At the beginning of my review of The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, I wrote: “It is hard to overstate how important Bill Morrison’s work is to the language and history of cinema.” That was nearly four years ago, and those words remain as true as they ever were, if not moreso. Morrison, whose work we’ve championed before on The Film Stage, received his first Academy Award nomination just last month for his essential short film Incident. We sat with him for a good thirty minutes and spoke about the nomination, the film, the inception of the project, the structure of it as a whole, and “how we grasp memory over time as a series of images.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the complete interview below.
The Film Stage: How has it been?
Bill Morrison: Wow, it’s been crazy. It’s a really crazy time. And as you know, I make pretty esoteric films, and once every six or seven years somebody asks me a few questions about it, but this has been an onslaught unlike I’ve ever experienced before.
How did you find out about the Oscar nomination?
Oh, you know––they tell you when they’re going to announce.
Were you watching?
I was watching. I got up early. It’s 5:30 L.A. time and I was in Chicago with my mom. And we were holding hands, and when they said the name of my film we squeezed hands. My sister Ellen was there. It happens pretty quick, so it took everybody a second to register. It’s a rather morbid and serious story, so there wasn’t a lot of jumping up and down. But for my part, I was quite relieved because there was a lot riding on it at this point.
Every year, and especially with the L.A. fires and everything going on, there’s a discussion of “what is the point of the Oscars?” Incident is a great example of exactly why: it provides this platform in which so many more people will seek your movie out.
I mean, look: we can’t get the news from the news sources anymore, so it’s going to be incumbent on the artists and journalists to try and get a story out.
We talked about Dawson City: Frozen Time, which came out in 2016, right? And it didn’t make the Oscar shortlist?
No, I think I was a little naive about what it would take. It did qualify, of course. It played theatrically, but I didn’t mount a campaign. The distributor didn’t mount a campaign. It certainly was loved by a few prominent critics. I’m not sure it would have captured the imagination of the entire documentary branch. It didn’t have a strong social issue, which seems to be…
In vogue right now.
Yeah. Interestingly, the Academy really rewards craft up and down the line. And when you get to documentary, it seems to be more issue-driven.
You’re playing with form in such an interesting way, even with Incident. It’s so great it got nominated, but even, I just rewatched it––it’s thirty minutes for those reading and available on the New Yorker. It’s been watched by many, hopefully will be watched by many more. Just for those reading, what is it capturing?
It’s a film comprised entirely of source material from police surveillance and private closed-circuit TV. So it’s all surveillance-camera footage. There’s no talking heads or narrator or music. And with that, we’re able to show that there was a police murder and a dishonest alibi. It was claimed to be a murder in defense, but the officer in question lies about the fact: he says that this guy pulled a gun on him and that he killed him in self-defense, and the footage clearly shows that not to be the case, and that even the officer knows it’s not the case. The film really is about the unspooling of this narrative that comes from sort of a sputtering lie and then it coalesces into an official police narrative of what happened, and the judgment reflects that. So it’s sort of a fascinating look into what is really publicly available footage.
I’d say the police, the city of Chicago, tried their best to spin it in a certain way and say, “There’s nothing to look at here, and let’s put it back in this huge trove of available oversight images and not look at it.” And it’s really the work of my collaborator and the film’s producer, Jamie Kalven, who said, “Well, maybe there’s more to see here.” And he’s done that in previous cases, and in this case succeeded in unearthing the mother lode of footage. I don’t think any police force anywhere has made public the amount of footage of a police killing that was available to us here. And from that I crafted this film.
Officer Dillan Halley is the one who shot “Snoop” Augustus and he misstates what happens immediately after and he catches himself doing it, stops, but never corrects it. Then in that four-minute rush you see the reaction of his partner, the female officer (PPO Megan Fleming), everyone around him, the public realizing very quickly what’s happened. That is a rush. You are going full Mike Figgis, Timecode, four screens. It’s challenging. As you are putting it together, you are getting a lot of angles. What were the conversations about how much information you are giving to the audience and what you are showing?
First of all, the conversations are all conversations I have with myself, right?
Yeah, you’re alone. You’re just talking to yourself. [Laughs]
I’m alone. I’m always alone. The real challenge was when I had to come up with a closed caption, where I’m not speaking. You can’t have two captions at once that occupy the same space. That certainly was challenging. I do press how much a viewer can take in. And many people have said to me, “I need to see this again” or “I’ve needed to see this again just to understand what’s happening.” But there is a way that we’re playing with this chaos, as you mentioned––especially those minutes where we go from two and then to four frames, the viewer is kind of plunged into this overstimulation and I think that that mimics, in some ways, the panic that the officer is feeling and that the community is feeling. You get this real rush of everything’s happening. Because after the shooting there’s sort of a calm before the storm, and then the storm builds very quickly, and it’s too much for the officer and he has to run away. And then we get another dip of silence while it’s sort of this meditation of them in the car while he’s weeping and freaking out.
We’re getting the incident in different ways, but that four or five minutes I referenced before right around that 10-minute mark––the cops’ immediate reaction and the acceleration of this mostly false narrative that they fully believe! Sociologically, it is just fascinating to watch because it becomes this thing he says: a police officer has been shot or shot at. That’s just not true. The victim never got the gun out of his holster, even if he was reaching for the gun. It’s fairly clear he was shot at before he even reached for that gun ––
To me it is.
There’s that key moment. Another officer quite astutely––and it really speaks to the whole “Blue Shield” of it all––he immediately takes that gun out of the holster as evidence but also not to have that gun be in the holster. Then they’re in the car with the other officer fleeing from the scene, as it were, so [Halley] can be safe. Because, like you said, the public is realizing what’s happened very quickly, and just the conversation they keep repeating what they see as the truth, and then that officer driving them––who kind of wasn’t necessarily there for what happened––is kind of reinforcing something she doesn’t actually know happened.
She’s just sure that they didn’t do anything wrong.
This is very much what we wrestle with as a public. To watch it play out, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.
Right.
George Floyd, Michael Brown, so many tragedies of course. You referenced Laquan McDonald had happened a few years before this incident. That officer was on trial when this incident had happened. It’s all connected––we know this––but in the car, going away from the scene, you’re capturing this kind of… we are inventing our truth right now in this car. It is malicious, I suppose, but from their context there is no malice.
It’s a systemic problem, right? These officers are just doing what they think they’re supposed to do, which is to create this narrative as they’ve been trained to do. I’ve read people say, “I can see this kind of YouTube footage anywhere.” You don’t see that kind of fallibility inside the police car anywhere else. That’s a real different peek into the other side. You see hard cops, sure, but you don’t see this crushing realization that their lives have just changed, and that they’ve taken a life and that they’re kind of creating this narrative, repeating it, and on some level knowing that it’s not true––but that this, nonetheless, is the narrative that they’re going to push, and that there’s an agreement there, there’s a pact being formed.
You touched upon it, but just after Officer Quincy Jones, who is the same officer who stopped Snoop––the 12-year vet––I think things would have unfolded quite differently if he had just been left to ask him questions. Maybe there would have been a citation or a warning or something like that. And it was really the other officers, the younger officers, coming up with guns drawn, sort of acting like they just bagged a big game that created the situation. But yeah: you’re right. There’s a key moment, and it’s the only time where I zoom in on the same image––and as an inset––where Jones removes the gun from the holster and takes it as possession.
It’s also from a different angle, the last shot of the film, when we slow down before we roll credits; you see the silhouette of that happen. That’s crucial. Obviously the gun was not drawn, and there’s a very quick exchange that happens between the officer who shot Augustus––Dillan Halley––and his partner, Megan Fleming, and it’s just after they reported to the sergeant. Now they’re off on the sidewalk, taking each other’s temperature. He says very quickly, “Was it a gun?” And she says, “Yes.” And he says, “Did you get the gun?” She says, “Yes.” And then he’s free to invent whatever he wants. He says, “Why did he have to point a gun right at us?” But he first needed to ascertain A) that there even was a gun, and B) that it was no longer [in his possession]. That whole exchange is super-condensed, like one second to rattle off that information.
When it comes to body cameras: Officer Fleming doesn’t turn on her body cam and she was cited for that after the fact. But then obviously other people do, as is kind of required nowadays. Do they help? We’re speaking as citizens, not as experts…
The number-one client of Axon, the manufacturer of the body-worn camera, is police departments, right? I think they’re fulfilling a need of some sort of problem for public oversight, but their usefulness is to prove innocence, or at least [with] the very presence of a camera there’s an assumption that this is being taken care of, this is being seen. Not taken into the fact that whoever owns the footage can sort of call it what it is and say, “Well, we’ve already dealt with that” and it’s going back into this huge file of uncountable numbers of surveillance cameras that are recorded every day.
There’s this obsolescence that’s created by just the sheer volume of footage that’s now available. So if the police say, “Oh, we looked at that and that was a split-second decision and we have to show deference to the officer. Nothing to see here.” The police did a good job of spinning, right? They isolated that frame that you mentioned, where it seems to be that Snoop is reaching for a gun. I think he’s already been shot at that point and this is a reaction. But they took that frame and blasted it over the evening news 24 hours later. That quelled the protests and the public opinion quickly swayed to this was a menacing figure. Quite opposite.
To your point, referencing Quincy Jones––who is the more veteran cop––the tragedy is, of course, the guy had a permit for the gun. He’s showing them the permit. It’s that classic thing of de-escalation being largely ignored. We live in this time now where there is so much fear on either side. But when one side has, by design, infallibility more or less…
I mean, how crazy is it that their cameras actually captured that FOID [Firearm Owners Identification] card? If you saw that on television you’d be like, “Well, that’s crazy that you can actually read his card in one of those frames.”
Bill Morrison
I want to bring it back to the filmmaking, because obviously this movie was nominated for an Oscar and aside from its social importance, it is just a well-made movie. I’ve heard you’ve mention it’s a little different from the archival kind of art form that you do, but in another way it’s not; it’s very similar, in fact. There is a sad timelessness, not unlike a Dawson City to this document, where you could, sadly show this in 10 years, and it would feel very much like this is our country.
Absolutely, and I’ve dug back to racial episodes in the Dawson City collection that, in some ways, appear more progressive than the society we live in now.
For the filmmaking part of it, I find it so well-paced; it’s almost like a thesis paper, in complimentary terms. You’re showing us the incident and then you show us again, again, and again. How do you get there? How do you find the pace for something like this?
There was only that one angle that showed the whole thing unfurling like that.
And those amazing birds––you can’t write that!
[The birds] clearly were startled by the gunshots, right? Those seagulls, but that is some kind of weird poetry there. The only thing that’s providing audio are the body-worn cameras, and they haven’t been triggered yet. So it necessarily began in silence because we didn’t have audio for that. But it also provided an interesting implication for the ending, right? Because at the end, they need to turn off the body-worn cameras so the poor schlub who’s charged with writing up the report can actually get the story of what happened and how he’s supposed to write it, not on camera. Meanwhile we’ve already seen what happened. We see him, like us at the beginning, trying to figure out, “Okay, what happened? Who’s at fault? Did the police shoot him? Did he shoot the police?”
And gradually, as twenty minutes go by, we’ve learned what actually happened and what their story is, and now he’s dropped into this situation where he’s trying to get them to tell him what happened. They’re all on camera and are claiming they don’t know. And it isn’t until the commanding officer says, “Can you all officers turn off their body-worn cameras” that presumably he’s going to learn. And so during that silence, we understand, we’re sort of returned to this silence that we came out of, but now we’re sort of complicit in a certain way, and that we know what happened, and we’re helpless to help the situation.
What got you into documentaries? What was the spark plug for you deciding to go down this pathway of archival and narratives from the past?
It started with an aesthetic concern. I came out of painting, but I studied with the great animator Robert Breer and so I was looking at film as a series of material images that could be understood as material images, and sort of the implications of what that meant in terms of memory and how we grasp memory over time as a series of images. So as an aesthetic concern I was constructing animated films and then shooting photographic, cinematographic films and somehow disturbing them so that you had this idea that every frame was different. Then I became interested in how that happened organically over time, and when it was part of the actual history or historicity of the film. And that became interesting to me, going back 30 years to The Film of Her, and then going back 10 years to Dawson City––these stories of films lost in an archive became both the subject matter and the stuff of which the film was made.
That was exciting to me, and also the idea of reclaiming films lost in sort of obsolescence, finding old images that nobody had seen before was an exciting idea––that you could go back into the archive and, in a way, create new images, in that, if people weren’t seeing them, they sort of didn’t exist or they weren’t in the currency. So instead of showing regular stock images that people are used to seeing, I was making an effort to try to present in these old films, films that no one had ever seen. It also begged the question, “What else have we not seen? And what has been lost, this deep history underground?” And I think that there is some correlation here with Incident in that there’s this plethora of imagery that we’re creating all day that’s creating its own obsolescence of any curation. Somebody needs to say, “Wait, what’s in that file?”
Also, when you think about a movie like Red Rooms, obviously a fictionalization of a real thing, and Assayas did it with Demonlover over 20 years ago. Incident is more disturbing in the sense of just this surveillance aesthetic that is now a part of our life. In a totally different technological way, but also in a very similar, practical way: all of this footage will be on hard drives that will break, not unlike all the celluloid under the pool in Dawson City. All of this will be lost.
By design. I don’t know if you read the postscript in the New Yorker article, but in December ‘23 there was a new deal between the Fraternal Order of Police and the city of Chicago, and in their collective bargaining agreement they slipped in that if two officers were to discuss an incident––as Fleming and Halley do––it’s inadmissible evidence now, and it is grounds to delete the file. So under current law, if any of this had gone down in 2024 as opposed to 2018, this film would be absolutely impossible to make, because all that footage would have been deemed deletable.
It’s incredible. I always see films as time machines to whenever they were made. Even if it’s a period film, they way the film was made or viewed or received is often a reflection of the time in which it was made. Your films take that idea to the ultimate level because they actually are time machines––these discovered things with this painterly, artistic quality that you bring to them. Then there’s the sadder, more revealing part of Incident, which is: as much as films are time machines, they are often sadly timeless. Because you have these very human things that happen. And it can be 2018, 2024, 1918, and it’s just fear, rash judgment, rationalization. Everybody’s the hero of their own story.
If you go back to why we had the urge to create cinema, it was somehow a way of capturing consciousness. First, you could show a sneeze, or that four hooves were off the ground.
My favorite thing is Muybridge and the bet. I always love the idea of cinema starting because of gambling. “I’m gonna invent something to win this bet to prove that all four legs are off the ground at the same time.”
Right. Also, that’s a thing that you can’t catch with your naked eye, like the spasm of the sneeze. There’s this desire to try to see between the frames, if you will. With the addition of audio, this kind of idea that each film could be some sort of representation of a story or of a dream or of consciousness. I think that’s the consistent thing. Now we’re talking about a bunch of different media and platforms, but the urge is to somehow capture an experience and pass it on.
When Jamie and I started, we’re a generation apart from each other but we’re old family friends, and as our careers started to overlap more we would meet and talk about what we were up to, and as he got into police-surveillance issues, I just met him on the street once in Chicago randomly. I said it would be interesting to explore the idea of a modern-day Rashomon, where a single event is captured by different people using different types of cameras and they represent a different truth or they can be expanded to show before and after in a context that belies what’s represented by camera A. We called this unwritten narrative our “Rashomon project.” And it was after all this footage got released to Jamie––first it was in piecemeal and then this mother lode came several years later––he shared it with me and I wrote to him and said, “I think we’ve got our Rashomon project here.”
Incident is now available to stream at the New Yorker.