Do you ever wonder who keeps holding the camera?

Did You Wonder Who Fired Gun? (d. Travis Wilkerson)

I don’t know what to make of this work. It’s a documentary about a murder committed by the director’s great grandfather in Alabama. The filmmaker claims, at one point, that he has expensive camera gear, but then refuses to show us key people, interiors, and incidents; instead, he uses the most banal of footages and low-fi special effects to represent the horrors of racism. The aesthetic is that of avant- garde cinema, clumsily done. Is this a deliberate strategy or a missed opportunity or both? The stylistic choices have the effect of rendering important sequences as fictionalized which sorts of undercut the gravity of project. Overall, it seems like white guilt on a budget. There are no real black presences in the film despite the filmmaker’s goal of solving a black man’s murder. The narration verges on self-importance to the point that the black death(s) in the film is displaced by centralizing the travails and anguish of the director. Note the use of black culture, primarily music, only to be used as props. The clip of a street demonstration puts the white figure at the center. Is that supposed to be the director, his public face? Should we applaud him for its intentions? Should we demand more from (white) filmmakers who tackle the subject of race? Not enough.

#2019 #10