A-Directed by Keith Maitland Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Modern media coverage guarantees that atrocities like mass shooting will now be covered for weeks, filling the public with dread and fear and morbid curiosity. The most recent (ugh) instance in Las Vegas shows no signs of abating two weeks later at the time of this review. In Keith Maitland’s meticulous reconstructing of the 1966 University of Texas clock tower shooting, the opposite was true. Despite the deaths of 16 people and the wounding of three times that number, there isn’t much sense given to a national rending of garments. The Austin campus was open for class the following day. Any national examination is concentrated in the detailed memories and lasting trauma of the survivors, the heroes, and the bystanders. Maitland’s Tower uses rotoscoping animation to capture the deadly drama, allowing the viewer to relive an incident widely credited with being the fulcrum on which the depressingly routine cycle of US mass shootings rests.
The historical precision in Maitland’s film is entirely due to etched-in-stone memories of the survivors. They include enough odd details to ring true, some fifty years later. A pregnant woman, shot and immobilized on concrete pavement under a scorching sun, recalls feeling like she was melting into the ground. An arriving officer remembers thinking this was the start of a racial revolution, possibly by the Black Panthers. Several react with anger and impotent rage, firing wildly up at the clock tower with their own personal firearms or ducking out of cover to point a middle finger up at the sniper. The most poignant recountings come from their regrets from the day. The pregnant woman, lying feet away from her boyfriend’s dead body, imagines what her life might have been like with him before she is finally rescued and carried away from his corpse. Those who acted heroically, instead of patting themselves on the back, wonder why they didn’t act sooner, while those who did nothing rue themselves being tested and found wanting.
From these accounts and reports from the era, Maitland journalistically constructs the moment-to-moment events of the UT shooting while also using the creative freedom of animation to add emotional punctuation. He breaks up the rotoscoping with actual footage and pictures. He syncs up the crack of the gunshot with the moment of impact by having the background briefly flash to red before reverting back to normal. These instances jarringly capture an instant where a life was snuffed out or irrevocably altered, but the rest of the world continues in spite of it. Maitland plays tricks on the viewer, where the animation and the use of voice actors lull the viewer into something closer to the experience of watching a fictional film. Both tools create a distance, but in a brilliant and shattering transition, he abruptly switches to the real, non-animated survivors in mid-sentence, reframing his film away from a harrowing recreation and into a very real purging of guilt and fear from people still plagued by the stresses of the day, leaving the viewer nowhere to hide in the face of persistent pain.
Tower is as potent as a documentary about a historical event can get, using cinematic techniques to make the UT shooting viscerally real and emotionally resonant. Watching these burly, good ol’ boy Texans tear up at their survivor’s guilt and grief counts as some of the most powerful filmmaking from 2016. Maitland somewhat intrusively includes a final commentary from Walter Cronkite in which he speculates about a coarsening of society, something that always gets said in one form or another after a mass shooting. It’s an unnecessary but relevant reminder that humanity is ever capable of both the violence doled out by the shooter and the common heroism and humility borne out of that violence. A-
From these accounts and reports from the era, Maitland journalistically constructs the moment-to-moment events of the UT shooting while also using the creative freedom of animation to add emotional punctuation. He breaks up the rotoscoping with actual footage and pictures. He syncs up the crack of the gunshot with the moment of impact by having the background briefly flash to red before reverting back to normal. These instances jarringly capture an instant where a life was snuffed out or irrevocably altered, but the rest of the world continues in spite of it. Maitland plays tricks on the viewer, where the animation and the use of voice actors lull the viewer into something closer to the experience of watching a fictional film. Both tools create a distance, but in a brilliant and shattering transition, he abruptly switches to the real, non-animated survivors in mid-sentence, reframing his film away from a harrowing recreation and into a very real purging of guilt and fear from people still plagued by the stresses of the day, leaving the viewer nowhere to hide in the face of persistent pain.
Tower is as potent as a documentary about a historical event can get, using cinematic techniques to make the UT shooting viscerally real and emotionally resonant. Watching these burly, good ol’ boy Texans tear up at their survivor’s guilt and grief counts as some of the most powerful filmmaking from 2016. Maitland somewhat intrusively includes a final commentary from Walter Cronkite in which he speculates about a coarsening of society, something that always gets said in one form or another after a mass shooting. It’s an unnecessary but relevant reminder that humanity is ever capable of both the violence doled out by the shooter and the common heroism and humility borne out of that violence. A-
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