TOWER Trailer from keith maitland on Vimeo.
Although most people have never set foot on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, perhaps a million or more people have spent years of their lives there. I'm one of them. I found so much of the documentary to be surreal, yet also utterly familiar. I wonder how other people perceived it.
People unfamiliar with the campus and the city might think much of the animated scenery is generic, created merely in service to the storytelling. However, as far as I could tell, it was all rotoscoped reality. And since much of the area hasn't changed much in the last fifty years, you can imagine that the animated scenes pretty accurately portray what things looked like on that August day in 1966.
Over and over, I saw strikingly real scenes I'd seen numerous times before. I immediately recognized the rotoscoped house that was named the "Stag Co-op" in 1966 because I had former students who lived there, and I lived in another house across the street for years.
Unfortunately, scenes of the rotoscoped West Mall seemed to rely more on the present-day footage than on how it was in 1966 (before all the concrete barriers and benches were installed on what had previously been a wide-open lawn).
And the tower itself. Wow. I remember fondly a weekly graduate seminar I had in the late Ira Iscoe's office up on the 23rd floor. The view was great. The class was great. Iscoe was great. It's hard to grasp how the decades have passed since then. There are some good memories there, no question.
But the tower is also a reminder of tragedy. Not just the 1966 murders, but also all the people who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck.
Alas, ambivalence.
The mention of the suicides reminds me of that rash of suicides reported at New York University about a decade or so back, and the Cornell gorge suicides, and others. It's just so goddamned sad.
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