Riotsville, USA

In the 1960s, in ply­wood mod­el towns rem­i­nis­cent of children’s play sets, Amer­i­can sol­diers prac­tised riot con­trol. These ​“riotsvilles” repli­cat­ed the aver­age Main Street in an Amer­i­can town, com­plete with paint­ed shop fronts and glass win­dows – there’s the appli­ance store next to the pawn shop, Joe’s Place on the cor­ner. As civ­il resis­tance move­ments and anti-police demon­stra­tions took hold of some of the country’s major cities over the decade, these forces rehearsed their unre­strained meth­ods of con­tain­ment and con­trol in sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ments before turn­ing them on the real thing.

Through sole use of archive footage, doc­u­men­tar­i­an Sier­ra Pet­tengill pieces togeth­er an illu­mi­nat­ing his­to­ry of this prac­tice and the result­ing effect on Amer­i­can civ­il rights move­ments in Riotsville, USA. Much of it was record­ed by gov­ern­ment or mil­i­tary offi­cials and shows role-play­ing sol­diers car­ry­ing out arrests, sub­du­ing crowds or seek­ing out hid­den snipers while oth­er offi­cers watch along, clap­ping and cheer­ing, from the bleachers.

They reen­act riots that have already tak­en place, such as the Watts Rebel­lion in Los Ange­les in 1965, dis­tort­ing the nar­ra­tive to one of army suc­cess and aggres­sive civil­ian blame. Giv­en that much of the unrest across Amer­i­ca in the 21^st cen­tu­ry was the result of a pub­lic refusal to accept police bru­tal­i­ty against Black peo­ple, or the vio­lence of white suprema­cy, it is sig­nif­i­cant that riotsvilles were con­struct­ed at mil­i­tary bases named after slave labour camps and Ku Klux Klan members.

The mod­el towns are a com­pelling entry point in the film for what becomes a wider por­trait of a dark water­shed moment in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, often lyri­cal in com­po­si­tion thanks to the dynam­ic voiceover by Char­lene Mod­este read­ing the work of writer Tobi Haslett. Cen­tral to Riotsville, USA’s explo­rations is the 1968 report by the Kern­er Com­mis­sion, a group estab­lished to inves­ti­gate the caus­es of city riots by Pres­i­dent Lyn­don B John­son, which acknowl­edged the root prob­lems of racism, pover­ty and the lack of social sup­port for Black com­mu­ni­ties instead of blam­ing these com­mu­ni­ties as aggres­sors as John­son had hoped. Despite these find­ings, one of the government’s only imple­men­ta­tions was the Commission’s mis­guid­ed sug­ges­tion for greater police funding.

The con­tent of all of this footage is key to Pettengill’s approach, but so is the very nature of how it is being employed. The film­mak­er uses a blur­ring, almost pointil­list visu­al effect, to obscure images of vio­lence being enact­ed against pro­tes­tors, and favours turn­ing the military’s own doc­u­men­ta­tion against itself over cen­ter­ing any footage that may have once been used to con­demn those eager for justice.

The ques­tion of which nar­ra­tives are giv­en space to breathe is cen­tral to the film’s cri­tique of this peri­od: of the lies and myths it pro­duced; and to the filmmaker’s rebel­lious recla­ma­tion of the truth. Haslett writes that the riotsvilles were the places, ​“where the state assem­bles its fears.” Pettengill’s film is an invig­o­rat­ing indict­ment of these con­struct­ed false­hoods – their fears, their riotsvilles, their scape­goats and their rea­sons for destruction.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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