On demand: "Attica"

You'll remember the title from the chant Al Pacino launches into outside the bank in 1975's Dog Day Afternoon. Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry's quietly furious doc Attica revisits the reasons that name held such potency in the first place. In September 1971, inmates took over the correctional facility at Attica in New York in what was the largest prison uprising in American history. It was a stand against conditions within the jail, and a not unprincipled stand at that, steered by the prison's significant roster of Black Panthers. The Muslim brotherhood, for their part, intervened to ensure those guards taken hostage on site would be safe from harm; a white inmate with medical training attended to those injured in the course of taking control of the prison; those with prior legal experience advised the democratically elected committee leading the revolt on how to proceed from there. The uprising, which lasted four days, the span of one weekend, was an attempt to remodel a community towards some form of self-governance; as one ex-con recalls of the initial gatherings in the rec yard referred to as Times Square, it was like "a big picnic", at least three days of peace, love and time out. As reframed by Nelson and Curry, it was also a vision of how a prison - and the wider justice system beyond that - might be improved for everyone: among the prisoners' demands were the provision of basics like toothpaste and toilet paper, and access to education. But it couldn't last, or rather it wasn't permitted to last. Sold out by the political aspirations of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, with his joltingly symbolic family name, the men's quest for a fairer world ran up, as such quests often do, against an unyielding (and heavily armed) wall of authority. The prisoners were fish in a barrel when push came to shove on day four; among the many aspects explained by Nelson and Curry's film, you can see exactly why a bank robber trying to raise funds for his transgender lover might have reached for a reference like Attica once placed under his own form of duress.

As a film, Attica hews to a tried-and-tested documentary framework, cutting between talking-head testimony and corroborating archive footage, yet it demonstrates the old ways can still generate power when that testimony and footage is this compelling. The former prisoners Nelson and Curry interviews speak on two levels simultaneously, recounting their own experiences of the uprising while also apparently speaking to the present moment. (A striking rhetorical quirk: how comfortable these seasoned-to-grizzled ex-cons are with such 21st century terminology as "privilege" and "safe space".) As Nelson and Curry see it, Attica was just one of several forks in the road where the American dream of justice for all was up for review and renewal, only for the initially promising conversations to break down with bloody consequences. The film benefits from the fact most of this particular stand-off was mediated extensively as part of US TV's live and uninterrupted coverage of the turmoil of the 1970s. We see with our own eyes the processes of negotiation by which the prisoners reaffirmed their status as individuals and citizens, rather than the cattle they'd been treated as; we hear the blatantly prejudiced rhetoric of the cops sat like hawks or vultures on the rooftops overlooking Times Square; and, finally, we witness the compromise of the prisoners' demands and the violent crushing of their hopes. The final reel is a real gutpunch: we seem to be walking further and further away from anything like an ideal, and more than one of Nelson and Curry's subjects notes how the violence visited upon them as the status quo was reasserted was far worse than anything they'd seen and experienced behind bars or in their previous life on the streets. Every now and again, our collective attention is drawn to an institution that stands for wider society, and how we treat one another in this world. (For Attica, British viewers could swap in The Maze, Grenfell or the Bibby Stockholm.) The filmmakers succeed in setting us down in the middle of that rec yard as the gas descends and the bullets pop off, and there set us to considering just how much society has learnt from Attica in the intervening half-century - particularly with regard to the boundless, disproportionate and demonstrably indiscriminate violence of the state, being both better funded and more scarring than anything individual convicts could achieve with a makeshift shiv. As one of these convicts puts it in Attica's closing moments: "It didn't have to be this way."

Attica is now streaming via the BBC iPlayer.