Incident

In the South Shore neighbourhood of Chicago, on 14 July 2018, African-American barber Harith Augustus was shot and killed by a police officer after being stopped on suspicion of carrying a weapon. Over the following year, the shooting was investigated by the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture alongside Chicago’s non-profit journalism organisation, the Invisible Institute. Based on their work, and a wealth of subsequently released footage, Bill Morrison has created his own meticulous analysis of the events in the powerful Incident, which received its world premiere at this year’s edition of Visions du Réel.

Utilising a variety of different sources of sound and image, Morrison creates a patchwork re-telling of the timeline of the day from a plethora of perspectives including surveillance cameras trained on the street, the body cameras of law enforcement officers present at different points, and footage captured by people who arrived on the scene after the killing and were involved in the protests that followed. These appear on screen at the same time, with the screen often divided into different sections to capture the action from multiple angles concurrently. While Morrison’s film contains less of the robust scientific analysis or digital modelling that characterises the videos that Forensic Architecture produced about the case, his reconstruction brings to the fore the key facts and behaviour of the officers involved, while also landing with genuine emotional clout.

What is perhaps most prominent in Morrison’s collage of images, is a wide shot from a high vantage point across the street. This establishing angle remains present throughout much of the film and regularly draws the viewers’ attention back to the prone body of Harith Augustus. The altercation that took place saw Augustus complying with the police to show them his permit to carry a weapon before being grabbed, trying to run away and then shot five times with his gun never unclipped from its holster. The audience sees the events from a number of different recordings, as well as hearing the conversations of the police after the fact – we get caught up in our own anger and disbelief at how things unfold – but it is the image of the lifeless body of Harith Augustus, left slumped in the road for what feels like an eternity, that rightly burns into the memory.

Director, editing: Bill Morrison
Sound: Billy Gardner
Producers: Bill Morrison, Jamie Klaven
Production companies: Hypnotic Pictures, Invisible Institute (United States)
Venue: Visions du Réel (International Medium Length & Short Film Competition)
In English
30 minutes