Sacha Jenkins’s Burn Motherfucker Burn starts making connections right away, coming out of the credits with one of (too many) contemporary analogues for the King video: the 2015 cell phone footage of L.A. cops murdering unarmed African-American Charly “Africa” Keunang. From there, we’re bounced back to a distant counterpart, the harrowing story of the April 1962 police shootings and brutality at Mosque No. 27, and brought up to King via a kind of cultural history of the city: migration from the South; the formation of gangs within these communities; the Watts riot, in detail. Burn is another well-made film; Jenkins’s cutting is inventive, particularly in his segues from one topic to another (he introduces Chief Bill Parker via a television game show clip, and comes in on the King chapter via Chief Gates’s internal LAPD video message on “The Foothill Incident”). But the film’s main virtue is the clarity with which it lays out the cause and effect relationships: the rise of activism and consciousness in the wake of Watts (particularly via the Black Panthers), then how the faltering of those movements led to the reemergence of gang culture/warfare, which led to the crack epidemic (and LAPD’s involvement in it), and then the music and culture that came out of that.
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