Enlightening footage: Riotsville USA

RIOTSVILLE USA
Directed by Sierra Pettengill
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆

HOW did the US civil authorities react to the breakdown of trust in society during the 1960s?

By ignoring their own government’s reports into the causes of unrest and instead of spending money on welfare, education and housing, they brought as much tear gas as they could lay their hands on and shiny new machines to spray it on citizens, who were, on the whole, black people.

Riotsville USA is a documentary that charts this policy choice.

Fuelled by the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, looking back, America appears as divided then as it is today.

In the 1960s, the nation was cleaved in two by a younger generation fighting the conservatism of their parents.

This status quo was fundamentally undermined by its immorality: The American Dream was based on racism, its economy partly the product of slavery and wholly the product of exploitative settlers.

By the 1960s, a generation born into a nation whose foundations were misery, recognised the evil and the contradictions. They were no longer able to turn blind eyes to the hypocrisy at the heart of the land of the free.

Washington, and the state-level governments, fought back.

Riotsville was a fictional cardboard town created by the US military to train soldiers to tackle domestic uprisings, and the protests of the period accelerated the militarisation of civilian law bodies – a trend that has never stopped.

Director Pettengill has gleaned some enlightening footage and period piece interviews from the archives.

It gives the story a genuine watchability – but if you are seeking answers to a question, this film does not provide it.

Watching news reports of the unrest, the calls for equality in the eyes of the law, the wail of injustice, of poverty, and oppression – and of a ruling class whose knee-jerk, blinkered ignorance is astonishing – asks the viewer to do some thinking. A repeated thought is what has changed?

The material is excellent but feels exhausting. It is noted by the narrator that thousands of hours of government-shot footage is open to the public to use – and it feels this prompted the film. It is as if they have said: here’s an amazing archive, let’s see what it has. The problem with this approach is the trap of being flooded with just too much to look at, too much material to wade through, and a lack of focus in the telling because of the huge editing job.