Riotsville, U.S.A. is a found-footage film about the American Civil Rights era. Although there is an abundance of archival materials on this subject, director Sierra Pettengill chooses to emphasize some of the gaps in the historical record. We see, for example, silent footage of a Miami city hall sit-in that is missing its original sound element. The measured editing by Nels Brangerter and the airy compositions of Jace Clayton complement the film’s broader ambitions to address a conceptual lacuna which looms large in the collective American consciousness. With the assistance of the narration written by Tobi Haslett, Riotsville, U.S.A. interrogates the profound discontinuity between a country set ablaze by race riots and the election of Richard Nixon as president, and asks: what is the total legacy of the civil rights movement?
Riotsville begins with footage of what appears to be an American town of stereotypical proportions, but this setting is revealed to be something else with the abrupt zoom-in shot of an army sniper. “Riotsville” is in fact a reference to the toy towns the United States constructed for riot control exercises following the 1967 and 1968 riots. Pettengill defamiliarizes these years by abstaining from the typical imagery. In the almost obligatory discussion of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, narrator Charlene Modeste speaks over a murky, pixelated still for several minutes. The most we end up seeing of any one riot are actually the faux riots acted out by American soldiers on the campuses of these Riotsvilles.
These military exercises reveal a bizarre theater. The military men who are in the audience are amused. The white men posing as agitators offer botched and admittedly comical caricatures of the counterculture. The performances of the black men, however, are emphatically Freudian. These men scream, gesticulate, kick, and curse with conviction. The people in the bleachers laugh, but the situation is almost reminiscent of the sublimations in Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous.
This riot-theater and its haunting comparison of divergent psychologies is one of the ways through which the documentary argues that America had failed to address the de factosegregation of black people. The film goes on to further argue that the only tenet implemented from the Kerner Report — a landmark inquiry about the cause of urban riots in the US issued in 1967 by a presidential commission — was an increase in federal funding to local law enforcement. Although many of us imagine the late 60s as a torrid and revolutionary period, this realist view betrays the cynicism of government and its tendency toward stasis and conservatism. All of this of course alludes to the continued racial inequities and militarization of police which plague contemporary America today.
The aesthetic motifs of pointillism, pixelation, and fragmentation which are so central to Riotsville, USA have an obvious poignancy in the context of segregation. But the expressionism of the film also serves to resist the notion that a documentary – or a series of photographs and clips – can present a historical totality. This then becomes a prompt for acknowledging the deficiencies in how we have come to mythologize the 1960s, the mention of which tends to conjure images of hippies, black panthers, and the concomitant phenomena of psychedelic music, street theater, beat poetry, ethical vegetarianism, free love, and recreational drug use. But in the midst of this cultural watershed and new bohemia, Riotsville reminds us – albeit in different terms – that middle America was still eating Jell-O and fruit ambrosia.
Pettengill also presents us with a few choice clips from the National Educational Television (NET), a broadcast station which featured programs of an unabashed left-of-center bias. This alienated conservative markets and prompted Lyndon B. Johnson to arrange a study on “the future of educational television.” When the federal government decided to found the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in the interest of “unbiased discourse,” The Ford Foundation pulled its vital funding from NET. NET restructured and managed to survive as its reincarnate institution, which we all know today as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
This dry genealogy on public broadcasting calls attention to the fractured heterogeneity which actually comprised American media and culture at this time. It is too easy and too reductive to reconstitute the late 60s with its paradigmatic images. In digging deeper into the archive for another kind of visual history, Pettengil reveals something that is, against our better wishes, less explosive and less progressive.
After the surreptitious image of the DNC, we are shown in vivid color scenes from the Republican National Convention in Miami. We observe a life in stasis, one that is suspended in an 1950s amniotic fluid and insulated from the chaos of 1960s protest – in this case that of the North West Miami ghettos. The setting is striking: big pink elephants, majorettes, men in bowties, and a jaw-dropping television advertisement for an aerosol fly spray that is an uncanny parallel for the latest in riot control tactics.
A nagging conundrum emerges when we try to reconcile our political history with the cultural history we remember best. The missing sound in the footage of the RNC protests offers new shades of meaning to Nixon’s adage of “the silent majority.” In the other direction, the reality of American media adds nuance to the underground protest that has managed to reverberate throughout time much more loudly than the quotidian television advertisement to which every American was exposed at the time it was broadcast.
It is impossible to encapsulate an era without acknowledging its complexities and its contradictions. It is illusory for a moment in history to ever be whole. Riotsville gives pause to our own contemporary climate of unnavigable contradictions – one of George Floyd protests on the one hand and Trump populism on the other. One wonders how we can begin to offer a cogent articulation of the present, of a society fraught with the schizophrenia of two competing polarities. The film does not have pretenses of escaping this chaos but ends adroitly with the most elementary of binaries – an image zoomed in from thousands to a hundred to four pixels: two black, two white.
© 2020-2022. UniversalCinema Mag.