"A Riot is the Language of the Unheard": The Grassroots Activism of Whose Streets? (2017)

Whose Streets? (2017), codirected by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, describes the months following the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown and the ensuing Ferguson uprising in 2014. Full of rare footage shot on-the-ground, the documentary follows a group of activists and their political awakening in the aftermath of these events. Yet what sets the film apart from the plethora of observational documentaries in the age of Netflix is the directors' proximity to the cause they depict. Folayan and Davis are both black activists and media artists, and their direction suffuses the film with pathos and empathy. In the manner of the best documentaries of its genre, the film activates its viewers: it horrifies and enrages, but also excites and renders hope. The codirectors do not appear directly in the film itself—the film does not feature expository voiceover, only brief explanatory intertitles—but Folayan and Davis craft a deeply personal account of the Ferguson uprising.

One could easily imagine a more even-handed approach to the material, perhaps reminiscent of Ken Burns or Frederick Wiseman. From the 1960s on, documentaries by filmmakers such as Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles Brothers were prized for their allegedly objective approach to documentary filmmaking. Whose Streets? refuses this veneer of impartiality and instead participates in the long history of activist filmmaking. As the first frame of the film informs, the film is "For Michael Brown, Jr." Folayan and Davis assert that police racism and brutality directly impact the lives of too many people to warrant an impartial response; as several activists profiled in the film claim, "you are either with us, or against us."

While the film does highlight the large issues of American police brutality and the founding of Black Lives Matter, the midwestern city of Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis, is central to the documentary. Despite being located in the American heartland, several subjects in the film describe their sense of being ignored by mainstream and coastal media. Ferguson and neighboring St. Louis are depicted as lagging behind in history: as one subject describes, "St. Louis is … I don't know what year it is, but it's not 2014."

The directors astutely link the events in Ferguson to Dred Scott vs. Sandford of 1857, a landmark case that also occurred in St. Louis. The case, infamous in the history of civil rights, deprived slaves of American citizenship, thus dealing a major blow to the abolitionist cause. The film and its many interviewees claim that this history extends through present-day Missouri: trapped in an earlier era, St. Louis/Ferguson is a locale where some of the most egregious acts of racism continue to be enacted. It is no accident that much of the film takes place in some of the poorest regions in the state of Missouri, all adjacent to one another.

The film is composed of interviews with Ferguson citizens, especially people of color. It also heavily features footage shot on cell phones and camcorders, some of which had been uploaded to YouTube. While some of the footage was shot in high definition by codirector Davis, a St. Louis native who was present during the events in Ferguson, much of it was culled from social media. Thus the documentary has a collage-like sensibility, as every scene includes several different media platforms and image textures. This contributes to the grassroots nature of the film, and, indeed, the film takes pains to contrast the footage presented through YouTube and cell phones with the officially recognized media portrayals of Ferguson on MSNBC and CNN. As Folayan and Davis demonstrate, the images of riots and looting contrast severely with the experience of Ferguson activists, whose behavior was almost exclusively nonviolent in nature. What appear as riots are unveiled to be expressions of frustration and despair. The film cites a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: "A riot is the language of the unheard." By giving Ferguson residents and activists a voice, Whose Streets? transforms what had been framed as a riot on mainstream...