“Wake up. Stop hiding” is the plea of an inmate that closes Cinda Firestone’s film Attica (1974). Firestone’s documentary Attica was made in the immediate wake of that infamous tragedy and the various committee hearings and investigations that followed it. Firestone’s film is a direct reaction to and a confrontation with the lies and cover-ups perpetrated by New York State to reallocate blame from state run institutions to the inmates of Attica suffering inhumane treatment and systemically violent abuse.
Attica is a film culled from hours of news footage and the film shot by state troopers as they stormed D-block as well as new interviews with survivors of the attack who have since been released from prison. Firestone was not granted permission to film interviews with inmates so instead still photographs of interviewees accompany audio recordings. Foregoing the usual investment in the linear causality of a detailed timeline of events, Firestone takes all of these elements and creates an adrenaline fueled rush of thematically linked political postures that essentially broadside the corrupt institutions of New York State.
Firestone’s film opens with the Attica prison revolt and hostage situation already in full swing. Attica, as much as it is a rallying cry against Nelson Rockefeller, Russell G. Oswald, Walter Dunbar, and all of their cronies, is a film that is focused on the experiences of the inmates. Attica is a film of advocacy and empathy designed to give a voice to individuals forced into silence or just ignored by the world at large. The interviews or testimonies of the inmates in the film reveal these incarcerated individuals to possess a greater understanding and compassion for what is fundamentally humane than any of the persons in power circa 1973, including President Nixon.
The conversation around prison reform may address the issues of institutionalized slavery, brutality, and poor nutrition but it’s hardly at the forefront of the public’s mind. Firestone’s film effectively takes these politicized buzz words and imbues them with an upsetting reality and humanity that is impossible to ignore. The racism that motivated the police assault on Attica prison is as essential to understanding that historical event as the understanding that the general dehumanization of prison inmates is par for the course as far as law enforcement is concerned.
Accounts of torture and murder at the hands of police officers, as well as the footage taken by law enforcement, is disturbing enough on its own. However, from the vantage point of a post-George Floyd America, Attica is a grim reminder of how little things have actually changed between the 1970s and the 2020s. The relevancy and resonance of Attica cannot be understated. Attica epitomizes the political power that the documentary form is capable of wielding.
