Yance Ford has grappled with issues of systemic racism in his documentaries, such as the Oscar-nominated Strong Island. As the filmmaker took in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, he was struck by the same question that animated much public discourse that summer: “What, exactly, do the police exist to do?” Four years later, that line of questioning has led to Power, his documentary about the ideological evolution of policing as an institution in the United States.
The film, which was released on Netflix on May 17, condenses a great deal of history and thought into an accessible 90 minutes, with Ford’s essayistic narration guiding the story. Ford joined me over Zoom to discuss the documentary, as well as image-making and reshaping, and coming across character actors in the least expected places. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hyperallergic: Why did you decide to use an essayistic format for this film?
Yance Ford: For Power, I wanted to make an essay about the power of police, and knowing the history of documentary, I wanted to make something that would resonate with people, that would feel like the conversation between me and the audience and leave the audience with a question.
H: This is a voluminous topic. How did you winnow it down to the specific tack you take, the questions you ask?
YF: We started out with the questions of: What is power? Where does it come from? How is it wielded? By whom and against whom? We spent an intense six-month period developing this film. Pre-production was like getting a PhD. Everyone was researching police funding, weaponry, their deployment overseas, training. As we distilled this information, it was clear that this question of power was the foundational question of the film.
The thing we wanted to do most was take a step outside of our contemporary moment and debate about policing and get a 30,000-foot view of the institution and how it came to be. The choices about what to include were driven by what things are foundational to policing. The international deployment of the military as police forces in place like the Philippines and the feedback loop of that deployment felt foundational. The way in which police were used to respond to the uprisings in the 1960s felt foundational. The three points of origin [the expansion of the US frontier, the patrolling of enslaved people, and the suppression of labor organizing], which very few people have connected before this film, felt foundational. So we went from pillar to pillar, and we also chapterized the film to guide the audience.
H: Did you interview the various experts with those questions in mind?
YF: Each of our interviewees were asked the same set of 20 foundational questions that were about the deployment of police power, the evolution of police power, and its impact on the institution through which it’s deployed. Then, based on their area of expertise, there was a second set of questions that drilled down further into their research. I think of them less as talking heads and more along the lines of lessons. I would say, “You need to think of me as your worst student. I’m the person who’s been least attentive in class and I need to catch up right now. Don’t assume I have previous exposure to any of these concepts.” And I think that as a result we got accessible explanations of complex ideas.
H: What were your primary archival sources? Were there any unexpected discoveries in there?
YF: We worked with a very skilled archivist named Jillian Bergman. She knows just about every archival source out there. We got a lot of material from the National Archives. The material came in waves. I wanted her to be thinking about representations of Whiteness, the evolution of the notion of public safety, the Kerner Commission and what happens after it, what it means for a feedback loop to exist between police and the military. What we have in the film is a result of that early interaction between the archive and the themes, as well as the work she did very diligently in searching for material that resonated.
H: What led to the incorporation of the footage of nuclear weapons testing?
YF: That was a proposal from the editor, Ian Olds. He had a draft of the text and was doing a lot of experiments. The film’s architecture of meaning is the result of a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error with the archival material matched with the narration, interviews, etc. Ian found the nuclear material in the vast archival collection, and it struck me as exactly the right choice for that moment in the movie.
H: Many of the archival images you use were originally made to bolster the heroic ideal of policing, but you’ve reframed them. There’s a lot of conscious recontextualization of how the media has been used to construct ideals.
YF: One of the things that went into how we selected the images was how well they illustrated the contemporary issue, even though it’s material from the past. We see a lot of footage from the early 20th century, but it speaks to exactly what’s being said in the interviews. We showed how consistent police and policing have been over time, and how much earlier certain things happened in policing. We also did something documentaries don’t traditionally do, which is completely reject a chronological presentation of information. We had no interest in chronology, but we did have an interest in the way history and the present echo one another.
We also wanted to use material that had been made by the police themselves, representing the type of work they do, the type of training they do, the way they see themselves in the community. We made these decisions very deliberately because we know people will try to attack the film. But when we can point out that so much of this is police-produced material, it will force people to reckon with how they generate images to cement a singular understanding of them as heroes. If you take that footage out of the moment in which it was made and plug it in somewhere else, you illustrate the opposite effect.
H: I was startled when actor Ben Gazzara showed up hosting one police film. It’s a good reminder of how deep the roots run between police and the media industry.
YF: Yeah, we were startled as well. Got to be honest with you, that was a full stop, hit the space bar, “Are we were really looking at this?” moment. We also discovered another police film where Peter Falk was narrating and onscreen as well. It was interesting to see the ways celebrity was used to authenticate these notions of police nobility. The same thing is still happening today with, for example, the universe of Law & Order. At Hot Docs, I learned for the first time that there’s a Law & Order: Toronto.
Those shows perpetuate a singular understanding of police. And if you have no interaction with police other than the fact that they might help you instead of harm you, and that they are heroic in their portrayals in the media, that’s going to shape your understanding of what they do. One of the things the film tries to do is show police using their own material, including body camera footage, acting as actors in situations that are not heroic. It’s a counterbalance to the continued dramatization of one side of the policing experience.
H: Since the movie is guided by its ideas rather than chronology, how did you construct its flow?
YF: We built the structure in real time. It took us nine months. Ian is a tremendously skilled editor. He has an understanding and command of the material that made this process possible. It was a really pressurized experience. Because so much of it had to do with how the interviews interact with the archival material and how all of that is shaped by my narration, it was important for us to do it in real time. We had voluminous notes as we would watch the interviews together, but honestly, we just started cutting. We didn’t have a script; we just started to work with the material.
Power is available to stream on Netflix.
