Flint Town is a radiant documentary about police work in Flint, Michigan. The program is divided into 8 episodes each about 35 minutes long. The filmmakers, Drea Cooper, Zachary Cavepari, and Jessie Dimmock, were "embedded" in the Flint police department for about two years, and apparently allowed near total access to crime scenes, the police station, and the homes of the cops whose lives are chronicled. (The degree to which the documentary is shot like a big-budget Hollywood movie is astonishing and, to some degree, distracting: in one shot, a lady police officer takes out her keys to open the door of her small, shabby bungalow. The next shot is an interior to the bungalow, a reverse shot of the first, showing her opening the door from the inside. Obviously, the construction of a shot/reverse-shot narrative for something as quotidian as merely entering a house shows a level of Hollywood-style flair that seems incongruous given the nature of the material presented -- a tough, embattled police procedural. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of the five episodes of Flint Town that I have now watched is the documentary's lavishly beautiful photography. Simply put, Flint Town is gratuitously beautiful and, in fact, contains some of the most ravishing night photography ever committed to film: squad cars prowl through velvety darkness; the halogen street lights make the streets shine with a sinister gem-like radiance: the vacant lots and sidewalks are the color of Tiger Eye agate. In the winter-time, huge flakes are always plummeting down from the night sky and the police cars churn through snow, making tracks that glisten in the darkness. Red and blue lights oscillate back and forth and the cops are always standing in halos of shimmering radiance. In one sequence, the cars prowl neighborhoods, providing Steadi-cam tracking images of dark alleys and humble homes while enormous firework explosions, detonated seeming at about 45 feet above ground level decorate the gloom above the homes. The night-lighting looks theatrical, operatic: on the wide-screen, one half of the image is mustard-color street lamps and falling snow -- to the right, an American flag is suffused with radiance and glows like a stained glass window in the darkness. The filmmakers are fascinated with drone effects: cameras stare vertiginously down onto the spillway of the famously polluted Flint River or examine the patterns made by cars slipping and sliding through snowy intersections; drones rise like balloons, portentously pulling cameras from street-side up through the canopy of trees to gaze across Flint's modest de minimus skyline. The police or community members sometimes appear for interviews facing straight into the camera posed against velvet-black backdrops that give the brightly-lit figures a kind of statuesque and sculpted quality. The film simply put is a modern version of film noir imputing to the police a sinister, wildly melodramatic glamor. Police work looks so fascinatingly beautiful and involves such beautiful weapons and light effects that it is instantaneously attractive. In one sequence, a young recruit with his field training officer explores an abandoned house -- we see for an instant some clutter on the floor and there are X-Files lighting effects with respect to the beams of the flashlights penetrating the darkness. Out on the sidewalk, the older cop says that someone is using the building because one of its rooms is full of "feces and urine" -- but we aren't shown anything like this. The squalor is disguised by the glamorous, fashion-shoot lighting.
The sheer beauty of the documentary cuts against its hard-bitten subject matter. The Flint police force is undermanned and can't keep up with the number of calls for assistance that it receives. Flint itself is poverty-stricken and mostly African-American -- the police force is half black, but also has its fair share of the truculent, overly muscular and baby-faced white thugs who gravitate toward police work, and so there are plenty abrasive encounters with the public, although no unwarranted shootings (at least in the first part of the show.). The cops see themselves as victims and are increasingly told that they are targets and should expect to be shot. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders come to Flint for a debate and both decry the increasing "militarization" of police forces. These speeches coincide with a new sheriff in town, Chief Taylor who has a hum-vee and, in fact, is militarizing the force: he has set up an elite squad of cops, the CATT team, whose role is to aggressively fight crime -- a task they accomplish by heavy-handed zero-tolerance policing. This leads to community complaints but also lavish media and community praise. The local newscasters, white women, love the CATT program with its stylish tee-shirts and the local community leaders, all of them Black, also approve of the CATT team's work because crime statistics seem to show the effectiveness of the program. (The film doesn't shy away from the fact that the most aggressive voices raised in favor of zero-tolerance tough law-and-order policing are African-American city council-members, church people, and beleaguered middle-class Black women.) The chief of police is obviously a publicity hound and a loose cannon -- his coffee cup has a pistol-grip as a handle -- but he means well. In fact, everyone means well and, even, the must thuggish of the white policemen are given little soliloquies in which they express themselves with some degree of eloquence. (Of course, the Black cops are almost uniformly conflicted and, often, seem on the verge of tears -- on several occasions, we see them arresting a kid, handcuffing him, and, then, after a profane sermon, letting the kid free.) There are several engaging characters -- an attractive female cop is living with the most petulant, and aggressively militaristic, white officer; she humanizes him and gives him an opportunity to do something other than make self-pitying and bellicose speeches while flexing his impressive muscles. A mother and son are both enrolled in Police Academy at the same time. There is a lot of imagery of the cops reacting to footage of police shootings (both by police and in which police are victims) -- their responses are, more or less, predictable but worth seeing. The plot involving the aggressive smash-mouth policing by CATT seems to be heading toward some kind of calamity. The Chief of Police has now deputized a cadre of hare-brained citizens as police auxiliaries and put them out on the streets armed with "conceal and carry" weapons -- this seems to be an obviously bad idea. The fifth episode shows everyone congratulating the police chief for decreasing crime and a black tuxedo Mayor's Ball in which Flint's mayor lavishly praises the CATT program (the mayor is a stylish African-American lady doctor). After one shooting, victims bathed in orange light, are sprawled on a lawn begging for help. "We're soldiers," one of the victims tells a buddy. A middle-aged Black lady standing on the curb speaks: "Black on black crime. No one cares...It just makes me..." She pauses and sighs. "...so...tired," she says.
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