Bill Morrison Unveils the Power of Contemporary Archive in ‘Incident’ a Harrowing Exploration of Police Collusion

On 14 July 2018 a local barber and pillar of his community Harith Augustus was shot to death in the street by the Chicago police, what follows as captured by a mix of CCTV, dashcam and police bodycam footage is a chilling demonstration of what the phrase ‘closing ranks’ means at its most pernicious. Building on the work of journalist/writer Jamie Kalven who was also the collaborative producer of his Academy Award nominated documentary short film Incident, archival filmmaker Bill Morrison’s Incident reconstructs the events leading up to the shooting of Harith Augustus but most critically, continues beyond that tragic moment to reveal how the police on the scene immediately began the work of retconning a narrative to justify the slaying. Assuming that the police are capable of unjustifiably killing someone and then covering it up one thing, but watching it unfold with cold unquestioned calculation in front of your eyes is something else entirely. Another of this year’s nominated Oscar shorts picked up by The New Yorker, Incident is available to watch now over on their YouTube channel. While it makes for a deeply harrowing viewing experience, it’s an important and sobering reminder of the weight of the ‘document’ aspect of non-fiction filmmaking. Morrison joins us to discuss the defined parameters he adhered to when constructing the film, how Calvin’s earlier activism and journalism paved the way for the availability of the Chicago Police Department bodycam footage in the first place and his hopes for Incident being embraced as a cautionary instructional for those tasked to serve and protect.

[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]

Bill, welcome to Directors Notes. Could you kick us off by giving us an introduction to you and Incident?

I’m a filmmaker who often works with archival footage, generally from the most ancient nitrate films that nobody seems to care about anymore. I’ve made a career out of extracting that stuff and compiling it into new titles. This film takes a bit of a different direction for me. I’m still saving footage from obsolescence, but in this case, I’m using police surveillance and closed-circuit TV camera footage from private stores to reconstruct the 2018 murder of Harith Augustus by police officers on the south side of Chicago. I use only this source footage to tell the story of the murder and the narrative the police that unfolds in its wake.

I was interviewing the director Theo Panagopoulos recently who also works with archival images and he talked about his film The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing acting as an intervention to the original footage. I thought that was an interesting point which could be said to apply to your film too.

Well, all this footage is from an archive, albeit a contemporary and vast one of recorded images compiled by police and door monitors every day, every minute. We’re flooded with images now. What forms an intervention here is the police’s awareness that they’re being recorded and that they’re creating an archive as they work so there’s a performative nature to their work and behavior. A big subplot in this film is the awareness that police are being recorded and their manifesting when the endpoints are becomes material for the imagery itself. So, in that way, it is an intervention on the archive in that it’s not just taking the footage at face value but also considering who’s recording it and who gets to see it.

I’ve watched the film over and over, and the more I watched it, I felt like the police could have been actors told to play a role and that terrified me to my core. What was your reaction when editing it?

Clearly, there’s an uncanny feeling that this is somehow being created for cameras. We have a multiracial police force, all of whom are at fault – not just the white murderer and his accomplice partner, but also the Asian cop and the older black cops and commanders who turn a blind eye and enable this narrative to continue. It’s not just a black and white problem as much as it is a blue and everything else problem. There are eerie seagulls that float in and out of the frame, seeming to portend Snoop’s soul being carried off. There’s the uncanny vision of his gun license being visible to the camera as if staged. It’s almost impossible to imagine his gun license would appear in the frame of the police officer’s lens but there it is.

It’s not just a black and white problem as much as it is a blue and everything else problem.

From an editing point of view, I was working with what I was given. The only audio provided is from the body-worn cameras so that initial POD police observation device that establishes the murder is the only camera that captures the entire string of events at 5:30, that was necessarily silent. And then it’s informed by the officer saying “Police shot” or “Shots fired at police”. Then he has to correct himself, though he doesn’t actually correct himself, but he acknowledges that that’s not entirely true and he makes up this story that a gun was drawn on him and he acted in self-defense.

Taking the silence that we experience at the beginning where we don’t understand what’s happened, gradually we learn what’s happened as audio is introduced. Then there’s this poor officer at the very end who’s assigned to write up the case who necessarily can’t have been there as he’s supposed to be working from an objective point of view and asking questions. But again, everyone’s on camera, they’re not going to say the truth while they’re on camera. It’s not until the commander instructs all body-worn cameras to be turned off that he presumably can ask what actually happened and how he’s supposed to write the case up to reflect the official police narrative. At which point we are plunged back into the same silence we began with but now afforded the knowledge of what happened, how it’s going to be described and that there’s very little we can do about it. So it is a frustrating film in that way.

Did you ever consider options of putting something over that silence?

No. When I made this film I set parameters for how I would use the footage. I wanted it to be entirely composed of publicly available footage released by the police. The audio you hear happens concurrently with the time stamp that you see in the upper left-hand corner. I certainly didn’t want to include a narrator or God forbid, music. I didn’t want to have talking heads I wanted it all to be told with this footage. Which in some ways compromises what you might see as the ‘glossy cover’ of a documentary but on the other hand, it is really made of the document itself.

You do get the sound of the community recorded by the mics as the police keep them at bay and they form a Greek chorus. This community has witnessed this kind of violence before and the Laquan McDonald murder is on their minds because the trial for that officer is coming up. One man says, “You’ve already taken one of mine. Now you’re just killing random people.” The community’s input is a big part of what I’ve included here.

When I made this film I set parameters for how I would use the footage. I wanted it to be entirely composed of publicly available footage released by the police.

How did you approach the construction of Incident to ensure you avoided subjectivity in what we’re looking at?

If I had introduced new imagery that would reveal a partiality. By only using police footage or footage they’ve made available there’s an inherent objectivity to it. There’s some editing when Officer Jones takes the gun out of Snoop’s holster and claims it as police evidence so that it no longer is still on his body and it supports the idea that he’d drawn the gun. I use an inset at that point to draw your attention to it but it’s not like it wasn’t already there, I just emphasize what we’re looking at. That’s also the last image of the film shown from a different view, the silhouette of him taking that gun out of the holster. I’m sure any viewer can tell where I’m coming from and why I think it’s an important story to tell. At the same time, it would be hard for any supporter of the police to say none of this happened the way I showed it.

Has there been any backlash to the film?

Not yet but give me an Oscar and there might be! Until a month ago it was just seen in film festivals or by people who subscribe to The New Yorker. As someone who reads the letterbox reviews of my films I’ve seen it jump from, 71 to 72 to 74 and then to 300 to 800 to 1200 over the course of the last week. There’s a great recognition that comes with the nomination and with a win, it might become a national story provoking a response from Chicago police.

What are your feelings about being the person to tell this story and put it all together?

I’m not, this film is all based on the work of producer and journalist Jamie Kalven who has had a long career of documenting social activism on the south side of Chicago and more recently police oversight with several different projects, beginning with Laquan McDonald in 2014. It was his journalism that revealed there was a culpable police who eventually was charged with first degree murder and that ultimately changed the law requiring police to release evidence like this to the public within 60 days. That gave rise to this situation of the police wearing cameras and knowing that they were going to be building an archive every day and that would affect their performance. We can only imagine they’ve been coached on how to behave with these cameras, when to trigger them and when not to. As more of this footage became available, Jamie wrote a summation of this case referencing the new video that became available in 2022. I read that article and saw it as the makings of a new film.

Were you two collaborative then in the making of this film from the foundation of his work?

I would say so. I work alone as an editor but Jamie fact-checked and proofread text to ensure it reflected his work and Chicago’s legal code which he’s an expert about. I’m a filmmaker of some 30 years now and so producing it and getting it out to the festivals largely fell on my shoulders. Then as we started to get attention and do more Q&As after screenings we operated as a team discussing the work and the history in tandem with one another. That’s been a great pleasure and really educational experience for me too.

It’s an approach to archival filmmaking of horizon breaking rather than redundancy.

As a director whose filmmaking has concentrated on much older archival footage, how did you find this experience?

There are similarities of course, this idea of saving some footage from obsolescence that no one else would see otherwise so there’s this use of the archive as documentary unseen grounds and that’s always been something that’s exciting to me. Even when I’m using old images, they’re old images that no one has seen before. Even the silent film veterans haven’t seen these films and images before and I’d say that no one has ever seen police footage like this before – this is unprecedented. In both cases, it’s an approach to archival filmmaking of horizon breaking rather than redundancy. And of course, it’s extraordinary the social relevance that this story has as unfortunately it’s an evergreen issue (especially in the United States) police violence against black men and it came in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. This occurred during the first Trump administration and now we’re in the second Trump administration there’s a lot of talk about empowering police to mobilize deportations, be tough on crime and these code words for systemized violence and racist violence. I think it’s an important time to see the film as increasingly our media outlets are not reporting on this kind of stuff in the way that they used to and so it’s incumbent on independent journalists and indeed artists to seize on these stories and try to bring them to light.

What has been the audience reaction to the film, particularly in Chicago?

It took a long time before the film showed in the U.S. It premiered in Nyon at Visions du Réel in April 2023 and went around Europe in this sort of rarefied festival air where a certain type of film going audience who might be familiar with my work saw it. It wasn’t until September 2023 that Telluride Film Festival programmed it and American audiences started seeing it. Then, quite surprisingly, it won the IDA award at the end of that year which became the cachet that I needed to get somebody like The New Yorker to actually answer an email and say, “Yes, we’ve watched this. Yes, we’re interested in it.” It won the Florida Film Festival the following year which Oscar qualified it and we’ve been building support since then.

I think it’s an important time to see the film as increasingly our media outlets are not reporting on this kind of stuff in the way that they used to.

But you know, by and large, it’s been in these rooms of 50 people. There’s certainly a hushed palpable gasp in the audience as they see it. We’ve only had two Chicago screenings. We showed it at the Chicago Humanities Festival in November of ’23 in the presence of Snoop’s mom, the mother of the victim, which was really moving. She stood up afterwards – having been denied a wrongful death suit by the police – and said, “Okay, now the world can see what happened to my son.” And she looked at me and said, “I’m counting on you to tell this story!” so I feel that I need to get the film out there as much as possible. The second Chicago screening was maybe six weeks ago at the Gene Siskel Film Center where the film was followed by a 90 minute discussion. There were a number of people of color in the audience and that was a really different and charged atmosphere than other screenings that I’ve experienced.

What would you like this film to achieve? Do you want it to affect police practice?

I’m not looking to hang these individual officers, they’re part of a systemic problem. I think the best use of this film moving forward would be if it was shown in police academies instructional saying, “Okay, who messed up when?” Can we all agree that it’s tragic that a 37-year-old barber, a pillar of the community is now dead in the street and that he was licensed to own a gun? There’s all this anger and outrage, and distrust of the police has only been exacerbated by this event. At what point could this have been de-escalated? You saw the older veteran officer Quincy Jones, who stops Snoop on the street and asks him about his gun, if things had just been left between the two of them or his partner and Snoop it would have concluded with a warning or something. Maybe there would have been a citation but I don’t think it would have gone further than that. It was this excitement of these rookie cops who had been told that they needed to strike first, that they’re in some sort of dangerous jungle situation and any black man with a gun is a threat to their life. It was this kind of thinking that created a situation where a split second decision had to be made and unfortunately, those split second decisions are afforded great deference to the officer without looking at the scope of the events that led up to them.