Doc Watch: Domestic Warfare

 

ATTICA (B+) - The first three-quarters of this two-hour documentary -- about the September 1971 inmate uprising at the infamous prison in upstate New York -- might lull you into thinking that this is a fairly rose-colored nostalgia trip. Don't be fooled. Whether intentional or not, the film can lure you into letting your guard down. If you do so, you might not be prepared for the horrific resolution to the conflict.

Don't go googling the event. Watch these two hours and let it unfold. The talented Stanley Nelson --  with some solid work under his belt, including 2015's "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution"; a 2006 documentary about the Jim Jones cult; and recent pieces on the Tulsa race riots and the crack cocaine epidemic -- pairs with newcomer Traci Curry to create time capsule of unrest in the prison-industrial complex of Nixon's America.

The filmmakers assemble some of the men who survived the crisis, along with family members of inmates and guards who died when authorities finally stormed the prison to end the standoff. Like with his "Black Panthers" retrospective, Nelson refuses to sugarcoat events or glorify the prisoners as heroes standing up to the Man. 

There certainly are some villains here. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, heard in telephone recordings sucking up to President Nixon during the standoff, uses the crisis to burnish his law-and-order bona fides and takes a hard-line stance, refusing to give an inch to the rioters. The prisoners who survived are clear-eyed about the protest against inhumane conditions at the time. Extensive file footage from inside the prison shows inmates celebrating this sliver of freedom and power, even if they knew at the time that it probably would not end well. We get extensive footage of the ambassadors, like attorney William Kuntsler, who tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement (a release of hostage guards and immunity for the death of one guard who died early on), and TV reporter John Johnson, who was on the front lines for most of those four days of tense developments.

And then comes the bloodbath. The filmmakers are not shy about showing dead bodies or the humiliation of the survivors who were forced to crawl naked through filth back to their cells. It is shocking but necessary. In some ways we've come a long way since those times, but in other ways, law enforcement's brutal crackdown on a group of men, mostly black and Puerto Rican, feels eerily familiar more than 50 years later. The first half of this film could have been streamlined, but the storytelling overall remains powerful.

BONUS TRACKS

Speaking of the rancor of generational and racial divides from 50+ years ago, HBO is providing a home for a trove of raw footage from turbulent Chicago in the late 1960s.  The short films come courtesy of the Chicago Film Archives. Most of the films deal with the riots at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention, including a stunning reminder of how brutal the Chicago police pounded on demonstrators.

The first short film I sampled, 8 minutes long, was "Cicero March." Like the others, there is no narration, just crude footage shot with handheld cameras picking up scraps of dialogue and ambient noise. It is a snippet of a civil rights march cutting through the notoriously racist near-west suburb of Cicero, just a stone's throw from where I grew up (and where I started my journalism career in 1986).  

The Democratic Convention series includes the 11-minute "Law and Order vs. Dissent," which features news conferences by Mayor Daley (barely able to read a simple statement) and the spokesman for the Police Department, who comes out of the blocks with a chip on his shoulder, apparently convinced that his hard-ass demeanor and his demeaning of "communists" and "revolutionaries" will be eaten up across America's heartland. By contrast, "A Right to Dissent" gives us 9 minutes of mostly David Dellinger and Rennie Davis meeting the fairly hostile press from the left side.  "Social Confrontation" (11 minutes) includes some classic footage from the floor of the convention, such as Abraham Ribicoff's denunciation of Mayor Daley's "gestapo" tactics.

"Black Moderates and Black Militants" is a 9-minute conversation between a Chicago Black Panther leader and a middle-age teacher, as Bobby Rush (only this year stepping down as a Congressman from the South Side after 30 years) mostly lurks in the background. It's not the polemics that hit home so much as the earnest effort on both sides to have a dialogue, which now seems downright quaint.

Some of all of the above makes up the 75-minute "American Revolution 2," melding the stories of the Black Panthers and the Yippies into one narrative.  You can close out the decade (December 1969) with the powerful full-length documentary "The Murder of Fred Hampton."