You know the story of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. You know Rodney King, four cops, Reginald Denny, “Can’t we all just get along.”
What you don’t know is the ten years leading up to those two chaotic days.
The 25th anniversary of the LA riots has brought about no fewer than five documentaries this year. Let It Fall: LA 1982-1992 is probably the most accessible of all those, as it will air at 8 om Central time tonight on on your local ABC station. And it may be the one with the most to give. The Milwaukee Film Festival hosted a special preview screening on Wednesday.
Using a mix of archival footage, archival interviews and stunning new interviews, Let it Fall slowly and deliberately portrays the many forgotten stories and moments that contributed to the riots in LA, beginning in 1982.
Though the riot is often portrayed and recounted as a single moment of violent reaction to the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King, Let It Fall pushes that notion aside and reflects not with just two days or even the year 1992, but the 10 years that built up to those two days in April.
Filmmaker John Ridley, a native of Mequon, Wisconsin and an Oscar winner for best adapted screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, accomplishes this with no narration, no experts, no psychologists, no criminologists, no sociologists. Those who lived through it share their stories – and their pain, or their justifications. The key is that the stories are less told and more shared (and well edited), and they’re gripping. You might not even notice that you’re halfway through the film before you see the first footage of the riot itself.
The story isn’t trapped in a one dimensional view of prescribed footage and commentary. It expands into the debate of police procedure, of historical injustice, of innocent victims, of blame and responsibility, of the psychological toil of the dehumanizing of a community – all through these interviews. All from these everyday people who experienced extraordinary moments before, during and even after the riots.
And the burning of LA is told by those who were there – not just in 1992, but in 1982 and the decade between. Those who lived in the neighborhood, were born there, immigrated there, and those sworn to protect it. And you are privy to their memories of pain, regret, pride and guilt that haunts them still, to their memories of split-second decisions, decisions not of their control or doing, decisions that impacted themselves, their community and the history written about them.
Unlike documentaries that try to find immediate answers for the why, or those that bring in experts to describe or justify a timeline best fitting for an event, Ridley instead gives you a person to be compelled with, someone you are familiar with, someone you can relate to or someone who should know better, should be better.
And you’ll realize as Ridley unfolds these narratives and weaves them toward purpose was that the riots were nothing short of inevitable. The riots were not just a reaction to a verdict, but the inevitable outcome of a city that continuously failed to grapple with racial tensions. The thread through all these stories, all these death and frustration, was that something had ignorantly been ignited long before and simply covered in smoke, left to smolder and fan itself out.
Ultimately Let it Fall is human. It’s about our mistakes, prejudices, pettiness. It’s about blame and responsibility. It’s about complicated men and women, drama and the stories behind the drama.
And the reason you should set aside your plans tonight and watch this film is that it does not offer rhetoric or analysis or a simplified, clear reason why. Instead it is an intimate and in-depth look at a community that will feel disturbingly familiar. What you’ll realize you missed was so much more in substance than what you first knew or heard about those two days, so much more than a 30-second news clip, so much more than the grainy video shot from a helicopter hovering over the corner of Florence and Normandie.
And you’ll wonder, is the next fire already smoldering?
