Hold Your Fire

One of a few documentaries at Glasgow's 2022 Film Festival to explore America's parallel carceral state(s), Hold Your Fire is a about an incident widely regarded as being the birth of hostage negotiation. In New York, 1973, four young black men held up a sporting goods store, seeking to acquire (more) guns. Needless to say, things did not go according to plan.

The scenarios since are sufficiently familiar that there are at least two films called The Negotiator, but also that audiences might be expected to be familiar enough with them that Spike Lee can play with those conventions in Inside Man. The scenarios before are filmed too, mention made of 1972's Chase Manhattan siege as Dog Day Afternoon and the contemporary incident in Munich. What's weirder is the bleeding edge of futurity, New York skylines which only recently had added buildings that are now no longer there, the mixture of double-button double-breasted 'choker' uniforms adopted in the 19th century and early body armour, pillowy versions of plate carriers as shooting irons are carried past the elevated railway's iron works.

Writer/director Stefan Forbes has some experience with documentary, including 2004's One More Dead Fish about government buildings taken by unhappy fishermen. It's also not his most political, a biographical film about (in)famous Republican operative Lee Atwater is a picture of a man who did more to shape current US thinking than even events like this. The film is dedicated in memoriam to Harvey Schlossberg, at the time a traffic policeman and a PhD in psychology. He was called to the scene early in the siege, count kept with intertitles for the duration of the situation. At 'Standoff Hour 2' it's striking to see uniformed officers already around a barrel keeping warm.

There's some archive footage from outwith the event, but less context than one might like. There's brief discussion of the militarisation of US police but while we see the M114 armoured personnel carrier (described as 'the tank') how it came to be rejected by the armies of the US and Republic of Viet-Nam to end up in Brooklyn parked outside the John & Al Sports Store is in itself another story. There's mention made of 'not well trained' officers, but that's got a corollary in an ex-policeman talking about America being a nation 'built on violence' that's further extended by a riot cop outside Attica shouting "White power!"

The air mobile prison assault is uncomfortable enough, even if only for context. There's at least one racial slur that's bleeped in dialogue but visible in a transcript. That's even before we get to the events depicted.

This is a tragedy at any level. There's not just the siege but the associated mentality, a mixture of recursion, remorse, and regret. There's surprise at a note that "he's still in prison" but perhaps there shouldn't be. That dedication to Schlossberg wasn't the only potential one, there are other losses amongst those involved. At times overwhelming, there's a bit of archive footage where the camera suffers blowout, the film oversaturated by the transition from scuffle to sky. That chaos caught in chemistry is one of the elements of the approach, that the same factors that ratchet tension on one side of a hostage situation affect the other.

What's particularly compelling is how the siege itself was resolved. What gave it the chance to happen the way it did was a change of approach, but while change can often come from within both institutions and individuals resist. The events of this film did a lot to transform all of them, but the film suffers perhaps from a split focus. We're told a wee bit about wider impact, see quite a bit of local consequence, but for all that they met at this knotty situation the threads are often undone or left frayed. Unconventional methods do not always benefit from conventional documentaries, and it's unfortunate that a novel approach on the ground is met with a standard approach in the film.

As interesting as the subject is, given its length it had room for more context. Talking heads and archive footage, some personal interviews and the opportunity for those interviewed to see others contributions are all standard fare. I spent a while trying to recall where I'd seen the pattern of names in white with roles/subtitles in yellow beneath them, it's just on the edge of uniformity. This is not to fault the film technically, it's well constructed, but it seems stuck between the incident's local and wider impacts. It's the latter that means anyone's paying attention to the former, however unfair that might be. Despite the quality of its subject(s), Hold Your Fire isn't one to wait for.