civil unrest

One hot day in Brooklyn ends with a bin through a pizzeria window in Do the Right Thing. La Haine follows three friends around a Paris estate the day after a riot. Fruitvale Station spends its running time on the last day of a life. The crowd is never the whole story here. Somebody has to decide, alone, whether to stand in it.

The distinction that does the work is that this theme needs a collective. One person's grievance against a corrupt office is Institutional Corruption; economic grievance as a standing condition rather than an event is Class Warfare; two armies in a field is war. Civil unrest is the moment a population becomes a party to the conflict — and the reason so many of these films are built around a small group inside a large movement is that the crowd is the subject, and a person is the only available lens on it.