Movie Review : ‘Fire This Time’ Sheds Light on L.A. Riots

In “The Fire This Time” documentarian Randy Holland has done such a thorough soul-searching job of researching the roots of the 1992 L.A. riots that the event itself takes on a quality of tragic inevitability. Most people who will see this film--and countless others who probably will not--are aware of the pervasiveness of racial inequality and injustice. Almost everyone, regardless of his or her opinions, has been inundated by images of the riots on TV or in newspapers or magazines.

The ever-worsening plight of blacks trapped in ghettos is so familiar, so omnipresent, that many no longer respond to it. Holland, however, demolishes indifference, first by sketching the difficult history of blacks in Southern California, and then by letting the people of South-Central L.A. speak for themselves. Holland starts making connections that are finally explosive in impact, like a string of firecrackers.

The way in which Holland weaves together the words of his witnesses reveals the destructive interplay of social, political and economic forces. “The Fire This Time” suggests persuasively that inflammatory infiltration activities on the part of police and the FBI have had an even more profoundly destructive impact on black communities than most of us have ever realized, stirring up gang warfare, destroying the Black Panthers and arresting small boys so that they will have records that stick with them for the rest of their lives.

Holland pays particular attention to the Panthers, stressing their positive contributions and suggesting that the elimination or suppression of a generation of courageous black males served to pave the way for the dominance of the gangs.

*

Making everything incalculably worse has been the loss of 200,000 jobs in the area, as one factory after another has closed, compounded with a decline in basic community services and resources to an extent that can only be described as shocking--hospital wards without any equipment, a high school wood shop course without any wood.

One individual after another tells us that there’s nothing for young people to do, no place for them to go, no alternatives to the gangs. One man, working with maps, shows us that more striking than the abundance of liquor stores in South-Central is the lack of virtually all other kinds of businesses. Although Holland doesn’t state it, what he is showing us is the inner workings of a phenomenon that can only be described as a conspiracy, a combination of forces, both conscious and unconscious, to disenfranchise and oppress black people. We hear a laborer working on the construction of the Century Freeway say that he’s only one of two people from nearby South-Central on the crew--the rest of the workers have been imported from out of state, he claims. More startling, we hear a young man tell us how guns and other weapons are mysteriously deposited by the boxcar-load into the community, free for the taking. Bobby Lavender, co-founder of the Bloods, says they come from “certain families” or “police on the wrong side of the law.”

As Holland’s litany of decay and despair unreels, he suggests that the white business Establishment has good reason to want to see South-Central destroyed, because its land is so valuable, so conveniently situated--there may even be oil under the projects--that it’s ripe for the kind of redevelopment that has no interest in preserving what’s left of the black community.

The cumulative impact of his film, however, drives home the point that whites can no longer afford to be ignorant or indifferent about the ills of the black neighborhoods that they have “maintained and condoned.” As former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young observes, it almost takes as much money to keep a black man in prison as it does to send him to college.

Holland was moved to make his film by the powerful dignity of the elderly women he met in the wake of the riots at the South-Central Senior Center. They are among the film’s many memorable presences, and their forthright character and determination lends “The Fire This Time” a sense of hope, which is also to be found in the truces between key gangs. Young, too, talks hopefully of the diversity of American society that threatens to tear it apart as also being the source of strength for the future. “We have to be a part of the system,” says Lavender, a man weary beyond his years, “or there isn’t going to be a system.”

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes intense anger and adult issues and themes that older children should be able to grasp.

‘The Fire This Time’

A Blacktop Films presentation. Writer-producer-director Randy Holland. Cinematographer Jurg Walther. Editor Barbara Kaplan. Music James Verboot. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

* In limited release, at the Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd Street, Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.