Diving Deep: A conversation with Bill Morrison

The latest film by experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison (Chicago, 1965, 23 minutes) uses security cameras, police body cameras and POD to reconstruct the tragedy of the killing of Harith Augustus, an innocent barber who was shot and killed by a police officer in Chicago in summer 2018, once more pointing to racism in US law enforcement.

 The film won the Best Short Film at UnArchive Found Footage Fest in Rome, for its powerful political and artistic statement and the exploration of the new possibilities of surveillance cameras and digital video archive.

Here is Universal Cinema’s conversation with Bill Morrison about the film.

Bianca Montanaro, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Bill, what led you to rebuild this tragedy through the use of police cameras and surveillance cameras?

‌Bill Morrison (BM): The killing of Augustus was well documented by a friend of mine, Jamie Calven. He has a research laboratory (The Invisible Institute) and had written a series of essays about police brutality and sent out a report about this case last summer, and in that there were links to the footage that he was referring to, so by following that and then following further material by COPO (the Chicago agency that oversees police activity), I had hours and hours of footage, an archive to work with. So, I could see how it could tell a story concurrently.

Jamie and I often discussed how maybe a narrative screenplay could be constructed in the style of Rashomon, where there is a different point of view for every different camera…and in watching this footage I felt that you couldn’t do better than this. It showed the frailty of the police, the fallibility, the Greek chorus of the community, the eye in the sky (POD, the police observation device) which is the establishing shot, and then there is stuff happening on the street in HD. There are sort of different angles telling different sides of the story, and you need the different angles to get the whole story.

(UM): The schizophrenic eyes of different cameras do build a Greek tragedy. where do you think it comes from?

(BM): There’s an utter lack of communication between everyone: the police stops him, scares him, and then from then on nobody can connect on anything: the police, the community, the victim, there is no passing of information and the presence of the camera makes the police clam up. It’s a remarkable 30 minutes of lack of communication.

(UM): Let’s talk about the editing. You use surveillance cameras, so probably the most detached way of filming, but you use it in an emotional way, creating a poetic language. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

(BM): First of all the Invisible Institute had collaborated with forensic architecture to create six different essays videos which they showed in galleries and were available online and it sort of contextualizes what the meaning of this shooting was, so knowing that that had already been done, I saw how the different type of cameras could tell the stories in different ways and I could follow some rules. One of the rules that I decided to follow was that the corpse should be visible, the victim should be visible and that that would somehow belie the vain excuses that the police were making. On one side of the screen you see the body of Augustus and on the other you can see the police comforting the officer who shot and hear their dialogues, and on top of that there was the outrage of the community that once again, they had lost one of theirs.

(UM): Filmmakers are using digital archives to draw attention to many aspects of society. Do you think that the digital age can pave a way for a new technological historiography?

(BM): I would like to say yes. Because what you’re describing is the utopian idea that we can somehow reach the truth of what happened. But it is AI, and the more we put our faith in these images to tell us the truth and the more the same lie can be given, the same credence by manipulation, so I think the more we film the less we know in fact. We’re quickly entering an age where we get little pieces of information that can be constructed or made into a new truth that didn’t actually happen. Perhaps we don’t even have the means to understand what the implications are yet.  But yes, I do feel like this moment where we can hold onto cinema or surveillance videography has some sort of truth that may be slipping through our hands just as it becomes available.

(UM): Your whole poetry of cinema has so far laid on film rolls, but now you’ve used a digital archive. Can we expect a change of your language in the future?

(BM): We’ll have to see! When I find something that I think is compelling, I dive into it pretty deeply: all my favorite films were ones where I could barely sleep, and this was one of them. It really grabbed me. The same things happened with Dawson City, the same happened with Decasia. And so I won’t limit myself.

(UM): What do you think the effect of this film on society could be?

(BM): Everyone wants to know if this film could bring justice to the officer. I’m not sure it can, but it could be a learning tool. This tragedy could have been avoided and it should have been avoided, it shouldn’t have happened…

All the officers who were charged were told that they didn’t turn their body camera on in time. I think that if we have to use this devices as a sort of indicator of what happened, this camera should be on all the time, they should be uploading, it shouldn’t be up to some officers to push a button “Now we’re shooting”, or “Now it’s off and we can talk”. Otherwise it’s an editing, while they should be continuously streaming. So that’s a takeaway from the film: if we really believe in these cameras as something that can either exonerate the police or hold them responsible for their actions, they have to be able to tell all the sides of the story.

(UM): Why did you call the film Incident?

(BM): It’s a police story in Chicago but it didn’t make national news, nobody outside Chicago heard this story. So it was also a way to say how this kind of things can happen and then they can disappear…It could happen and then very quickly, the time that it takes for you to watch this short film, the kid’s swept up, put into an ambulance and carried away, and the street is clean again and it’s like it never happened. The dryness of the title is part of the outrage.

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