65/100
Thanks to Tony Manero imitating Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon in Saturday Night Fever (that phrase technically does make sense!), I became aware of the Attica prison riot when I was maybe 11 or 12, though I can’t remember who I asked about why Travolta was chanting “Attica!” or what reference source I consulted. (Latter’s less improbable than you might think. I spent a lotta time in libraries back then.) Learned a lot more at some point, possibly as prep for when I introduced a screening of Dog Day at the Museum of the Moving Image in 2002. In any case, this isn’t a subject that I came to cold, so Attica was never likely to be revelatory. Its primary virtue is simple immediacy, with surviving prisoners and witnesses interviewed while their memories were fresh and their emotions raw. (Didn’t see the recent Stanley Nelson doc of the same title, but I have to imagine that’s got a significantly different tone, except insofar as it may employ archival footage shot in the early ’70s by Firestone’s sources or by Firestone herself.) Longwinded way of acknowledging that Attica ’74 (formerly ’73, not sure where that premiere went) serves as a first-rate, nearly present-tense primer on one of America’s darkest days, then confessing that the film didn’t much excite me because it’s more or less what I expected. If you know the basic details of what happened, and already feel that Rockefeller needlessly got 39 people killed (some of them outright murdered by vengeful cops), you’re likely gonna feel the same way when Attica ends as you felt before it began.
What interested me most here—and this may well be a by-product of let’s call it Our Current Moment, in which numerous public servants have no shame about responding to any effort at oversight with non-responsive partisan hostility, in one notorious instance actually arriving for Congressional hearings armed with a file of prospective roast-style insults for each member of the other party—were lengthy excerpts from the McKay Commission. There’s something exquisitely nauseating about tortured attempts to justify the clearly unjustifiable. At one point, Walter Dunbar, the New York State Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, misstates the number of prisoners and hostages who were killed, claiming it was 24; when corrected, he clarifies that he was referring to those who “initially” died, omitting 15 people who died of their injuries days later. “Do you draw a distinction between whether the wound is so mortal that you die that moment or whether you die within 24 hours?” asks chief counsel Arthur Liman, heroically refraining from making the question sound outright incredulous. Whereupon Dunbar concedes the point, which is to say the pointlessness of his distinction, and maintains that “only” 39 fatalities, including nine hostages, represents “excellent self-disciple, excellent self-control” on the part of law enforcement. He’s not saying they didn’t get their hair mussed! But he does say: No more than two or three dozen killed, tops. Depending on the breaks.
Counterpointing such absurdity are the plainspoken but still livid witness testimonies, shot by Firestone in stark monochrome setups that almost never come across as standard retrospective talking-head interviews, though that’s technically what they are. (Some are audio-only, accompanied by a still of whoever’s speaking; oddly, Firestone never explains why that was necessary, leaving me to assume that it’s probably prisoners who were still incarcerated.) Most of what they say merely states the obvious, e.g. convicts should be treated humanely and then also not be murdered in cold blood after surrendering (that it likely happened at Attica, btw, doesn’t alter my sense of its implausibility in Nocturama), but it’s still well worth hearing as spoken in the atrocity’s immediate aftermath. Nothing to criticize here, really. I’m just not someone who gets blown away by documentaries that aren’t either doing something formally unique or tackling subjects about which I’d previously known zilch or close to it. Had there been more purely present-tense footage shot during the riot itself (akin to say, Chicago 10’s copious visual record of the ’68 DNC), different story, though honestly I’m grateful that it’s hard to make out the snippet of subpoenaed footage that was somehow filmed through a state trooper’s rifle scope. Sounds are plenty horrifying enough.