# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Punishment Park by Peter Watkins

I already posted something about Punishment Park, not a long time ago, although it seemed that this movie should belong to HETEROTOPIA IN CINEMA...

Directed by Peter Watkins in 1971, Punishment Park is filmed borrowing the documentary vocabulary in order to create an ambiguity on the reality of this story. In fact, the movie introduces a "state of emergency" decreed by Richard Nixon (inspired by the real McCarran Internal Security Act) and authorizes federal authorities to detain people who could "represent a risk for society" without referring it to the American Congress. In this regard, arrested people can choose either to spend some time in prison or to participate to Police training in Punishment Park.
Punishment Park is a remote place in the Californian desert where young dissidents have to walk for 60 miles without being recaptured by the police. The pseudo-documentary dramatizes a session which turns to human hunting after a cop is being killed. Dissidents are shot one by one.
Punishment Park is therefore an heterotopia in its extraction from the "real world" and the total abolition of law it implies, bringing human to a state of cold violence between predators and preys.

# Quarantine / Remoteness, paranoia and mechanisms of precautionary incarceration

Yesterday, I attended to Geoff Manaugh (BLDG BLOG) brilliant lecture at Pratt in which he introduced the Quarantine workshop he is currently leading in the Storefront. I am very interested by this notion of quarantine in the materialization of fear and paranoia its implies. The potentiality for each building to become a quarantine station therefore a prison seems to me as embodying perfectly an ultimate state of totalitarianism. It reminds me of Foucault's descriptions in Discipline and Punish (see former post) in which he depicts a middle age city infected by the Plague (see also Geoff's article on Albert Camus' Plague) and the imprisonment of every inhabitants in their own house waiting for the health inspection which would deliver a license of free circulation in case of non-infection. What is really striking with this notion of quarantine is the precaution it implies. No matter if one is infected or not, if he is suspected to be, his circulation will be controlled.
Another example quarantine evokes to me is Peter Watkins' movies, Punishment Park on the one hand and The War Game on the other hand. The first one depicts. in an amazing documentary imitation, the invention of a park lost in the desert used by the police to train itself, chasing in the most violent way young "voluntary" dissidents. The War Game is also a diversion of a documentary (a kind of official one) dramatizing a country (England) living in the paranoia of a nuclear attack. Through these two movies, we can observe both violent remoteness of infected citizens (the infection is not necessarily viral) and the fear being the leitmotiv of a nation and therefore its omnipresent material of this nation's both physicality and social relationships.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Desert

Desert is something between an heterotopia and what I would call an atopia (a non-space). It defines itself as a territory whose limits seem to reach the infinite, which is not to say that it seems to have no limits. In fact, in the cinematographic desert, one always tries to reach the horizon as a tenacious impossible quest.

I think an appropriate author to quote here is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (see previous post) in his beautiful humanist novel Desert:

They appeared as if in a dream at the top of the dune, half-hidden in the cloud of sand rising from their steps. Slowly, they made their way down into the valley, following the almost invisible trail. At the head of the caravan were the men, wrapped in their woolen cloaks, their faces masked by the blue veil. Two or three dromedaries walked with them, followed by the goats and sheep that the young boys prodded onward. The women brought up the rear. They were bulky shapes, lumbering under heavy cloaks, and the skin of their arms and foreheads looked even darker in the indigo cloth.
They walked noiselessly in the sand, slowly, not watching where they were going. The wind blew relentlessly, the desert wind, hot in the daytime, cold at night. The sand swirled about them, between the legs of the camels, lashing the faces of the women, who pulled the blue veils down over their eyes. The young childre ran about, the babies cried, rolled up in the blue cloth on their mothers' backs. The camels growled, sneezed. No one knew where the caravan was going.
[...]
They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They had appeared as if in a dream at the top of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudness sky and carried the harshness of space in their limbs. They bore with them hunger, the thrist of bleeding lips, the flintlike silence of the glinting sun, the cold nights, the glow of the Milky Way, the moon: accompanying them were their huge shadows at sunset, the waves of virgin sand over which their splayed feet trod, the inaccessible horizon. More than anything, they bore the light of their gaze shining so brightly in the whites of their eyes.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Desert (1980). Verba Mundi 2009

pictures:
- Werner Herzog: Fata Morgana 1968
- Gus Van Sant: Gerry 2002
- Chuan Lu: Kekexili (Mountain Patrol) 2006
- Peter Watkins: Punishment Park 1971 (see previous posts)
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Zabriskie Point 1970
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) 1975