Sophia Michaels
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? Movie Review
Travis Wilkerson’s “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” is extra of a private exorcism than a conventional documentary. In truth, it premiered as a fair less-traditional movie expertise, taking part in at Sundance and different festivals as a dwell occasion, throughout which the filmmaker/narrator spoke in individual and exalted the viewers to even take part in the unearthing of racial demons. Now condensed right into a cinematic expertise and getting a restricted launch, it’s laborious to shake the concept that the “live documentary” strategy isn’t somewhat extra satisfying for this materials, however it’s inconceivable to disclaim the energy of a lot of what’s on show right here. Wilkerson seems to be at the racial discord and violence in the world round him and has the braveness to look at his personal legacy as an alternative of simply doing away with the idea as one thing that occurs to or is perpetrated by others. It’s price contemplating how significantly better off we’d all be if we did the similar.
Wilkerson opens by evaluating his story to that of certainly one of the most legendary literary characters of all time, Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Like Finch’s saga, this one could have against the law and a court docket case, however Wilkerson is fast to level out the consolation of fiction doesn’t typically occur in the actual world. Wilkerson’s family should not Atticus Finch—actually, nobody actually is—and certainly one of them was extra prone to be a member of the lynch mob than the upstanding citizen who stopped them. After the George Zimmerman verdict, Wilkerson decides its time to open the closet stuffed with skeletons in his household residence and study his personal racist lineage.
In 1946, S.E. Branch shot Bill Spann. That is historic file. Branch, Wilkerson’s great-grandfather, owned a small retailer in Dothan, Alabama, and Spann was in the retailer. What precisely Spann was doing turned an object of controversy, however the necessary factor to know is that Branch spent virtually no time in jail. 70 years in the past—not that lengthy if you consider it—a white retailer proprietor shot a black man in chilly blood and didn’t do any time. How did that occur? Wilkerson begins with this quite simple query, and, very refreshingly, permits the solutions to information his filmmaking. This isn’t any easy “murder mystery documentary.” At its greatest, it has a really natural move, permitting us to observe the threads of private and nationwide historical past with its creator. For instance, he runs right into a neighbor subsequent to the constructing that was his great-grandfather’s retailer and so he interviews her. He usually reveals us looping footage of Southern roads. We are on this journey with him.
Perhaps the most attention-grabbing facet of “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” can be one which I want Wilkerson explored a bit extra in-depth, and that’s the thought of the wounds left on components of this nation by racial violence, and the way there’s a ripple impact, each unfavourable and optimistic, to all of this. He presents pictures of locations in Dothan that merely appear to be they’ve historical past embedded in them and speaks of not with the ability to stroll in the former retailer with out feeling the ghosts beneath his toes. There are hundreds of locations like this in the nation, locations endlessly redefined by violence.
And then he takes this historical past of violence a step additional, visiting close by Abbeville, the place the rape of Recy Taylor happened, and noting how that incident impressed Rosa Parks to take the motion she did so a few years later. What will the occasions of immediately encourage us to do tomorrow? Wilkerson breaks his movie usually to current the names of murdered women and men, asking viewers to say their names, together with Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and extra. His movie isn’t as a lot of a name to motion as a name for reflection. Yes, we are able to march and protest, however we are going to get nowhere till we glance into our personal histories and say the names of the individuals we discover there.
There are occasions once I longed for the visceral, quick facet of seeing “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” in individual and it’s typically troublesome to translate these experiences that strategy efficiency artwork as a lot as movie into one thing that may play in theaters. In this case, Wilkerson acquired most of the method there, even when just a few of his bits of heated narration in all probability play higher dwell. Most of all, he’s made a movie that’s laborious to shake. There are tons of of films about the racial points that proceed to divide this nation, however few that really feel this private or this pleading.
