“Riotsville” takes its title from two U.S. The film shows NBC’s coverage of the convention discussing the rioting that went on in nearby Liberty City, but never once cutting away to show disaffected American Americans protesting a convention that refused to meet or even acknowledge them miles away because the GOP had parked their fete on an island only accessible by drawbridges. “Everyone is free to interpret that however he likes.” “Law and order,” NBC anchor David Brinkley would drawl. “The Southern Strategy” and Republican race-baiting, a party whose 1968 state delegations were whitewashed, a party whose standard-bearer, Richard Nixon, would make “law & order” a cornerstone of his campaign, and who would cast Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running to appeal to “the George Wallace” vote, all were trotted out in authoritarian lockstep contrast to the soul searching, debate and hand-wringing over the unrest, riots and assassinations of the previous two years. “But we’ve been living through Miami Beach.” “We’ve heard about Chicago, ” Charlene Modeste dispassionately narrates. Who can forget the iconic and ugly images of the “police riot” that took place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago? What filmmaker Sierra Pettengill shows us instead is the tightly-controlled, sanitized and “disciplined Republican Convention in Miami that preceded it, and how compliant the media were in covering it the way the Republicans wanted. government training films and long unseen programming from the pre-PBS Public Broadcast Laboratory related to the unrest and televised efforts to get at and discuss its root causes and possible solutions. This documentary is built entirely from archival news footage, U.S.
“Riotsville, USA” isn’t a recycling of the oft-repeated footage of Detroit, Newark, Watts and elsewhere in flames, of troops fanning out across littered streets in front of shattered and torched storefronts.
And they offer a fresh view of the burning summers of 1967 and ’68, when American cities erupted in civil rights protests that quickly crossed over into riots. The images are stark, often silent snippets of little-remembered American history.
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