Did You Know Who Fired Theg Un
Filmmaker Travis Wilkerson rips out the roots from his family tree as he investigates a racist murder committed by his swell-grandad.
Upon start glance, the title of Travis Wilkerson'southward "Did You lot Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" carries an air of mystery, as though the movie will start with a trunk and then piece of work its way through a vast conspiracy before identifying the killer. And — in a way — that's exactly what it does. But not in that order. First we place the killer: SE Co-operative, Wilkerson's great-grandfather, a virulent racist who murdered a blackness man in 1946 and got abroad with it scot-free. So nosotros take the victim: Pecker Spann, who had the misfortune of living in Alabama at a time when his life most certainly didn't matter to the people in accuse. Finally, we sift through the vast conspiracy that separated these two men, a vapid system of violence that left one of them live with his family, and the other dead in an unmarked grave, as Pecker Spann fertilizing the soil for the likes of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and the other black Americans who would later be buried beside him.
In that location's no mystery here. "Did You lot Wonder the Fire Gun?" isn't a whodunnit — information technology's a yeah-or-no question. The ultimate emphasis of this soul-searching self-investigation isn't on then, but on at present; not on the evidence that remains, but on the erasure of that which does not. The most pernicious grade of hatred is the kind that cleans upward after itself. "Trust me," Wilkerson says at the beginning of the moving picture, "this isn't another white savior story. This is a white nightmare story."
The dauntless, guilt-ridden work of a man who'southward confronting the fact that the skeletons in his family closet don't belong to any of his relatives, "Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" is ultimately a story that Wilkerson needed to tell. The problem is that Wilkerson is really just telling it to himself. While in that location's no uncertainty that his self-flagellation also doubles as an urgent condemnation of white America, or that information technology'due south all too piece of cake to connect Bill Spann's death to those of the black men and women whose names sporadically announced on the screen, the picture creates an awkward (and somewhat detestable) clash betwixt the banality of the evil it confronts, and the drama that information technology tries to wring from it.
First performed as a "live documentary" at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017, "Do You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" unfolds less like a traditional exposé and more like an illustrated podcast. The spine of the film is prepare along Wilkerson'south severe narration, which he delivers himself in a monotone growl that suggests an episode of "This American Life" as hosted by Vincent D'Onofrio's character from "Full Metal Jacket." In person, the triple-underlined gravitas of Wilkerson's voice may take been needed to sell the performative element of this piece; on screen, it has the perversely comedic effect of cocky-parody.
"Whiteness tin incinerate a family with a heat equal to a bomb," he confesses at one point. "Give information technology enough fourth dimension, and whiteness volition incinerate the world." He's not wrong. In fact, he'southward so evidently right that the weight of his words feels too heavy, as though he might readapt the Spann family unit's pain with his own. Information technology's similar staring into the uncanny valley of white guilt, the emotion and then real that yous tin't help but sense that it's forced. This issue could take been mitigated by a more plainspoken script, but the filmmaker understandably opts for another path, determined to reset the stakes of a sadism that's e'er been minimized.
"Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?"
On the other hand, Wilkerson'due south tone has a way of recasting his family history as a horror story, and the picture is about constructive when it seizes itself on a stir of echoes. There's something inherently haunted nearly home video footage, and Wilkerson — starting with some elusive 16mm snippets of his peachy-grandfather — manages to stretch that morbid feeling across the entire length of his moving-picture show. "Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" is darkened by the sense that Wilkerson is discovering something that he wasn't meant to see, and that palpable shiver is only strengthened past the movie's spartan visuals.
Well-nigh of the activeness is related to us against a static backdrop of still photographs that Wilkerson took on his trips dwelling to Alabama. Sometimes, the filmmaker cuts to a drawling, red-tinted shot of an empty highway, the epitome fabricated all the more ominous by the dull audio of a record skipping beneath it (it's a shame that Wilkerson breaks this bleak spell with a smattering of talking heads, all of whom distract from the film'south introspective drive). This simple effect is enough to transform the American Southward into a Lynchian dreamscape where all of the screaming has been paved over with silence. Nosotros hear about white men who used to dress up equally surgeons so that they could torture the most desperate blackness people they could find. "Take y'all ever been in a place where it feels similar something terrible just happened there?" Wilkerson asks. Of class you have.
"Did Yous Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" is at its sharpest and most necessary when Wilkerson interrogates his personal connexion to the by, extrapolating his reticence to explore his own family's fierce history into a national epidemic of people who are similarly reluctant to practice the same. It'southward painful to hear Wilkerson marvel at how the same hands that held him as a baby could have been responsible for hate crimes. Too, information technology's sobering to empathise how difficult it must accept been for him to ruffle upward his relatives, specially those who are currently involved in White Nationalist organizations — even in passing, the moving picture does a fine job of tracing how honey and hate tin co-exist within the same people.
And notwithstanding, seldom does Wilkerson's stolid self-inventory justify how he presents his search. His moving picture is stymied by the same erasure that information technology's attempting to expose, Wilkerson left to fill in the blanks with self-impressed tangents near Rosa Parks' early activism, and a hollow framing device that recasts Atticus Finch every bit the story that America wants to tell itself. The nobleness of his journeying is beyond reproach, and at that place's no incertitude that this process allowed him to ameliorate sympathise a history of violence that is ultimately beyond all understanding. Just "Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" loses its momentum by trying to wring suspense out of what should have been a rhetorical question.
Grade: B-
"Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" is now playing at Film Forum.
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Source: https://www.indiewire.com/2018/03/did-you-wonder-who-fired-the-gun-review-travis-wilkerson-1201933910/
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