Incident

Earlier this week, we released our predictions for the upcoming Academy Awards. I wrote the section on the documentary short subject nominees and selected this film, Incident, as the likely winner. I started by calling it a “complete package” of what one should expect in an award winner and then added that it’s also “really good” (the latter not always guaranteed by the former). This endorsement naturally begged the question: if it’s so excellent, why has it not been given a featured place on the site? By now it is too late to influence the vote and much too late to earn cred as an early booster, but, with our last official selection before the event, it’s not too late to urge you to experience this powerful film before you potentially hear its name announced on stage this Sunday.

As to the meaning of our delay, I wish I could chalk it up to inaccessibility or oversight. But, having debuted online in August via the New Yorker, Incident is one of the few nominees to have been online throughout the award season. It also premiered nearly two years ago at Visions du Réel and had a strong run at festivals before winning the important 2023 IDA award. After playing Telluride in the fall of 2023, I had tabbed it as an Oscar frontrunner for last year’s awards. This was not an underdiscussed work, having received a lengthy profile in the Village Voice that year and an excellent essay from Jan Tracz in Talking Shorts back in April.

I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling—where was its director, Bill Morrison, in the film?

Embarrassingly, the truth is that I badly misread Incident on my initial watch, committing the classic blunder of viewing the film through the lens of what I expected it to be rather than meeting it on its own terms. The story of the police-killing of Chicago barber Harith Augustus, told through entirely found sources, the film is intrinsically harrowing and contributes to a vital discourse, but on first blush feels amateurishly constructed—large segments of the film are without sound, the titles and captions are basic-looking, and there is little overt editorializing. With much of the film presented in real-time, albeit with several different sources of concurrent action tiled into a divided screen, it can feel like a document, but perhaps not a documentary. It is an immersive watch, provoking strong feelings of outrage, and it possesses interesting insight into these recurring tragedies, but I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling—where was its director, Bill Morrison, in the film?

The flat, journalistic presentation I didn’t mind, but with its reliance on security and bodycam footage, I expected the treatment of the event to be in the Open Source Investigation style (OSINT), which we discussed in our coverage of the Jan 6th documentary Day of Rage. I’m not an expert in this field, but films in this still-nascent format often take on an authoritative, explainer-style tone and frequently use data visualizations, animations, or digital recreations to guide and illuminate the viewer toward novel or hidden truths. Indeed, the film is an outgrowth of the forensic journalism of Eyal Weizman and Jamie Kalven, who covered the shooting of Augustus in The Intercept in 2019. That piece utilized the work of organizations Forensic Architecture and Invisible Institute to acquire and sync the disparate source footage, producing several accompanying video shorts that lay the necessary foundation for Morrison’s film.

A still from one of the videos in the Invisible Institute and Forensic Architecture investigation.

However, as mentioned, Incident is not explicit in its conclusions or moralizing, nor does it deploy any of these other tricks of the OSINT form outside of the footage sync. In some sense, it can be described as striving towards the appearance of being unmediated, and I made a rookie mistake of receiving it as such. It wasn’t until much later and my third viewing (a difficult ask for a 30min film that is wrenching in subject) that I finally fully appreciated the thoughtfulness and artistry of what it achieves.

I did not know much about Morrison before that first viewing, other than being vaguely aware that he is an artist of some repute. Knowing why he is perceived as such really could have unlocked the film much earlier for me. Morrison is a celebrated avant-garde filmmaker with a career stretching back nearly three decades. His film, DECASIA (2002), is frequently mentioned as the first film of the 21st century to be selected to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, and is a work that provoked Errol Morris to say, ”This may be the greatest movie ever made.’’ Morrison received a mid-career retrospective from MOMA in 2014 before premiering Dawson City: Frozen Time at Venice in 2017, where it proceeded to land on several “Best of the Decade” lists.

Still from Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017). There is an interesting connection between his celebrated works that recover meaning in works nearly lost to obscurity and the digital security footage of “Incident” which is similarly overlooked due to its uncurated ubiquity.

He is best known for producing works comprised of entirely old and degraded archival footage, and that magic power of constructing narratives and associations via juxtapositions and time manipulation, of taking footage that is not your own but synthesizing it into a vision through mastery of the frame, is key to understanding Incident’s artistry.

My surprise at Incident’s lack of overt direction morphed, upon repeat viewing, into an appreciation of how effortlessly the film guides you to its main point—how the police narrative of the killing is incepted and codified immediately through affirmation and repetition. This is not intrinsically emergent from the material, rather, it is something that we are expertly nudged toward by Morrison in an almost invisible way. The use of multiscreen video and audio invokes a sense of chaos on the screen that matches the heightened environment of the subject event but also inflates the viewer’s ego as to their competence in deciphering this firehose of visual information. No, it is actually Morrison, with his subtle tactics of audio prioritization, selection of video feeds, the shape of those frames within the frame, and their placement and relationship to each other that constructs this meaning for the viewer. The richness of the film’s themes, its cultural import, and the dialogue it is engaged in regarding institutional racism and dehumanization blooms once this intentionality is recognized.

This review is running long, and I have, yet again, indulgently centered my evolving reaction to a film over an appraisal of its themes, narrative, or even an in-depth examination of its technique. I’m ok with that though, as there is an unusual amount of quality writing on Incident out there. Mubi just published a good piece last week in their Notebook, and I appreciated this interview with Morrison in his local Chicago Reader. But, the film is still relatively underseen online these past six months, with less than 75k views across YouTube and Vimeo. I believe Incident would be a worthy winner this Sunday, but if it fails achieve that, I think my initial impression of the film as “unconstructed” will be the main reason why, when I now see the film as anything but. To the extent that this combination of length, heavy subject matter, and a potential lack of faith in its firm direction has prevented you from checking out the film, I hope this unconventional review can change your mind. Incident is a great film that I believe will be recognized and remembered goin forward no matter what happens on Sunday.