Force is Netflix’s second high-profile documentary about policing in the United States, coming eight years after Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary. 13. Director Yance Ford: Oscar nominee for best director in 2017 strong island – delves into the topic, delving into the subtext of the current state of policing, tracing its roots and exploring the ways it can undermine democratic principles. It’s a thoughtful and comprehensive opinion piece from a filmmaker with a strong point of view.
FORCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: The film begins with a black screen and Ford’s narration: “This film requires curiosity, or at least suspicion,” he says, and his voice is calm, calm and collected, but seething deep down, as if trying to maintain a sense of meaning. of civility in the face of serious injustice. Let us consider the tone set for an academic and philosophical pursuit of questions such as Who controls the police? and If the United States were conceptualizing a police system today, would it look like what we have now? The film organizes its central ideas under headings that read “Property,” “Social Control,” “Resistance,” and other broad themes, then boils those ideas down to more detailed commentary by a collection of talking heads including big businessmen. think about university professors; a black man, Charlie Adams, who has been a Minneapolis police officer for 36 years in a district just a few miles from where George Floyd was killed; and an Indian-American gentleman who shares how stop-and-frisk procedures in New York City affected him psychologically.
Ford traces the modern policing system to 18th-century slave patrols (groups of white men who made sure plantation slaves toed the line), to 19th-century frontier militias that drove indigenous peoples from their lands. and to the anti-slavery struggles of the 20th century. union strikebreakers. The brutal methods of these groups were reflected in police seeking to quell the “urban riots” of the 1960s, whose federal response was the Kerner Commission report, which had “something for everyone”: evidence of a racist policing system. and claims that federal funding for police needed to be increased. The response to the commission leaned heavily on this last point; Cue a montage of every president, from Reagen to Biden, fighting for more and more money for the police to increase their numbers and their increasingly militarized arsenals. Ford’s conclusion? This country is excessively monitored.
Several discussions arise from this central statement: how the police have “a monopoly on violence”, are only responsible to themselves and benefit from laws that practically allow them to kill with impunity. Ford intersperses a series of talking heads supporting his point with archival footage, from cheesy old movies to disturbing footage of past and recent violent riots, police body camera footage, and viral clips showing incidents of excessive force. (including part of the video capturing Floyd). the murder). The modern policing system, Ford says, is deeply entrenched and undemocratic, but what will it take to change it?
What movies will it remind you of?: Beyond documentaries with similar themes 13 and The forceI couldn’t help but think of the powerful drama of Kathryn Bigelow. detroit.
Performance worth watching: The aforementioned Indian-American man, identified as Nilesh V, shares his experiences with police injustice. He says he was subjected to stop and frisk, a policy that allows police to search people on the street at random for weapons, and is a prime example of racial profiling, almost every day, and asks, “Is this is what I get? Just for being me?
Memorable dialogue: Ford: “Every arrest, every stop and frisk, every moment of police violence, illustrates the paradox of police power.”
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: To your credit, Force retains a calm, serene and analytical approach to a social problem that is prone to inflaming strong emotions. Some may criticize Ford’s tone for its lack of passion, but his film doesn’t need to further fan the flames that are already soaring high; It’s better, the film implies, to bury that emotion in subtext beneath a series of salient points, derived from logic, in the argument for police reform. Ford tends to avoid inflammatory terms like “defund the police” or “blue lives matter” in an attempt to filter out the noise of partisan politics and focus on core ideas of justice, fairness, equality, and, of course, power and the approach usually works.
That approach sometimes takes talking heads into overly detailed territory that discusses the issue in depth but offers no pragmatic solution to the problem; that may be too much to ask of a single documentary film. The strongest elements of Force lie in the complexities of Officer Adams’ point of view, which illustrates how the power of long-standing police institutions essentially finds black men enforcing a system that is ideologically opposed to their identity; This is how it has “always been done,” and changing it seems like a task beyond the capabilities of American society. Ford takes audio of a woman being Tasered by an officer during a traffic stop and overlays footage from a mid-century TV show depicting a friendly cop as a kind, wholesome man, and challenges us to reconcile reality with perception. Can you live with that cognitive dissonance? Ford certainly hopes not.
Our call: Force He channels his rage into a calm, collected, and persuasive argument. TRANSMIT IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
