“…people fear knowledge.  Knowledge is hard, and grotesque, and messy, and it eats away at whatever you believe in.  We cannot travel across the stars and keep worlds safe and well fed without knowledge, but nobody has to like it.”

—Charlie Jane Anders, “Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak”

Longtime readers of Beyond Chron may remember that Sierra Pettengill’s documentary “Riotsville, U.S.A.” was reviewed when it screened at SFFILM 65.  When news came that Pettengill’s film was getting a theatrical release, this writer felt the film’s message was still timely and welcomed its exposure outside the festival circuit.  It took reading the above words written by local writer Charlie Jane Anders to inspire these further thoughts on what still feels like one of 2022’s most important documentaries.

For those who need a quick recap of the film, the title refers to an artificial training town built by the U.S. Army to train soldiers and police officers on ways of controlling future urban riots.  Pettengill uses that fake town as a starting point to explore American society’s response to the grievances that sparked the riots, the roots of present day police militarization, and the price white America continually wants to pay to keep the country as racially unequal as possible.

The summer urban riots of 1965 and 1966 were effective enough to make clear to a reasonable person that Something was seriously wrong in America.  Certainly there was curiosity about why the riots happened and what could be done to prevent their reoccurrence.  But that curiosity soon got overwhelmed by a desire for answers which wouldn’t seriously challenge existing American sociopolitical relations.  Pettengill’s documentary offers a chronicle of the consequences of way too many Americans’ fear of knowing the actual state of American race relations.

The director’s accomplishment is more remarkable given that her raw material is a mix of footage from 1960s national television broadcasts and film shot at Riotsville itself.  Onscreen titles are used to provide context for some of the footage, such as learning that the Army base that was the site for the first Riotsville was named after a slaveholder.  Narration by Charlene Modeste brings in more abstract thoughts about the footage, such as the impossible desire for a single image that can summarize the contradictions of the 1960s.

Pettengill generally refrains from offering any commentary on her film’s vintage footage, preferring to let the resurrected images speak for themselves.  Her major exception is the use of The Shirelles’ 1962 song “Soldier Boy” to mock the rationales for police militarization.  The cop humping crowd can be expected to be unamused by this juxtaposition.

Snipers, the threat used to justify such militarization, generally turns out to be an illusion.  The Kerner Commission report on civil disturbances did acknowledge sniper fire did occur.  But those incidents were generally cops unknowingly shooting at each other.

Yet training for scenarios that had little basis in reality seemed part of Riotsville’s DNA.  The Riotsville simulation of the incident that sparked the Watts riots seems to assume pre-existing police-Black community friction was non-existent.  “Outside agitators” appear as a frequent scenario, as if to say that without such agitators the Black community would otherwise be satisfied with their miserable living conditions.  And it’s unclear whether the police and military observers hearing a riot simulator yelling “You haven’t heard the last of me” are laughing at overacting fit for a 1930s Poverty Row film or at enjoyment of the man’s fictionalized impotence.

However much the viewer may be tempted to laugh at the unreality of Riotsville training, it’s no laughing matter seeing how some of the unrealistic fear-based attitudes underlying Riotsville leaked into American culture.  Housewives and grandmothers start taking an interest in learning how to shoot pistols “for protection” without considering the emotional costs of taking a human life.  News programs extol new crime fighting technologies such as computers and an armored personnel carrier-like vehicle called the Witch Craft.  Most chillingly, television footage of the Chicago police brutally quelling counterculture protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention solidifies public support for the cops.

But Pettengill’s real focus is on the less familiar police actions during the 1968 Republican National Convention.  Those actions in Miami would presage the police militarization that exists today.  It turned out that the Miami cops trained at Riotsville.  Overkill was the operating principle for the cops’ response.  Eject a white reporter from a Black community meeting?  Then send in five armed police units in response.  Want to control trouble in the Black community of Liberty City?  Impose a curfew and use tear gas like insecticide.  It doesn’t matter that the heavy tear gas use made it impossible for Black residents to even breathe in their own homes.

It’s another point of irony that beefing up police capabilities was one of the few Kerner Commission report recommendations to actually be implemented by the federal government.  The Kerner Commission may have been born out of flawed roots such as trying to prove outside agitators precipitated previous years’ urban riots or trying not to appear “political” (a weasel euphemism for the unspoken attitude of “I do not want to have public acknowledgment of unwanted truths”).  Yet the final report wound up presenting data confirming what the Black communities had been saying all this time about their existence in America.

But if the Black community’s messages about the inequities of their existence hadn’t penetrated white America’s mass consciousness, a large piece of the blame lay in white peoples’ inability to listen.  A Black reporter in Miami tells his white colleague on the air that current unrest in the Black community comes from weariness with continued white disrespect…yet the white reporter acts as if it’s still a mystery to him why the Black community is unhappy.  The moderator of a nationwide discussion on police-Black community relations can’t abandon a both-siderist position to call out cops’ denial of police brutality’s existence.

Jimmy Collier and Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick’s performance of “Burn Baby Burn” provides “Riotsville U.S.A.”’s dramatic highlight.  It summarizes in song form the communal desperation and frustration that make burning things down the only reasonable response.  Yet Public Broadcasting Laboratory, which aired this performance and the aforementioned nationwide discussion on police-Black community friction, was rewarded with Republican criticism for being “too liberal” and death by funding denial.

The Kerner Commission report’s final conclusion can be boiled down to “the U.S. government can continue to fight in Vietnam or it can finally deal with the roots of urban unrest.  But it can’t afford to do both.”  That America chose a course of action that would not eat away at its racially prejudiced attitudes is a historical disgrace whose consequences we still live with today.

Carlota Pereda’s Sundance sensation “Piggy” can be described in part as a film where audience members want the killer to succeed in killing certain characters.  But it’s also a condemnation of a certain type of bullying and the story of one outcast teen’s discovery of her own self-worth.

That outcast teen is named Sara.  She’s the daughter of a sleepy rural Spanish town’s local butcher.  Like her father, she’s very overweight.  But while her father has stopped caring what others think of him, Sara is still very sensitive as to what her peers think of her.  The film’s title is the nickname bestowed upon Sara by the other teens.

Particularly guilty of using this hateful nickname to torment Sara are the teens Maca, Roci, and Claudia.  After a particularly humiliating and odious encounter with the three girls at the town pool, the outcast teen just wants to hide somewhere and figuratively die.  But when Sara learns the three bullies have been kidnapped by a mysterious bearded man, she doesn’t act to help the three girls.  Instead, she becomes fascinated by the only person in the town who has shown her some nonjudgmental kindness.

While Pereda’s story uses noticeable suspense and horror tropes that would make it ripe for a Hollywood remake, one particular factor makes such a remake either unlikely or a very weak shadow of Pereda’s original film.  Sara’s figure is neither Rubenesque or even curvy.  Instead, her body is dominated by rolls of fat, which Pereda shows directly on screen more than once.

If a viewer has an ick reaction to Pereda’s images of Sara’s near-naked body, that reaction puts the viewer on the very low moral plane inhabited by Maca, Roci, and Claudia.  Maca delivers her fat-shaming taunts of Sara with the speed of a poetry slam contestant.  The girl with long brown hair can even turn Sara’s nervous habit of chewing on her hair into another attack on her eating.  Roci may not say much, but then most of her fat-shaming bullying of Sara is conducted on social media.  For example, a picture of Sara with her parents in their shop gets turned into a popular insult.  Perhaps Claudia is the worst of the three girls even though she’s the follower in the trio.  It turns out she betrayed whatever friendship she had with Sara to ensure her social cachet by hanging out with cool girls Maca and Roci.

When Sara sees Claudia’s face looking out of the rear window of the bearded man’s  truck, the fear for her life Sara’s former friend displays is unquestionably genuine.  Yet the taunted teen’s inaction is both understandable and even sympathetic.  Yes, leaving someone to the mercies of a homicidal nutter is a bad thing.  However, the abducted teens’ last unapologetically cruel prank justifies at least temporarily withholding from them any further servings of the milk of human kindness.

Pereda doesn’t make the teens’ bearded kidnapper a saint by comparison.  Partway through “Piggy,” the viewer sees him about to murder a woman in front of the television.  Yet not seeing him commit any acts of violence on screen and doing such nice things as giving the humiliated Sara a towel to help her cover herself allows the viewer to temporarily accept the film’s heroine’s seeing him as a possible romantic interest.  The bearded man’s near reciprocation of Sara’s feelings also convinces the viewer of this point.

What finally turns the viewer’s sympathies against the bearded man are his interactions with the other members of Sara’s family.  His use of violence against them feels firmly out of proportion to their individual crimes of cluelessness and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  On the other hand, given how much of a pill Sara’s mother Asun is, the viewer won’t be that regretful about what happens to her.

Pereda succeeds in getting viewers to see Sara as a person first before worrying how her relationship with the bearded man will affect her subsequent actions.  It’s one thing to not admit to withholding information about the kidnapped girls (and indirectly protecting the bearded man).  But it’s another thing to confront how deeply Sara’s antagonism towards her tormentors runs.  Is the emotional toll of her tormentors’ cruelty great enough for Sara to reciprocate with violence?

Until “Piggy” gets to that final question, it offers some nice moments of suspense and even dark humor.  There’s a nicely staged search in the woods that threatens to reveal Sara’s connection to the bearded man.  Cutting from the moment before a woman’s throat gets sliced open to a watermelon being sliced open is both funny and a temporary disincentive to eat watermelon while watching “Piggy.”

Sara’s emotional growth proves ultimately refreshing because it depends on choices other than hanging with the hot guy.  Pedro, the guy in question, comes across as needing Sara’s help to get out of trouble rather than being a sympathetic ally.  But there’s something nicely twisted about seeing one supposed personal weakness of Sara’s proving ultimately helpful.

(“Riotsville U.S.A.” is now screening at the Opera Plaza Cinemas (601 Van Ness Avenue, SF).  “Piggy” is currently screening in a pre-opening engagement at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission (2550 Mission Street, SF), but will expand to more theaters and even video-on-demand on October 14, 2022.)