Riotsville, USA review – disquieting study of police tactics to deal with social unrest

Echoing the work of Adam Curtis, film-maker Sierra Pettengill curates archive footage from riot-torn 60s America to create an unsettling picture of the authorities’ response

As if in a seance or hypnotic trance, Sierra Pettengill conjures the ambient voices of the riot-torn United States in the 1960s, traumatised by the uproar in Watts, Chicago, Newark and Detroit. She curates archive TV discussion show clips and newsreel footage of the times, including some quite extraordinary contemporary reports about the “Riotsville” imitation towns that the US army built to practise anti-riot techniques. These were complete with audience bleachers in which an invited crowd of military brass could approvingly watch a full-scale re-enactment of the Watts riot – a bizarre theatrical fantasy in which the disorder was swiftly and efficiently brought under control. (Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber’s 2008 film Full Battle Rattle discussed the fake Iraqi town built in the Mojave Desert for very similar reasons.)

Pettengill also shows us TV reports on Lyndon B Johnson’s Kerner commission which was tasked with looking into the causes of the riots, but whose findings resulted chiefly in increased federal funding for the police. The authorities were obsessed with the largely illusory threats of “snipers”, whose supposed presence justified police and army intrusions and attacks on private property. She shows us earnest but intensely angry discussion shows aired by PBL, the Public Broadcast Laboratory (a precursor to PBS) which ventilated the rage felt by African Americans over civil rights, and was shut down when its sponsor, the Ford Foundation, withdrew funding.

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