Tower

2016 "August 1, 1966, was the day our innocence was shattered."
7.9| 1h23m| en| More Info
Released: 13 March 2016 Released
Producted By: Go-Valley
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://www.towerdocumentary.com
Synopsis

Combining archival footage with rotoscopic animation, Tower reveals the action-packed untold stories of the witnesses, heroes and survivors of America’s first mass school shooting, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.

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Reviews

Protraph Lack of good storyline.
BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.
ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
morrismatalon This movie is one of the most unique documentaries ever made. You don't even need to be a fan of documentaries to enjoy this film. The concept and execution is very masterful. Basically, here was a shooting in Austin, Texas in 1966. There was a sniper at the top of a tower in the area around the University of Texas. It was a devastating event that killed 18 people, But since it was the sixties, there was no footage. So, they used actors to reshoot the events that happened in 1966. Then, they used a technique called rotoscoping to animate the events that happened in 1966. It's truly brilliant when you think about it. The pacing in this movie is some of the best of the year. The editing in this movie is stellar. If you are an editor, watch this. The only problems I have is that I was screaming in my head at some of the things the characters were doing, and there was a scene were there was no sound at all (except the talking). The weird part is that the music and sound mixing in the rest of the movie was all very good. Anyway, this was a very good movie. The premise is unique, the execution is great, it is good on a technical aspect, and it is very intense and sad emotionally. In all, it is great and definitely recommend it to everyone.
jc-osms This unusual film demonstrated an innovative way to fill in the gaps of a major news event where there are still survivors alive to share their memories but where there's a lack of available archive footage to fully tell the story. The event here was as I understand it, the first, but as we now know, far from last occasion when a warped individual exercised their constitutional right to bear arms by massacring innocent civilians in cold blood. On this occasion, ex-Marine Charles Whitman killed his mother and pregnant wife before taking to the tower at Texas University to rain down murder and mayhem onto whoever came into his eye-line.I can recall the excellent debut feature of Peter Bogdanovich "Targets" made in 1968 which made this then very recent story its backdrop, albeit with different names for the principal characters. The ambition of this feature however was to take us through the actual 96 minutes of the onslaught almost in real time by recreating the memories of the survivors, some since deceased, in vivid animation sequences. I doubt it's coincidence that the film's running time is the selfsame 96 minutes. Actors resembling the real life characters play the latter's younger selves in both telling the story as it occurred in pieces-to-camera as well as in physical recreations of the events of the day as it unfolded. There is no third party commentary at all and at the end we get to see the witnesses in the present day, to give the film, as well as themselves perhaps, a sense of closure.The animation takes a little getting used to initially but is skilfully done in a near-lifelike manner which gradually draws the viewer into the action. Again I applaud the modern trend of giving next to nothing by way of background or motive and therefore importance far less justification to the perpetrator of these awful killings. Instead the focus is, as it should be, on the remarkable courage of everyday individuals, from the young cop who goes to the crime scene even when off-duty, the shopkeeper who ends up on the tower with the policeman, rifle-in-hand, to the young students who run in full view of the shooter, one young girl to comfort a wounded pregnant young woman, lying prone next to her fatally shot boyfriend and a couple of boys who actually lift her out of harm's way.One wonders if the filmmakers here will go on to use a similar technique on other in-living-memory calamitous events but one suspects it will more likely prove a one-off exercise. I do believe though that the director's primary motivation was to re-tell a remarkable, if tragic, story rather than demonstrate flashy technique. If occasionally there are mistakes in the pacing as sequences are unnecessarily run and re-run for no apparent reason and also no real political point is made about gun-control itself, still the narrative is compelling as only a true-life disaster can be.
Movie_Muse_Reviews At the onset, it might seem insensitive to tell the story of a deadly mass shooting using rotoscope animation, but after you settle into the style of filmmaker Keith Maitland's "Tower," you realize how useful (and even powerful) a tool animation can be to tell a story that largely exists in fragments of witnesses' memories.Maitland pieces together the horrifying 90 minutes on a sweltering summer day — August 1, 1966 — when a lone sniper essentially took the University of Texas at Austin campus hostage from the top of the campus clocktower, killing 16 people and wounding more than 40. With only testimonials and scarce video, audio, photos and news media coverage of the event at his disposal, Maitland mostly turns to animation to fill the gaps and relate what actually happened as completely as possible. The finished product is as close to a moment by moment account of the shooting — from the perspective of those who lived through it and were closest to the action — as possible.Most filmmakers would shy away from a subject like this. There's not much to work with, it could feel too exploitative of people's trauma and live action reenactments of what happened would come across as inauthentic if not comical. But the rotoscoping effect, and Maitland's choice to animate his subjects as they looked in 1966, casting actors to play them in animated reenactments and to read their testimonials with younger voices, addresses all these concerns. It's as if Maitland dips part of the documentary in fiction just so that it can all come together more cohesively. Instead of cutting frequently between the real and the reenacted, he blends to the two.This also turns "Tower" into a captivating, pulse-pounding retelling of events, almost as if it were a feature film. For those unfamiliar with story, it's all the more engrossing, and kind of jaw-dropping when you consider that it all actually happened. Adults young and old today have no shortage of mass shootings to draw from in their minds, but few lasted 90 terrifying minutes like the UT-Austin tower shooting. That makes it all the more important to create the vivid account we get in "Tower." What the witnesses and survivors experienced doesn't deserve to be reduced. As has been the case with most media accounts of mass shootings, the focus always turns first to the shooter — who could be so evil and/or disturbed to take human lives this way? This was especially the case in this shooting; the attention was turned to the perpetrator and not the victims (and heroes) by magazines and broadcast media, some of which we see in the film. "Tower" almost entirely ignores who Charles Witman was and instead gives the narrative of events back to these victims and heroes. Maitland wants to honor their experiences and dig deeper into how they remember and process trauma instead of heaping attention on the selfish individual responsible for it all.Again, it might seem like rotoscoping would work counter to this objective by obscuring the film's subjects in portraying them as "cartoons" with professional actors' voices, yet Maitland navigates that creatively as well and shows us that authenticity doesn't only come from the way someone looks or sounds, but that their "voice" is their story. The rotoscoping actually forces us to focus on their story and only their story. It allows us to live in those moments, rather than the person's recollection of those moments."Tower" stands out as a piece of creative, resourceful documentary filmmaking, one that allows the director to tell a complete story from disjointed pieces, and an absolutely gripping story at that. You might argue that this method and style allows Maitland to exert a bit too much of his own influence over the film, but his creative license largely comes in the form of accents that honor rather than exaggerate the stories of his subjects. Regardless, "Tower" raises the bar for how documentary stories can be told.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more
Lilcount WARNING! Major spoilers ahead.In 1968, Peter Bogdanovich based his film "Targets" on the mass shooting at the University of Texas-Austin on August 1, 1966. Bogdanovich focused on the shooter. Now, nearly half a century later, director Keith Maitland looks at the incident from the viewpoint of the victims in "Tower."After the MOMA screening on Nov. 26, 2016, the director answered questions about his film. The main purpose of this review is to preserve some of his responses.A big question was why "Clair de Lune" was the background music to the shooting of the sniper, Charles Whitman, by Austin police officer Ray Martinez. Maitland told the audience that a few weeks before the shootings, Whitman, a student at UT-Austin, had paid a late night visit to one of his professors. Whitman was clearly agitated. He said he was depressed, he had many issues in his personal life, and he needed an extension of time for his term project. Suddenly, the professor said, Whitman noticed the professor's piano and asked if he could play it. The professor agreed, and Whitman proceeded to play, according to the professor, "the most beautiful rendition of Clair de Lune he had ever heard." When Whitman was finished, all the anger had drained from him. As he left, Whitman said, "That's what I needed."Maitland explained that by using the piece just before Whitman's death, it was his way of acknowledging the humanity of the shooter. As his life ended, he was finally at peace.Of the eight people whose stories are told in this film, the most prominent is Claire Wilson, the first person shot, who lay next to her dead fiancé on concrete in 100 degree weather for nearly an hour before a couple of brave souls carried her to safety. Wilson, who also lost her unborn son, said at the end of the film that she had forgiven Whitman. The only depiction of the shooter in the entire film is a photograph of him as a child in a magazine article. Whitman is seen at age 3 standing between two rifles.Claire Wilson became a schoolteacher for thirty years and an adoptive mother. A lifelong activist, she dropped out of school at age 13 to volunteer to register voters in the deep South. She had received special dispensation to attend UT-Austin without a high school diploma.The film itself is superb. The rotoscopy is first rate, and the actors who play the subjects for most of the film are uniformly excellent. Highly recommended.