Although the first paragraph of this article is a dead giveaway it was written by some spineless no-nuts liberal, please disregard that and continue on…this is actually a pretty good article; And Don’t Forget to watch the clip of the documentary. -SF
Powerfully Retold 50 Years Later: The Story of the UT Campus Shooter Charles Whitman
Texas is famous for its love affair with guns. Elected officials in the Lone Star State can’t move quickly enough, it seems, to equip everyone who is not a toddler or a recognized mass murderer with firearms.
Enter the new Texas-centered documentary Tower.
It’s a spell-binding recreation of an extraordinary event: that day in 1966 when someone ascended to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin, and began firing a rifle at anything and everything. The siege continued for an astonishing 96 minutes. It was the first campus mass shooting.
By the time the gunman, Charles Whitman, a former marine sharpshooter turned architectural engineering student — with an arsenal, including a 6 mm Remington rifle with a telescopic sight, an M1 semi-automatic carbine, and several handguns — was finally killed, the toll was 16 dead and three dozen wounded. The siege traumatized the nation — back before this kind of pointless carnage became so common.
I saw Tower, appropriately, in Austin — during the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival. It was interesting to see it in the state capitol, and one of the most liberal, tolerant places in Texas — ironically, perhaps the place where one might normally feel the least threatened by firearms.
The film, which won SXSW’s audience award for Feature Documentary, itself is a feat of innovation. It is a dramatic reconstruction, a mix of archival footage, voice-overs from present-day interviews with the survivors and “rotoscopic” animation.
This kind of thing has perhaps never been done before — at least I have never seen a film rendered quite this way — and both the story and the technique are riveting. It moves relentlessly from the first shot until the gunman is subdued, then continues into interviews and recollections, bringing us up to date with some of those whose lives intersected on that extraordinary day.
Read the Remainder and Watch a Short Clip of the Documentary at Who What Why
Reblogged this on The way I see things … and commented:
“This coming August 1st is a kind of double whammy: it’s the 50th anniversary of the Tower bloodbath, for which the university, very belatedly, will be unveiling a monument.
Amazingly, that is also the day a Texas law goes into effect allowing licensed individuals to carry concealed weapons on campuses. As many as 500 UT students are expected to be able to attend classes, packing heat.”