 What we're watching here is a government funding of a militarization of the police. A door swung open in the late 60s. Nothing that big or bright had ever happened and in so many American cities. And someone, something, sprang up and slammed it shut. Riotsville, USA, a new documentary by filmmaker Sierra Pettengill, is a surrealist look at the dawn of police militarization in America. Following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Americans became increasingly aware of the growing use of military tools and tactics by law enforcement. But as Pettengill's film makes clear, the practice began decades earlier, in the 1960s, after protests erupted in cities across the country. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to study what had caused a series of urban riots that led to deadly clashes between protesters and police. The commission's report recommended an ambitious set of initiatives to combat racism in America and a minor measure calling for increased funding and training for police. It was that minor recommendation that President Johnson latched on to. One conclusion is that the police and the military failed. People were shot, people died, that strategically there was a need for reform. And so Riotsville, in ways that are very important for me in how I think about the present tense, is a really direct example of what police reform looks like in practice. Riotsville was a series of fake towns that looked like low-budget film sets that were constructed on military bases in the late 60s for training in civil disturbance control. People ranging from FBI agents to governors rank-and-file police officers, police chiefs were all brought in for this course. And Riotsville was a sort of day-long stage reenactment. What they're expecting when they go there is to learn about coordination between departments, how communication should be happening. They are learning how a riot typically unfolds, which is an invention and a creation of the military and the government that sort of reinforces itself. This school bus with this town, right? Right! That thing looks like it took Henry Ford to school, right? Right! And playgrounds, we haven't got one playground in this town, do we? No! Isolated and secured from outside interference or agitation, such demonstrations will usually terminate peacefully in a minimum of time. Now an incident will demand more positive action. They don't tell me what to do, man. I'm a civilian. You didn't get there. I didn't put up my time in that honor, you know? In these stage demonstrations, the men dressed in black will typify hard-core professional agitators. When the group refuses to disband, action must be taken. Now the agitators shift their troublemaking skills into high gear, using the naturally contagious qualities of excitement and violence to incite them into action. It's largely the first time that the federal government is funding local police departments directly. Federal allocation for local police went from zero dollars in 1964 to 10 million in 1965, and then by 1970 it was 300 million. It's the same rhetoric for police reform now, which is you can pull a lot of things under the rubric of how to reduce harm, but here's a tank just in case, you know? What the justifications are for grant writing purposes versus what's actually being experienced on the ground are often at odds. A great deal of the archival footage used in the film was shot by the military. Pettengale, an archival researcher, was particularly drawn to the government films. Finding a visual record of the fantasy space, of what the government and the military, how they are designing the world, you know? They're building their own city and they're populating it and they're scripting the actions. And I feel like that's a very rare thing to come across, is a sort of visual representation of what they think, how they conceive of the world. When I saw the footage, the first thing I was struck by was this simultaneous deep absurdity and stupidity. It's really dumb and bumbling and bad and you do want to laugh at parts and then extreme, pretty chilling violence. And the pairing of those two things does feel like what it feels like to be living in America in many ways. That was a real guiding force in the edit room was how do you make this absurdity reflective of the callousness and lack of care and attention on the part of the military to government? The film takes pains to make the viewer aware of its manipulations with jump cuts, digital artifacts and jarring editing choices. The goal is to drive home that what you're seeing, like Riot's fill itself, is constructed. The idea of being in an immersive documentary where you feel like you're right there and you're in it and you're living through it is not actually an accurate way of experiencing things. And to me, it's very important that we are watching this for a reason, which is the reason we keep asking, what are we looking at? What do we make of this? What do we make of this in the future it was meant to ensure? And so not hiding the digital nature of things and in some ways trying to probe as far in as you can get and see what's there and see the limitations of the pixels. The film is pretty self-aware in its construction and one of the most important political points to me in the film is that this is all constructed, that we do not live in a historical inevitability. We are not forced to live in a really repressive brutal state.