by Owen A. Gottlieb

Editor's Note: Inside Voices will premiere on the Showtime Network on April 29, the fifth anniversary of the 1992 L.A. riots.

A car engulfed in yellow and orange flames slowly rolls across the street in daylight. At night, the city is lit by fires. And when the dawn finally comes, only the husks of buildings remain. These are among the images that open South Central Los Angeles: Inside Voices, a film directed and produced by Maxi Cohen and co-produced by Wendy Apple.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1992 riots, while the city was being rebuilt, Cohen felt that if she and the world outside of South Central were to understand the deeper causes of the riots, then the voices of those who lived in South Central would have to be heard. So, funded in part by French and German television, Cohen and Apple located a handful of videographers and gave them Hi-8 cameras, a small stipend, and a mentor from their respective ethnic communities.

Cohen located videographers during her visits to South Central and through inquiries at the USC Visual Anthropology Department and Jefferson High School's Humanities program. Once the project began, Cohen stepped back a bit. "My job as director was to basically facilitate people to be brave and to be intimate - to find the heart of their story and to try to help them to develop a voice. Everyone kept a video diary and I interviewed all the videographers periodically."

Cohen uses portions of the video diaries to introduce each section of the videographers' work. For editing each of the sections of the video, Cohen assigned a professional editor to work with each videographer. "The idea was that each videographer would sit there with the editor, screen all the material, discuss it with the editor, look at cuts and give feedback, and come up with a piece which they felt represented their point of view."

Cohen began her television career by producing and directing a weekly TV series in Cape May, New Jersey. "I owe a lot to George Stoney at NYU, who came out of Television for Social Change in Canada," Cohen says. "I was part of that guerrilla television movement that was very concerned about how to give a voice to those who are underrepresented in the spectrum of voices and how to make TV active and participatory as opposed to passive." The desire to create participatory television continues in Cohen's new project which she clearly hopes will change both the lives of the videographers and of viewers.

The stories in the project range across topics and communities. Andre Rainey's portrait of Tony Bogard in The Peace Is Coming tells of a man who made $15,000 a day running a drug operation until one day, while recovering from gunshot wounds in the hospital, he makes a pact with God. Bogard left the drug trade to found and run the non-profit Hands Across Watts, an organization to create and promote a gang truce; Lea Edwards' You Got No Business Being in a Gang presents Yaffette, a young high school gangbanger who leaves a Hands Across Watts meeting to join in a rumble; Francisco Leon presents In Search of the American Dream, the stories of Latino street vendors who come under attack on the street; Jesse Lerner's Clever About the Law is an up-close look at time on the street with Clever, a Chicano drug dealer and gang member; Diana Lee presents two stories of life in Koreatown. Wrong Place, Wrong Time is about a husband and wife whose store was burned in the riots, and who were subsequently accused of starting the fire. In Where Were the Police? Lee presents the Korean Young Adult Team, a group of vigilantes who protected Koreatown when the police stayed away; Jennifer Rhodes' Out of the System explores the videographer's life as a Caucasian rent collector in South Central; and Maxi Cohen and Jennifer Rhodes interview Frank Dipaola, a highly regarded Los Angeles police officer, and the only one willing to speak to the filmmaker.

Dipaola's point of view, placed in the context of multiple points of view, lends great insight into the complexity of violence, race, and ethnic issues in South Central. Dipaola is frustrated and trying to get out of L.A. and yet he works weekends to rehabilitate juvenile criminals in a graffiti paint-out program. Frank talks about "us and them" and about "habilitating" people; teaching that in order to make it they have to learn how to build up their community instead of breaking it down. And yet as Andre's piece points out, popular incentives do not seem to work this way. It took Tony Bogard a moment of divine inspiration to turn away from destroying his community for $15,000 a day, and Tony knowingly discusses the need to bring businesses into South Central.

Perhaps the most stunning of the stories, however, is Rubin Green's self portrait in I'm Telling You the Truth which documents Rubin's trip from South Central, where he lives in a welfare hotel with his brother and drug addicted mother, to meet Tipper Gore at the National Summit on Children and Family in Washington D.C.

Inside Voices raises questions of representation in documentary film and video both through the form that Cohen adopts, as well as reflexively on screen. We see the videographers learning how to shoot and discussing how the camera's presence effects the events that will take place in front of them. The self consciousness of the project's form heightens our awareness of the questions surrounding representation and ethnography. Can this project represent life in South Central? What are the stories that are not included or discovered? Cohen maintains that the stories all come from the personal perspectives of the videographers. "All Koreans aren't like this, all Latinos aren't like this, all African Americans aren't like this, and all police aren't like this. It's a multidimensional, complex issue, and that's what we have to be sensitive to."

Cohen is also aware that the project will not fit everyone's perception of what is accurate or permissible: "This raised a very difficult issue for me - how do you do what is your responsibility in editing and what do you take out? You don't want a film that's going to promote racism, obviously. And I know that even the most inspiring story - Rubin's - causes difficulty. Someone attacked me for letting Rubin say his mother is lazy. Now from where I come from the fact that Rubin could identify his drug-addicted mother who he kept trying to save as 'lazy' give him the objectivity to deal with his life. And I've been attacked by African Americans for allowing that to be there. But that's something Rubin wanted there. So everyone's perception of what is correct and comfortable is different."

Because it was important to Cohen to maintain the integrity of the videographers' visions, she scrapped an earlier editing scheme in which the various stories were inter-cut throughout the film. As Inside Voices draws to a close, however, Cohen does intercut the conclusions of the stories, pointing out contrasts and connections. In the end there is a sense of honesty that runs through all the stories, such as when Frank Dipaola talks about needing to leave the neighborhood or when Clever, in a quiet moment, confides about a time he was beaten by police and left in an alley, saying "If I had a penny for every time the cops kicked my ass, I'd have a whole dollar." Inside Voices is also full of arresting moments, from young children displaying their bullet wounds to Rubin in Washington D.C. And, whatever philosophical dilemmas the makers may have faced, everyone involved with the project acquired new technical skills while hashing out some of the city's most difficult problems.

Owen A. Gottlieb is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Gottlieb has screened his film, Cutters, at Slamdance and Sinking Creek.