On August 1, 1966, terror struck the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. A lone gunman occupied the top of University Tower and for 96-minutes, on a scorching, sun-poisoned summer day, rained bullets down upon unknowing bystanders. It was an unprecedented event: the first mass school shooting in American history. Fourteen people died. Thirty-two were wounded. It’s fifty years later and only a small plaque hangs on UT-Austin’s campus in memory of day’s tragedy. Director Keith Maitland’s powerful new film Tower makes its case as a better commemoration.
This documentary is so sprawling in approach that it feels impossible to describe. It’s a recreation from memory, using animated, rotoscoped actors as stand-ins. It’s a painstaking period piece with a strong sense of place. It’s a historical document of archival footage. It’s a collection of memory-comprised interviews from victims and witnesses. It’s even a taut action-thriller. Yet all these layers are successfully drawn together to craft a unified tapestry. It’s a single vision that gives heed to a better story.
To bring focus on the victims and to draw attention away from the tower (even as everyone in the film has it always in mind and sight), Maitland doesn’t allow the shooter to dictate where Tower goes. We witness people being shot, but we also hear the stories of what they were doing that day, what their dreams were, who they loved. The importance of witnessing the victims as people and not casualties is the burden of this film. Tower is an effort to reverse norms. We are made ever-aware that these victims were people; they were students, mothers, boyfriends, classmates, children, teachers. These filmmakers craft a fully-immersive mixed-form experience that gives the audience the opportunity to live in these moments with them.
One famous image from that infamous day is of a pregnant woman laid out in the concrete courtyard directly below the tower. Claire was one of the first shot along with her boyfriend Tom, who died immediately. Maitland doesn’t exploit the image of her lying helpless as everyone looks on fearfully, wanting to rescue her but afraid to risk their own life. Instead, he is able to take the camera to her, and she tells us her own story. She relives how she and Tom fell in love that year. The memory invokes a pure and joyful digression down memory lane scored by a wistful 60s pop song, overlaid with psychedelic animation. It drowns out the shooter. And thankfully, Maitland doesn’t weigh the memory with doom; he lets it live.
This is where the film’s layered approach reveals its ingenuity. If the archival image of Claire, i.e. the pregnant woman, had been her only representation, she’d remain just a body struck by a bullet. Using it in a documentary like this would’ve been almost exploitative because doing so would have overlooked her story and seen only her fallen body. Maitland fills that body with Claire’s own words and films her stand-in from closer angles. The animation literally animates the stillness of the archival footage. Tower brings life to that which death tried to claim.
The film’s unique approach to animation adds to it layers of memory. This filmic recreation is meant to bring catharsis by titillating the same primary human functions which force the mind to wonder about the psychology of the shooter. Maitland and his animation team capture the audience’s attention with an old technique known as rotoscoping. It’s hardly commonplace anymore. (Though, it is actually favored by another Austin-based filmmaker, Richard Linklater.) Without getting too technical, this method of animation is basically a tracing over of filmed footage of real actors in real settings. It captures the shapes, movements, and essence of the things themselves precisely yet with an imperfect fluidity. When the rotoscoped images are edited together, they keep their form yet seem to reverberate. Outlines constantly shift in small degrees. Movements are discernible yet tease the eye. It’s all very much like history and memory. Things always shift and change. By nature, reenactments possess an awareness in the audience that creates a distance. It’s difficult for these stagings to be as emotionally engaging as the real thing. Rotoscope imbues the reenactment with some of the immediacy of the real thing.
As Tower follows the different lives and stories of that day, threads are uncoiled and bound. As the film goes on, the artifice yields to the real. We begin to see real faces, older and wizened. They are the victims shed of their past, animated self. The film and its process takes on a more significant purpose. The tragedy was evidently not oft-spoken of in Austin. No one knew how to deal with it. Tower is an emotional catharsis for a whole city just now coming to grips with its history.
With each subsequent mass shooting on American soil the media and its public are increasingly infatuated with the predator’s narrative. We want to know what made him do it. We want the grisly psychological details. What is the DNA of such evil? We want to walk the crime scene and see chalk outlines. We want a peek into the morgue, to see the forensic work. We are infatuated with this darkness. To that, Tower is not just a wake-up call; it’s an emotional force of will that compels its audience to witness the victims, to see their faces, to hear their words.
The University of Texas in Austin will finally unveil a more appropriate on-campus memorial on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, yet that doesn’t take away from the gift that Tower is. It’s more than a memorial or commemoration. It’s not meant for the walls of buildings or the centers of courtyards. This is a living, breathing document that elevates the better story by letting the right people tell it.