Riotsville, USA (Sierra Pettengill, 2022) (Patreon)

A specter is haunting the world of documentary: the specter of the essay film.

Riotsville, USA is a good example of a film that might've been much stronger had its makers decided to attempt less, focusing on the topic at hand. Of course Pettengill has uncovered some amazing footage from the government archives, where we see the US military's very controlled facsimile of total chaos and their enthusiasm in using it -- the fake town square with fake rioters -- as a training ground for new techniques in crowd control. Although Riotsville frequently features a somewhat elliptical voiceover imploring us to look at these images critically, the film itself never really does. It's as if Pettengill felt that the harsh irony of this footage was self-evident, and all that was needed was to bring it to light.

Using one form of the essay-film template -- assemblage / concatenation, basically -- Riotsville chooses instead to use the military footage as an ideational touchstone for considering the militarization of everyday life in the U.S. The film touches on the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions as sites of civil unrest and disproportionate police response. But again, Pettengill prefers to let the viewer connect the dots. The violent police attacks on Black protesters in Miami are supposed to tell us something about the man about to become president, Richard Nixon. The sponsorship of NBC's convention coverage by Gulf Oil and their insecticides is supposed to rhyme somehow with the production and deployment of tear gas, as a way to disperse crowds of people deemed undesirable. And woven throughout is a kind of look back in anger at the failed promises of the anti-authoritarian resistance movements of the mid 1960s.

Perhaps more irritatingly, Riotsville always comes right up to the cusp of making contemporary parallels. History is merely an academic exercise if it doesn't elucidate how our present-day situation came about. But again, Pettengill seems to think that any attentive viewer will draw this unavoidable conclusion. Instead of building an argument, she simply places a lot of semi-digested material before the audience. And I'm sure this is very intentional, based on a belief that eliciting "work" from the viewer creates deeper understanding and avoids the traps of propaganda.

I don't buy it. It's not just that Riotsville is in no way an open text. It is clear almost immediately what sorts of conclusions we're supposed to arrive at. But by abjuring argumentative structure, the film comes close to abjuring responsibility. If the term "essay film" is to have any meaning, then filmmakers and critics need to approach these films the way one would approach a written essay, with a clear set of rhetorical priorities. Documentary filmmakers need to establish what counts as evidence within the logic of their works. They need to adopt more transparent forms of organization so that we can observe how a given argument comes into focus, and make our own decision as to the legitimacy of that argument. It should go without saying by now: almost everything has a propagandistic element to it, and the way to subvert that impulse is through more formalism, not less.

Addendum: I should note that several of the people who worked on this film are friends and acquaintances of mine. My frustration with certain aspects of Riotsville should not in any way occlude the fact that this is an intelligent, ambitious film, the sort of work I greatly admire. My remarks should be taken in that spirit: the desire that a worthwhile artistic endeavor might've been better.