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- Title
Ghosts of Attica and Investigation of a Flame: A Documentary Portrait of the Catonsville Nine. (Film).
- Authors
Giesen, James C.
- Abstract
This article reviews the documentary films Ghosts of Attica and Investigation of a Flame, directed by Lynn Sachs, which were both released by First Run/Icarus Films. Allegedly, the two documentaries tell very different stories of Vietnam-era protest. Ghosts of Attica recounts the five-day takeover of New York's Attica Prison by its inmates in 1971, the bloody counter-rebellion led by state police, and the personal and legal legacy of the riot. Investigation of a Flame, on the other hand, examines the motivation and spiritual narrative of the Catonsville Nine, a group of clergy and laymen who non-violently entered an office of the Selective Service in 1968, grabbed a binful of draft papers, carried them outside and burned them with homemade napalm. Though each film documents a very different part of the Sixties protest era, they are linked by their descriptions of unlikely historical actors who find themselves suddenly grabbed by the larger, radical current of the 1960s. Whether prisoners or preachers, the characters in such films are dragged by their consciences into the torment of late-1960s political life. Ghosts of Attica makes it clear that many prisoners in New York's state penitentiary were well-connected to the larger political and social debates taking place worldwide in the 1960s.
- Subjects
DOCUMENTARY films; FILM reviewing; GHOSTS of Attica (Film); INVESTIGATION of a Flame (Film); FIRST Run Features (Company); ICARUS Films Inc.; MOTION pictures &; history
- Publication
Film & History (03603695), 2003, Vol 33, Issue 1, p66
- ISSN
0360-3695
- Publication type
Entertainment Review