“ Attica”评论：1971年监狱起义的激动，毁灭性和确切的纪录片说明
‘Attica’ Review: A Stirring, Devastating, and Definitive Documentary Account of the 1971 Prison Uprising
早在60年代和70年代，当新闻界首次发现自己是“媒体”时，都有许多事件 - 僵持，起义，大众聚会，大灾难 - 新媒体世界传播和塑造了这些世界的现实事件使人们变得更加前所未有。乔治·华莱士（George Wallace），1963年，站在阿拉巴马大学的校舍门口，阻止种族隔离。1968年的芝加哥示威活动。慕尼黑奥运大屠杀。帕蒂·赫斯特（Patty Hearst）绑架及其在跑步之后的小说之女更加疯狂。劫持。伍德斯托克（Woodstock）和乔纳斯敦（Jonestown）。难怪许多美国人认为这个国家正在崩溃 - 在许多方面，因为它需要。旧的系统和腐败正在破裂。美国的一致性和服从大坝已经破裂，涌入的是自由，暴力，高举和混乱的不守规矩的融合。T 1971年的阿提卡监狱起义是一部必不可少的电影，现在可以成为这一时代事件的确定愿景。纳尔逊（Nelson）从从未见过的惊人录像中汲取灵感，瞬间，日复一日地将活动汇集在一起\u200b\u200b，并澄清了其在历史上的地位，并与每个人有关的人延伸到屏幕上的人：囚犯和警卫队： ，官员和亲戚，政客和观察家，记者记录了所有这些。我们看到每个观点；演讲并不是“煽动性”，而是新颖的。在今天接近十几个幸存的囚犯的采访中，纳尔逊（Nelson）掩盖了愤怒，恐惧，兄弟情谊，屈辱，向往和悲剧的非凡口述历史。这部电影使我们进入了美国起义的心脏，变成了美国的灾难。1971年9月，阿提卡的起义是美国有史以来最大的监狱叛乱。它始于绝望的理想主义越来越多的解放感为D加油了一两天。纽约州北部最大安全矫正设施阿提卡（Attica）的囚犯没有计划骚乱 - 它自发地，有机地展开。但是，这就像火焰燃烧了已经干燥和腐烂了很多年的火焰。阿提卡（Attica）是一个地狱，甚至是监狱。这是一个终结的地方，以恐惧和制度化的虐待而奔跑。一卷卫生纸或更换床单，必须持续一个月。牙膏在哪里？食物很糟糕。穆斯林被剥夺了敬拜权，并被喂猪肉。守卫队将在晚上进来，拿出一个囚犯，他们遇到了问题并击败了他。住在阿提卡镇（唯一可用的工作是乳制品耕种或在监狱工作）的警卫是农村白色的小镇。监狱人口为70％的黑人和西班牙裔，其中许多来自内城。 “怎么了？”问老化派律师乔·希思（Joe Heath）具有讽刺意味。在电影中，许多人指出，这种基本文化脱节是如何喂养阿提卡（Attica）的动荡的。加剧了缓慢的紧张局势是那个时代的革命能量。许多囚犯都读过马尔科姆·X（Malcolm X）和埃尔德里奇·克莱弗（Eldridge Cleaver），在索莱达兄弟（Soledad Brothers）的监狱戏剧中喝醉了，这是黑豹的叛乱分子。他们被准备起来。纳尔逊以悬疑的精确性重现起义的物流。阿提卡看起来不像其他监狱。这是一个巨大的分裂堡垒，从某些角度，它类似于城堡。起义始于被称为“时代广场”（Times Square）（30年代的杰里（Jerry）指定的霉菌）的门的大门，这时几名囚犯袭击了一名名叫比利·奎因（Billy Quinn）的警卫并拿走了他的钥匙。他被严重殴打，但被四个穆斯林囚犯救了，他们拿到床垫并将其推开（我们看到了镜头）。“在获得奎因的钥匙之后，”一名囚犯说：“他们打开了所有四个方面，说：‘我们得到了联合！’这开始是战斗的哭声。”有一段时间，囚犯的抬高拳头被明显地刺痛了。然而，没有武器，他们只有如此之多的控制权。他们撤退到D院子里，周围环绕着持枪甲板上的警卫。大多数囚犯都戴着围巾或口罩来掩盖自己的身份。约有2200名监狱人口，约有1200名囚犯参加了起义。他们劫持了30名警卫人质，他们要求记者和电视新闻摄像机被放入监狱。那些相机改变了游戏。一位观察家说：“现在，囚犯有全球观众。”他们将其用作杠杆。 ABC新闻记者约翰·约翰逊（John Johnson）描述了穿过院子的“完全超现实”的品质（他在那里向他认识的男人和哈林（Harlem）认识的男人）。囚犯有一些新的东西：从被看到的希望。我们观看了他们的一位领导人艾略特“ L.D.” b阿克利（Arkley）是一个戴着电线框架眼镜的年轻人，他的句子仅剩90天，在院子里读了一份宣言。他描述了“多年来，该监狱的种族主义行政网络所束缚的压迫，”他以镇定的力量宣称：“我们是男人！我们不是野兽。与纽约惩教专员罗素·奥斯瓦尔德（Russell Oswald）谈判的囚犯罗素·奥斯瓦尔德（Russell Oswald便士 - 安特·J·埃德加·胡佛。囚犯向他提出了30条要求，最多关于监狱条件。他们还在暴动期间寻求大赦。奥斯瓦尔德（Oswald）合作，向他们承诺或多或少地承诺，但在监狱的高压锅外面谈论了一场与他里面的游戏不同。好像他没有意识到囚犯可以看到他在电视上说的话。首先遭到袭击，死于他的伤亡。骚乱者的大赦现在将意味着谋杀大赦，因此这是不在桌子上的。我们看到囚犯与30名“观察员”的小组会面，包括《纽约时报》的汤姆·威克（Tom Wicker），反文化律师威廉·昆斯特勒（William Kunstler）和阿姆斯特丹新闻编辑克拉伦斯·琼斯（Clarence Jones）。作为调解人，这是一个享有声望和有影响力的人。囚犯照亮了他们对媒体广告牌的需求，使美国监狱系统本身受到审判。一些观察家恳求纽约州长纳尔逊·洛克菲勒（Nelson Rockefeller）与囚犯会面。在一个更美好的世界中，这就是发生的事情。但是时间到了阿提卡叛军。他们最伟大的武器的媒体剑回来困扰着他们。 For this was the apex of the “law and order” era, presided over by President Richard Nixon, who had been elected largely on that basis. （您可以很好地说，1968年的芝加哥示威活动密封了尼克松的VI洛克菲勒州长想成为总统，但洛克菲勒的话是他对犯罪很柔和。他正在与尼克松打电话，尼克松谴责任何表示同情囚犯的手势。 （我们听到了洛克菲勒和尼克松之间对话的磁带，它们像尼克松磁带的最大热门歌曲中的奖励曲目一样发挥作用。尼克松：“ Wicker吗？上帝。”）当您看到阿蒂卡（Attica）最终发生的事情时 - 我遇到的什么都没有让您像“ Attica”那样看到它 - 现在是50年后的，意识到使它令人震惊的暴力看起来看起来像更像是从一开始就存在的计划。几天以来，奥斯瓦尔德（Oswald）和他的惩教人员似乎绑住了双手，但他们一直都知道他们可以达到的计划 - 标有“过度武力”的计划。他们伸手去拿了。这很淫秽。在颗粒状的黑白警察检查视频中，现在可以使用G敌对的恐怖恐怖，我们看到一架直升机飞过墙壁并将自己放下的镜头向院子里，释放了一块二氧化碳辣椒气。囚犯被盲目和窒息的囚犯被解除了武装，使他们坐在鸭子里大屠杀。就是这样 - 在许多情况下，一次大屠杀都折磨了。我们听到了像爆米花一样流行流行的枪支，这部电影向我们展示了《后果的照片》。他们可怕。但这也揭示了纳尔逊纪录片讲故事的毁灭性力量。他向我们展示了囚犯是如何成为烈士的，在拒绝英雄主义时，英雄主义闪闪发光。当电影告诉我们其中的10个人质死亡时，它以一种方式使观众想知道这可能发生的情况。接下来的启示是一个肠子：证明“法律和秩序”本身如何变得无政府状态。
Back in the '60s and '70s, when the press was first discovering itself as "media," there were any number of events — standoffs, uprisings, mass gatherings, cataclysms — that the new media world, transmitting and shaping the reality of those events, made all the more unprecedented. George Wallace, in 1963, standing in a schoolhouse doorway at the University of Alabama to block desegregation. The Chicago demonstrations of 1968. The Munich Olympics massacre. The Patty Hearst kidnapping and its nuttier-than-fiction heiress-on-the-run aftermath. The hijackings. Woodstock and Jonestown.
It's no wonder that a lot of Americans thought the country was falling apart — and in many ways it was, because it needed to. Old systems and corruptions were cracking up. The dam of American conformity and obedience had burst, and what came pouring through was an unruly blend of freedom and violence and exaltation and chaos.
Drawing from a staggering array of footage that has never been seen before, Nelson puts the event together, moment by moment, day by day, with a clarifying view of its place in history and an empathy that extends to every person onscreen: prisoners and guards, officials and relatives, politicians and observers, the reporters who came and recorded it all. We see every point-of-view; the presentation isn’t so much "incendiary" as novelistic. And in interviews with close to a dozen of the surviving prisoners today, Nelson nails down an extraordinary oral history of rage, fear, brotherhood, humiliation, yearning, and tragedy. The movie pulls us into the heart of an American revolt that turned into an American calamity.
In September of 1971, the uprising at Attica was the largest prison rebellion the United States had ever seen. It began on a note of desperate idealism and was fueled, for a day or two, by a growing sense of liberation. The prisoners at Attica, a maximum-security correctional facility in upstate New York, didn’t plan a riot — it unfolded spontaneously, organically. But it was like a flame set to kindling that had been drying, and rotting, for too many years. Attica was a hellhole, even for a prison. It was an end-of-the-line place, run on fear and institutionalized abuse. A roll of toilet paper, or a change of bedsheets, had to last you a month. Where was the toothpaste? The food was abysmal; Muslims were denied the right to worship and were fed pork. Teams of guards would come in at night to take out a prisoner they had a problem with and beat him.
The guards, who lived in the town of Attica (where the only jobs available were dairy farming or working at the prison), were rural white small-towners. The prison population was 70 percent Black and Hispanic, many of them coming from the inner city. "What could go wrong?" asks the aging-hippie lawyer Joe Heath with rueful irony. In the movie, many make a point of how that essential cultural disconnect fed the tumult at Attica. Adding to the slow boil of tension were the revolutionary energies of the era. Many of the inmates had read Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, had drunk in the prison drama of the Soledad Brothers, the insurrectionary rhetoric of the Black Panthers. They were primed to rise up.
Nelson recreates the logistics of the revolt with suspenseful exactitude. Attica didn’t look like other prisons; it was a massive divided fortress that, from certain angles, resembled a castle. The uprising began with the knocking down of a gate in the section known as Times Square (a jerry-rigged mold from the '30s gave way), at which point several prisoners attacked a guard named Billy Quinn and took his keys. He was severely beaten, but saved by four Muslim inmates who got a mattress and wheeled him out (we see the footage). "After they got Quinn’s keys," recalls one prisoner, "they opened up all four sides and said, 'We got the joint!' That began to be the battle cry." For a while, the raised-fist spirit of the prisoners was visibly stoked. Yet without weapons, they had only so much control. They retreated to the D-Yard, surrounded by guards standing on decks with guns. Most of the prisoners wore scarves or masks to hide their identities.
Out of a total prison population of 2,200, approximately 1,200 inmates took part in the revolt. They took 30 guards hostage, and they demanded that reporters and TV news cameras be let into the prison. Those cameras changed the game. "Now the prisoners had a worldwide audience," says one observer. They used it as leverage. The ABC News reporter John Johnson describes the "completely surreal" quality of walking through the yard (where he greeted men he’d known from Bed-Stuy and Harlem). And the prisoners had something new: the hope that comes from being seen. We watch one of their leaders, Elliot "L.D." Barkley, a young man in wire-framed glasses with just 90 days left in his sentence, read a manifesto in the yard. Describing "the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administrative network of this prison throughout the years," he declares, with calm power, "We are men! We are not beasts. And we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such."
The prisoners negotiated with New York's Commissioner of Corrections, Russell Oswald, who we see lumber into the prison and sit down at the table, a burly, uncomfortable-looking man who's like a penny-ante J. Edgar Hoover. The prisoners presented him with 30 demands, most about prison conditions; they also sought amnesty for their actions during the riot. Oswald cooperated, promising them more or less all of it, but talked a different game outside the pressure cooker of the prison than he did inside. It was as if he didn’t realize the prisoners could see what he'd said on TV.
Then the worst possible thing happened: Billy Quinn, the guard who had first been attacked, died from his injuries. Amnesty for the rioters would now mean amnesty for murder, and it was therefore off the table. We see the prisoners meeting with a group of 30 "observers," including the New York Times’ Tom Wicker, the counterculture attorney William Kunstler, and the Amsterdam News editor Clarence Jones. This was a prestigious and influential lot to have as mediators. The inmates, lighting up their demands on a media billboard, had put the U.S. prison system itself on trial. A few of the observers pleaded with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to meet with the prisoners. In a better world, that’s what would have happened.
But time was running out on the Attica rebels. The media sword that was their greatest weapon came back to haunt them. For this was the apex of the “law and order” era, presided over by President Richard Nixon, who had been elected largely on that basis. (You could make a good case that the 1968 Chicago demonstrations sealed Nixon’s victory.) Gov. Rockefeller wanted to be president, but the word on Rockefeller was that he was soft on crime. He was on the phone with Nixon, who denounced any gesture that would signify sympathy with the prisoners. (We hear tapes of the conversations between Rockefeller and Nixon, which play like bonus tracks from the Nixon tapes’ greatest hits. Nixon: "Did Wicker — was he recommending amnesty?" Rockefeller: "Oh, yes." Nixon: "Oh, God.")
When you see what finally happened at Attica — and nothing I’ve encountered lets you see it the way that "Attica" does — it is now, 50 years later, with an awareness that makes the shocking violence of it look all the more like a plan that was there from the beginning. For a few days, Oswald and his correctional officers seemed to have their hands tied, but they always knew the Plan B they could reach for — the one marked "Excessive force." And they reached for it.
It was obscene. In grainy black-and-white police-surveillance video that now takes on a ghostly poetic horror, we see footage of a helicopter flying over the walls and lowering itself toward the yard, unleashing a cloud of CO2 pepper gas. The prisoners, blinded and choking, were disarmed, making them sitting ducks for a massacre. And that’s what it was — a massacre topped off, in a number of cases, by torture. We hear the guns pop-pop-popping like popcorn, and the film shows us photographs of the aftermath; they are gruesome to behold. But it also reveals the devastating power of Nelson's documentary storytelling. He shows us how the prisoners became martyrs, with a glint of heroism in their refusal of heroism. And when the film tells us that 10 of the hostages died, it's done in a way that leaves the audience wondering how that could have happened. The revelation that follows is a gut-punch: a testament to how "law and order" can itself become anarchy.
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发表于 2022-7-5 04:35:27
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