Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Tower
2016 · Keith Maitland · Tower on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how low and close to the ground the camera stays. (staging)
Maitland shoots the campus from the horizontal vantage of people pinned down and crawling for cover, rarely tilting up toward the tower itself.
Payoff: You share the ground-level confusion of the witnesses instead of watching the tower like a landmark from a safe distance.
Listen for the radio broadcast running underneath the scenes. (sound)
Contemporaneous radio reporting from the day plays through the film as a live, present-tense voice, alongside gunfire that stays mostly off-screen and is conveyed through reaction and silence.
Payoff: The old broadcast collapses fifty years of distance, so the danger feels like it's happening now, not in an archive.
Notice the hand-painted, high-contrast color of the animated scenes. (light)
The animation renders 1966 Austin in a painterly register, heat-blanched pavement, controlled color, and faces built to read clearly even once abstracted from the actors who performed them.
Payoff: The style keeps you inside a real shooting without showing you the graphic violence of an ordinary reenactment.
Notice the film never lingers on or names the shooter. (structure)
Attention stays on witnesses, the wounded, and the people who ran out to help, while the gunman is scarcely shown and never explained.
Payoff: Your attention is being asked to stay with the people who acted, not the person who fired.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the people who run toward the gunfire to help strangers. The film is built around their choices.