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<\/h2>\nPowerfully Retold 50 Years Later: The Story of the UT Campus Shooter Charles Whitman<\/h2>\n
Texas is famous for its love affair with guns. Elected officials in the Lone Star State can\u2019t move quickly enough, it seems, to equip everyone who is not a toddler or a recognized mass murderer with firearms.<\/p>\n
Enter the new Texas-centered documentary Tower.<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n By the time the gunman, Charles Whitman, a former marine sharpshooter turned architectural engineering student \u2014 \u00a0with an arsenal, including a 6 mm Remington rifle with a telescopic sight, an M1 semi-automatic carbine, and several handguns \u2014 was finally killed, the toll was 16 dead and three dozen wounded. The siege traumatized the nation \u2014 back before this kind of pointless carnage became so common.<\/p>\n I saw Tower<\/em>, appropriately, in Austin \u2014 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 \u2014 ironically, perhaps the place where one might normally feel the least threatened by firearms.<\/p>\n The film, which won SXSW\u2019s 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 \u201crotoscopic\u201d animation.<\/p>\n This kind of thing has perhaps never been done before \u2014 at least I have never seen a film rendered quite this way \u2014 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.<\/p>\n