In September 1971, then New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller faced a difficult decision. In Attica, a small town in the north, a revolt had broken out in the local prison. 42 people were held hostage by the detainees. Negotiations were well advanced, but then one of the guards who had been injured in the first hours of the Attica prison riot died. Hopes rested on Rockefeller that he would appear to pacify the situation in person. There was little doubt about the justification of the concerns of the predominantly African-American prisoners. They didn't want much more than human treatment. But Rockefeller consulted. He called the President and Richard Nixon gave a clear policy: no concessions,everything for “law and order”. On September 13th, Attica Prison was stormed, 43 people were killed, including ten hostages, but all of them fell victim to police violence.
Just in time for the 50th anniversary of this important event in recent American history, Stanley Nelson's documentary “Attica” premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). It culminates in a single sentence: "It shouldn't have ended like this", "it didn't have to be that way". This is how Clarence B. Jones, a companion of Martin Luther King, who was among the negotiators in 1971, and now, fifty years later, one of the most important contemporary witnesses for the film, puts it. 50 years is a long time, but the gap between then and now is narrowed by the fact that the events in Attica also unfolded as a media event from the start. Documentations like Stanley Nelson’s have thus more or less predetermined their form: They fetch from the archives,what can be found, usually a rich selection, and complement the contemporary material with memories.
In “Attica” a number of former prisoners can be seen with whom one could easily have made a second film.
After all, their life stories beyond 1971 could also tell of how the racist politics of "mass incarceration" promoted by Nixon shaped entire generations of blacks in America.
“Attica” has to concentrate on its topic and also solves this task appropriately.
But the film also shows the limits of the history of events, or the other way around: since one always projects America from today back onto the situation from then, there remains a large amount of implications that one would wish for a cinematic development.
Everything was reduced in the second year of the pandemic
In normal years, the TIFF is one of the largest film festivals in the world. The audience cannot be overlooked in long lines in the city. In the second year of the pandemic, everything was reduced accordingly, and the international press was mostly connected digitally - including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The focus is usually on the latest American productions.
The TIFF has a global focus, but is increasingly becoming a parade of the big streamers. The thriller “The Guilty” by Antoine Fuqua can be seen as one of the most interesting reactions to contact restrictions, hygiene concepts and home office / home cinema. There is never any mention of Covid-19, and there is no mouth and nose protection. It is simply a consistent chamber play, a reduced or concentrated form of a narrative that only needs an outside world as an implicit horizon.