Mekas looked to the stage for his second feature, an adaptation of Kenneth H. Brown’s play of the same name, which had been produced off-Broadway at the Living Theatre by Judith Malina and Julian Beck. A harrowing, suffocating portrait of brutality and dehumanization within a Marine Corps prison, the film chronicles the abuses and indignities suffered by 10 prisoners at the hands of a few sadistic guards across a single day. At once a seminal adaptation of experimental theater and a fierce polemic against the conjoined carceral and military-industrial complexes, this searing film is marked by, per a Time magazine write-up at the time of its premiere, “a nightmare air that suggests Kafka with a Kodak.” A selection of the 1964 New York Film Festival.

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