When she speaks to Business Doc Europe, US filmmaker Sierra Pettengill is in Zagreb for this week’s screenings of her documentary Riotsville, USA at ZagrebDox. She has come to town straight from CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. The festival dates are racking up for the film (sold by Dogwoof) which premiered in Sundance but is also due to screen at Hot Docs, at the Seattle International FF and in New Directors New Films in New York.
Riotsville USA is the second project by Pettengill, following on from 2017’s The Reagan Show (co-directed by Pacho Velez) which is entirely archive-based. The title refers to the fake towns set up by the Government in the late 1960s where the cops and the National Guard could practice their riot management skills, better to deal with the urban riots happening across the country in the late 1960s.
The director spent six years making the film. During that period, she directed two shorts, also archive-based, Graven Image (2017), about a Confederate monument outside Atlanta, and The Rifleman (2020), about the links between the National Rifle Association and the US Border Patrol.
“I’ve been working through various ways of looking at white supremacism in the United States,” the director says of her documentaries over the last decade. “I think I’m really interested in trying to use visual material authored by various factions of the right wing, broadly speaking.”
On one level, the films are “bizarre art projects” but there is nothing frivolous about them. “It can be difficult to visually represent structural racism and that is what I am trying to do.”
During the period that Pettengill was making Riotsville USA, the Black Lives Matter movement, started in 2013, began to expand dramatically. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 provoked huge protests. “I’ve found with the last several films I’ve made, every film about American history, you inevitably come back to deep structural racism,” the director says of how her investigations into the past chime with what is happening in US cities today.
The inspiration for Riotsville USA came when Pettengill read historian Rick Perlstein’s book ‘Nixonland’.
“I think we approach our work in similar ways, which is trying to survey the detritus of American history to pull these narratives together,” Pettengill says of Perlstein. Like the historian, she looks for “unexpected sources.” She will focus on seemingly banal but often very revealing details in the archival material she scours, for example the way people dress, how they move in their seats, what kinds of cameras are recording them and even what their kitchens look like.
“When I was reading ‘Nixonland’, he mentioned, in a kind of laundry list almost, programmes being developed in 1978 as a way of summarising this increasing craze toward law and order.”
Riotsville was one of those programmes. It sounded so surreal that the director half-felt it might have made up. When she looked online, there was very little about it. However, she began to search the archives and eventually found the footage that features in the film.
“It was this spectacle of mostly white young men, the Vietnam era, the type you think might be anti-war protesters [who] said they were soldiers dressed up as hippies. There was this pageantry that was both quite funny…and really dark and disturbing,” Pettengill remembers of the first footage she watched. There was little contextual information about how, where and why the material was shot. She used her “follow the money” instincts to work out its provenance. She discovered that the ideas came out of the Kerner Commission Report investigating the causes of the riots that were happening across the country. The report, published in 1968, was part of “this explosion in funding for militarising the police.”
This wasn’t a programme that the government hid from the public. “For me, what was so infuriating about this story is that this was all public knowledge. Riotsville wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t classified.”
The filmmakers set themselves a “hard and fast” rule that they would only use footage that had been aired by broadcasters or shot by the military. The Kerner Commission report was a bestseller. The TV stations were openly showing footage of the Riotsville experiment. It “was a public history that we have chosen to forget…We are on this loop again and we can’t pretend that we didn’t know better.”
Pettengill also realised that her film “needed to tackle a much larger set of questions.” She set out both to explore the Riotsville story on its own and to explore it “on a metaphorical level,” looking at what it revealed about racism and violence in America.
The director pays extensive tribute to her main collaborators: editor Nels Bangerter, writer Tobi Haslett, composer Jace Clayton and producers Sara Archambault and Jamila Wignot.
“I don’t think of myself as an ‘auteur’ and I struggle with that framing,” Pettengill dismisses the idea that she alone takes the key creative decisions. “Filmmaking for me is a deeply collaborative process…I’ve worked as a producer of documentaries; I’ve worked as an archival researcher; I am executive producing other people’s films. I show up where I am needed and I think that has given me a really different perspective on what it means to direct.”
Pettengill is close friends with her fellow archival researcher Rosemary Rotondi, who worked for Traci Curry and Stanley Nelson on their recent prison riot documentary Attica, which used material shot by broadcasters and the State of New York to tell the horrific story of government-sanctioned violence against the Attica inmates.
Both films are doing “dot connecting.” Pettengill wants viewers of Riotsville USA to “feel close” to the archive material. “We let things run long. We are very, very clear about what sources are [and] there is not much mish-mashing of different archival pieces. There’s a lot of text on screen. We give a lot of facts…I hope that approach allows people to feel they have licence to find their way in and make sense of it on their own. The voice-over feels very important for that reason. It continually asks those questions which are important to ask of a historical film – what do we do with this, what does this mean and what are we seeing?”
Riotsville USA “will certainly get a theatrical release” in the US. (A distributor is expected to be confirmed in the coming weeks.) In the meantime, its director is turning her focus toward the Mediterranean. She is coming together with fellow filmmakers Iva Radivojević and Amber Bemak to create a filmmaking collective on a Greek island, a space that, as she puts it, “encourages creativity…The idea is to try to carve out a space for filmmaking and creativity that is outside of the market and outside of the industry.”
