Humanity Hallows Issue 5 Out Now
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By Christopher Witty

Image: towerdocumentary.com

There is a scene in Tower where Officer Martinez, aided by deputised civilian Allen Crum, mounts the stairs to the top of the clock tower at the University of Austin. On the wall is a map of the university campus. As they pass, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the ‘YOU ARE HERE’ marker on the map. As a viewer, you have been side-by-side with these two men intermittently throughout the film. For the past hour, the producers of the film have attempted to give the viewer some semblance of what it would feel like to be in a very real life-or-death situation. You are there. As the realisation of what is happening unfolds for the two men, you too are expected to share their fear and apprehension. It makes for very uneasy viewing.

As a documentary, Tower recounts the mass shooting perpetrated by Charles Whitman on 1st August 1966 in Austin, Texas, which claimed the lives of nineteen people, including Whitman’s wife and mother. By focusing on the victims, police officers and civilians who were present at the time, director Keith Maitland has paid tribute to those who endured the ordeal. The focus here is not on Whitman, nor is it a further critique/damnation of U.S. gun policy (that is for another film; Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine comes immediately to mind); rather, it is a meditation on the power of the human spirit and how ordinary people can rise up when faced with the most horrific situations. Coming fifty years after, it acts as a commemorative piece, allowing the survivors to reflect upon what happened. It also highlights how one person, for better or worse, can play a literally life-changing role in somebody’s life, before disappearing from that person’s life altogether.

As a cinematic experience, Tower is an innovative, daring and emotive film. Using rotoscopic animation (a superb job by the team at Minnow Mountain) to reconstruct the events, was a brave choice by Maitland, but it works surprisingly well. Oftentimes, the problem with docudramas is that the acted-out reconstructions can jar with the actual footage. Here, the animation is intercut with the archive material in such a way that it does not serve as a distraction, and, more importantly, allows the film-makers to use imagery that may have otherwise looked out of place and indulgent. Survivor Claire Wilson James’s account of how she and victim Thomas Eckman met, accompanied by some astonishing psychedelic visuals, is beautifully handled and makes the loss of Eckman, along with their unborn child (James was pregnant when she was shot) all the more heart-breaking. One particularly striking image is that of Rita Starpattern, who stayed with James until help arrived, lying on the concrete beside the body of Eckman. The shot is at ground level with all other background detail erased, forcing the viewer to endure the complete isolation and vulnerability which the survivors themselves would have experienced first-hand.

Spoken directly to camera, first-person accounts are delivered by actors whose ages match those of the survivors in 1966, giving the impression that the events are still recent, and not yet confined to memory. It is only later in the film that Maitland allows the viewer to see how they look now, reinforcing the idea that age can dilute the pain felt, but it is still very much there on a day-to-day basis.

The tone of the film is entirely current, in that it uses real time (Whitman kept the campus under siege for over ninety minutes), and the medium of television and radio, which was so important to how Americans witnessed events as they happened in the 1960s, is used to give actual reports from the day. Police officer Houston McCoy, commenting that he initially thought the shootings were being carried out by multiple snipers for the Black Panther Party, reflects the political climate of the 1960s. To imagine the gunman as a twenty-five-year-old, religiously devout, white male acting alone, would have been unthinkable, which only made the murders all the more shocking at the time.

As is often the case when tragedy befalls everyday people, strength and resolve is somehow found in the aftermath of the carnage. The last twenty minutes of the film could have been used to try and make sense of Whitman’s actions, but, as already stated, that is not the purpose of the film. With only a brief comment on the availability of firearms through news footage of the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech, Maitland avoids taking the usual route of judging society and the media. Instead, he maintains his initial objective to the end, allowing the survivors to tell their own stories with integrity, and in doing so, reinforcing the viewer’s belief in humanity.