Tonight I watched a documentary called "Tower" (2016) that I found at the Chatsworth Libe. The topic was grim, it was about the terrible sniper shootings at the University Of Texas in August 1966. The title of the movie refers to the clock tower on the Austin campus, from where the shooter Charles Whitman took his perch. He killed 17 people during his rampage and wounded over thirty more. The documentary was made in 2016 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. Filmmaker Keith Maitland uses Rotoscope animation to portray the experiences of several students, police officers and others who were on or near the campus that day, several of whom were shot.
The movie begins with a recreation of the day's events as told by a half dozen or so of the main characters, who are shown in their 1966 youth via Rotoscoped actors. This technique is very effective in building empathy for the victims, as the animation brings out their fragility in such a terrible situation. Maitland uses the repeating sound of the endless rifle shots to bring home the relentlessness of the terror. The shooting went on for over an hour and a half and marked the most deadly and infamous American mass murder at that time, when these kinds of things happened once a decade, if that. Near the end of the film, this point is brought home by the use of news footage from the exponentially more frequent shootings in the modern era.
I was initially unsure if I was gonna watch this film, because I thought it might be all animation, and I already knew the story of Whitman and the Texas Tower, and I didn't see how this documentary was going to add to it. But I checked the IMDB score, which was an 8, and that convinced me to give it a chance. And as it turned out, Maitland uses the animation to build the story and also to soften it, because it is easier to watch a cartoon human being get shot than to see the real thing. But then he begins to mix in actual news footage from that day. Suddenly you are seeing the victims lying there on the campus quad, filmed as it happened.. Heroes are shown coming to the rescue of a pregnant woman who is the main focus of the story. This is first shown in Rotoscope, but later in the film we see it in real life.
We see the conclusion of the sniper attack, as two officers and a civilian ascend the staircase inside the Tower, heading up to the observation deck. At the one hour mark, the ordeal is over, but we still have twenty minutes to go, and it is here that director Maitland pulls out all the stops by slowly switching from Rotoscope, and the victims in their 1966 youth played by actors, to showing the actual people in the current year, 2016, on camera and telling the rest of their individual stories, i.e how their experiences on campus that day affected the rest of their lives.
"Tower" had quite an effect on me and not only do I give it my highest possible recommendation, but I am calling it a Must-See. I have never been shot at, thank God, but as a victim of a highly traumatic set of experiences, I was near tears watching and listening to the real people describe the aftereffects that have followed them ever since that day on the UT campus. I needed a Kleenex, to be honest, and you may need at least one yourself as you watch. This is a documentary not only of the tower event, but of the compassion that joined together the community, in the idealistic days of the mid-60s, when the horror of a sniper was an aberration to be overcome, rather than a routine occurrence to be looked the other way at.
Please watch "Tower". Thanks. ////
I am writing from home and will be doing so until next Tuesday. I finally made it up to Aliso this evening after I got off work. The place was as green as I've ever seen it, the water was still bubbling in the creek even weeks after the last rain, and it felt great to be back on the trail. My first hike in a month! (this can never be allowed to happen again, lol).
When I got home I began work on a new drawing which I will refer to as "The Tunnel". Like my recently completed drawing, entitled "The Manhole", this one also has to do with 1989. I am getting a little better at drawing perspective, and overall the drawings - made with Prismacolor pencils - are turning out quite well. Grimsley saw the completed ones and said, "Now you have illustrations for your book"!
I was drawing tonight while listening to Disc One of a ten CD set of Tchaikovsky Complete Solo Piano Music, as played by Valentina Lisitsa. I mentioned during the Favorite Composer blogs that I needed to check out Tchaikovsky's piano music, and now I am doing so.
See you in the morning, with much love in between. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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