Tower

                

Keith Maitland's Tower is a very good documentary that chronicles the infamous 1966 shooting when Charles Whitman unleashed rifle fire from a tall tower on the University of Texas campus. As on his previous feature, Maitland utilizes animated footage to augment a polyphonic portrait of the survivors. Similar to Richard Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Maitland films actors and then animates the results, tweaking them to suggest the subjective state of those going through the ordeal.

Maitland interweaves this with archival footage, mostly from television broadcasts. This is a bold artistic gamble that pays off. A sixties romantic montage overdoes it a bit with the flower power imagery, but, on the whole, Maitland is a servant of the story. By largely ignoring Whitman's story, Maitland avoids morbidity. When we eventually see the actual aged faces of the survivors, it is with a jolt of bittersweet pleasure because we recognize a shared humanity that passes with and throughout time. (4/10/17)