90 min | NR | September 16, 2022 | Magnolia Pictures
In 1968, the U.S. government built fake towns called Riotsvilles and staffed them with soldiers playing rioters and cops. The military rehearsed crushing American dissent on these stage sets while cameras rolled. This film digs up the footage and asks what the rehearsal was actually for.
Riotsville, U.S.A. is a documentary built entirely from archival footage of military and broadcast origin. The center of the film is the literal Riotsvilles, mock towns the Army constructed at Fort Belvoir and Fort Gordon to train troops in riot suppression. Soldiers play the rioters. Other soldiers play the police. The film treats this footage as the smoking gun of a thesis. The state watched the uprisings of the late 1960s, decided the problem was disorder rather than injustice, and chose to answer it with force. What looks like history is really an origin story for the militarized police of the present.
Charlene Modeste narrates as the film’s controlling intelligence. Her voice is cool and deliberate, and she reads Tobi Haslett’s text as accusation rather than recitation. The archival figures speak for themselves and indict themselves in the process. Fred R. Harris appears as a member of the Kerner Commission, the body that named white racism as the cause and watched its findings get buried. Lyndon B. Johnson, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan appear as themselves in old footage, each one converting a moral crisis into a law-and-order talking point. The film lets their certainty hang in the air until it curdles.
Sierra Pettengill directs with a refusal to let the footage pass as neutral record. She slows the film down. She holds on the grain of the 16mm stock and lets the optical artifacts of the original cameras become visible. The effect insists that someone chose to point a camera at a fake riot. Haslett’s script keeps interrogating that choice, asking who funded the footage and who the audience was meant to be. The editing pairs the staged Riotsville drills with real broadcast coverage of real uprisings, and the seam between rehearsal and reality is where the argument lives.
This is a polemic, and it does not pretend otherwise. The film argues that the militarization of American policing was not an accident or a drift. It was a decision, made on camera, by men who preferred tanks to reckoning. Pettengill and Haslett build that case from the establishment’s own footage, which gives the indictment a strange authority. The Riotsvilles were built to rehearse the suppression of a future that has since arrived.