I'll call it "National Park"...or maybe "Debt Camp".

Film: Punishment Park Director: Peter Watkins, 1971



On PBS the other day I caught the family portrait-cum-documentary The Brothers Warner by Harry Warner’s granddaughter: Cass Warner Sperling. Nothing much to say about that, it is what it is and I don’t particularly give a shit. Not to say that the studio’s history is insignificant-it’s just that the family history perspective is, at times, rather elitist. One gets the sense in a sit-down between Cass and Roy Disney, both of whom are grandchildren “of a Certain Age” that they are the sort of bloodline egoists that are only approached by their own kind. Which is entirely unbased on dialog and besides the point entirely.

I bring up this doc because it mentions an undistributed 1934 pet-project of Harry’s: Concentration Camp. Unlike Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) which was based on a specific case that the public had already been made aware of through ample press coverage; Concentration Camp would have been-from what I gathered- a narrative compilation of compulsively collected accounts of what was brewing at The Dachau Camp, which opened in March 1933. The US ambiguously deferred acknowledging the existence said camps being used for the express extermination of civilians, and not political prisoners, until the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by the Red Army. A continued US policy of ambiguity would have meant being bested by the Soviets in the Human Rights record.

Because the premise of Concentration Camp was “conjecture”, and because German box-office sales represented the majority of overseas profit and 1/3 of all major studios’ revenue came from over-seas distribution, a Warner Bros. release of Concentration Camp would have meant a potential German Boycott of all Hollywood Studios and so its production was clotheslined and distribution rights witheld. Shortly thereafter Warner Bros independently pulled out of its German market in protest of the prosecution of the European Jewry. They were the only Major to do so. So much for the Mitzpucha, guys.

I wonder, if it were released, would it have endured the same lambaste as Punishment Park? My impression is that if Concentration Camp were released, Punishment Park would have had an irrefutable fore bearer legitimate film critics would have had to acknowledge regardless of how successful it was at the time of its release in 1971. How I wish this film was made. Not for the potential impact on the American consciousness of the Holocaust- one would be distinctly naive to think American anti-Semitism was in any way inferior to the European kind. Any one that believes we would have rushed Bavaria as Gallant Golem, swept up every last Jew from the floorboards and sent them on the first Oceanliner to Lady Liberty’s milkful tit had best ask themselves why it is we sent our troops to Iraq and not Zimbabwe.

Likely, if Concentration Camp made it to theatres, it would have been ignored by most, rejected by others, and ridiculed by anyone who mattered. It would bomb at the box office, and we likely wouldn’t have seen anything culturally significant out of Warner Bros until 1941. But at least then there would have been precedent for Punishment Park, and not of the French variety. Then, could it have been rejected so quickly, so thoroughly? Probably, but at least then I could get it on DVD and resurrect a lineage of “I told you so cinema”. If Concentration Camp existed, maybe more film classes would watch Punishment Park. In lieu of both the extreme leftists and the extreme right-to-lifers believing in the existence of FEMA Camps, and entertaining their sinister potential, maybe it’s time for a re-make of both.