Abolition Now! 50 Years of the Attica Prison Uprising will run in our Virtual Cinema from August 30 until September 20.
Our whole question is: just what level of consciousness will support the violent revolutionary activity necessary to achieve our ends? How will we know when this level is reached?
― George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972)
Curated by Emily Apter.
Co-presented by Maysles Documentary Center and Third World Newsreel and in collaboration with Attica Is All of Us, The Freedom Archives, and the Documentary Forum at CCNY.
Drawing on films made from 1971 to the present day, Abolition Now! 50 Years of the Attica Prison Uprising chronicles, commemorates, and politicizes the events of the 1971 uprising and massacre—tracing George Jackson’s influence—through the nonfiction visual representations that came out of it.
The films in this series (as well as one “audio documentary”) operate within a framework that advances the collective political project of prison abolition. It is not just the content of these films—the organized rebellion of Attica prisoners and the violent repression carried out by the state—that comprises their abolitionist tendency. Rather it is the way they depict the prison as a set of interlocking systems used to subjugate people, extract value, and naturalize racial violence. It is their particular articulation of “visibility” as a dialectical relationship between presence and absence—carcerality as a system that at once requires violence, produces violence, and conceals it.
Our hope for this series is to suggest that the power of film lies, yes, in disrupting dominant narratives, denouncing oppression, evoking alternative political realities, and highlighting revolutionary struggle. But, most importantly, to do these things while recognizing the material limits of moving images alone to enact the social and economic transformations we envision.
Our hope is to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Attica uprising, and to reflect on ongoing resistance efforts against prison slavery and police terror. It’s to memorialize the political prisoners killed by guards and troopers in 1971, and to grieve the many many others killed in the struggle for their, and others’, liberation in the present day. It’s to activate film in the fight for a world beyond policing and imprisonment—a world where justice is non-punitive and healing for all people—and to support organizers on the inside and out in the fight to dismantle the conditions that produce these structures of violence in the first place.
Films include:
Teach Our Children (Christine Choy & Susan Robeson, 1972, 35 min.)
Attica (Cinda Firestone, 1974, 80 min.)
Still Attica Remains (Nick Macdonald, 1975, 15 min.)
George Jackson/San Quentin - Workprint (Courtesy of The Freedom Archives, 1972, 28 min.)
Evidence of the Evidence (Alex Johnston, 2018, 20 min.)
The Prison In 12 Landscapes (Brett Story, 2016, 90 min.)
Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica, and Black Liberation [Digital Album] (Produced by Anita Johnson, Claude Marks, and The Freedom Archives)
Live Events:
Please read the Maysles Documentary Center Covid-19 Policies here.
Wednesday, September 8th at 7:30PM EDT in-person screening of Teach Our Children (Susan Robeson & Christine Choy, 1972) at Maysles Cinema. This screening will be followed by a recorded conversation with Christine Choy (Teach Our Children) and JT Takagi (Third World Newsreel). TICKETS HERE
Friday, September 10th at 8PM EDT Sidewalk Cinema screening of Attica (Cinda Firestone, 1974).
Monday, September 13 at 7PM EDT Live Zoom Panel discussion with Brett Story (The Prison In 12 Landscapes), Alex Johnston (Evidence of the Evidence), and Kevin Steele (Organizer with Root & Branch NYC). Moderated by Niki Franco (Organizer with (F)Empower Miami). RSVP HERE.
Thursday, September 16th at 7:30PM EDT in-person 16mm screening of Attica (Cinda Firestone, 1974) at Maysles Cinema. 16mm print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Preservation of this film was made possible by a grant from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film and Television. RESERVE TICKETS HERE.
Friday, September 17th at 8PM EDT Sidewalk Cinema screening of Evidence of the Evidence (Alex Johnston, 2018) Still Attica Remains (Nick Macdonald, 1975). Post-screening conversation with filmmaker Nick Macdonald.
