Please note that the following article contains graphic imagery.
Incident (Bill Morrison, 2023).
Bill Morrison’s Incident (2023) opens with a god’s-eye view of the world. A Google Maps rendering of planet Earth floats in space with an icon of crosshairs overlaid. We briskly descend on North America, zooming into Chicago, the South Shore neighborhood, and finally, 2020 East 71st Street—the exact location of Harith “Snoop” Augustus’s death. On July 14, 2018, the 37-year-old barber was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer while dozens of cameras passively recorded what took place. Despite such extensive police bodycam and CCTV footage, the truth about Harith Augustus’s death and its aftermath remained unclear for months. Weaving footage from various sources into a split-screen reconstruction of the shooting, Morrison’s Oscar-nominated short documentary provides vital answers about what happened that day, but in the process, it raises bigger questions about the limits of representation. If surveillance technologies seem well on their way to approximating omniscience, why does the truth about state violence feel increasingly elusive?
From a CCTV camera positioned across the street on the other side of two parallel sets of commuter rail tracks, we see the exact moment Officer Dillan Halley shot Harith. In complete silence, Morrison zooms in to reframe the shot around four blurry police officers walking down the sidewalk. Suddenly, Harith Augustus runs into the street and falls to the ground. “Police shot,” says Officer Halley, turning on his microphone as required by department policy. “Shots fired at the police, or… police officer sh—” he doesn’t finish his sentence. Amid cries of dismay from nearby witnesses, police officers call for an ambulance and stand around Augustus; the remote operator of the surveillance camera zooms in on his body.
The film then cuts to the past, fifteen minutes before Augustus’s death. A commercial CCTV camera on 71st Street captures the officers from above as they patrol the sidewalk, and onscreen text explains that after the murder of Laquan McDonald by police officer Jason Van Dyke in 2016, the Chicago Police Department adopted a policy mandating all police recordings to be released to the public within 60 days of an incident. When the digital clock in the top left corner hits 17:18, we see a distant Harith Augustus walking down the street from Sideline Studios, where he worked. Ten minutes later, Augustus is on his way back to work when the police officers notice the outlines of his concealed gun and stop him for questioning. Here, Incident leaves the towering angle of CCTV and cuts to shaky police bodycam footage. Augustus is reaching for the card that identifies him as a legal carrier of a firearm when Officers Megan Fleming and Danny Tan suddenly move closer, trying to grab and detain him—chaos ensues. Augustus breaks free and runs into the street, and then the image splits in half. Morrison places bodycam footage on the top half of the screen, above that of the police cruiser’s dashboard camera, showing from different angles that Officer Halley fires five shots while Augustus runs away, never drawing his gun. Halley turns his microphone on, and Morrison fills the frame with another CCTV recording of the scene from above. A sergeant arrives, and our vantage point multiplies again.
Incident (Bill Morrison, 2023).
The next seventeen minutes of Incident are structured around an intricate split-screen composition that combines up to four sources of video at any given time, from CCTV, body-worn, dashboard, and cell-phone cameras. Focusing on precise details without losing sight of the general view of the scene, the film offers an exhaustive survey of the available documentation. Immediately after the shooting, an inset frame shows Officer Jones approaching Augustus’s body and removing his gun from the holster. Meanwhile, other police officers walk around aimlessly while witnesses yell at them, an overwhelming and emotional scene conveyed (and perhaps even heightened) by Morrison’s frequent alternation of sources in the four quadrants of the screen. Juxtaposing wobbly bodycam footage with the sober, still images of CCTV cameras, Morrison shows Fleming and Halley pacing around the scene from several different angles: the former reassures him that his actions were justified as the latter hyperventilates, on the edge of a panic attack.
As the tension reaches a boiling point, another officer drives Officers Fleming and Halley away from the scene. Morrison fragments the screen to show different locations: on the left side of the image, police officers cordon off the area around 71st Street, while on the right the officers retell a version of the events to the driver, who comments on Halley being a “good shot.” Through frantic repetition, they craft a unified narrative, highlighting the danger they faced when Augustus “drew his gun.” The rest of the film captures the aftermath, with one quadrant of the image almost always fixed on Augustus’s body, which lays in the street for thirteen minutes. The crowd continues to protest, the police keep scrambling, and the truth begins to dissipate in the cacophony of voices, but one thing remains clear: a man has lost his life.
Incident (Bill Morrison, 2023).
The primary function of the split screens in Incident is to expose the truth. The day after Augustus’s death, the Chicago Police Department released a short video of the incident taken from Halley’s bodycam in an attempt to quell public outrage. “We’re not trying to hide anything,” Superintendent Eddie Johnson said. “The video speaks for itself.” The clip was edited to zoom in and freeze on a frame of Augustus’s gun before cutting to black. Media outlets picked up the footage uncritically, parroting what the CPD wanted them to say: that perhaps August had reached for his gun. Meanwhile, activists and journalists pressed for more video evidence, which Jamie Kalven, who would become one of Incident’s producers, used to write two articles for The Intercept. It was his reporting that initially planted the seed of a spatial montage in Morrison’s head. “[Kalven] mentions in his article that Harith lay prone for however many minutes it was,” he said. “So that gave me the idea to have a quadrant that constantly showed Harith. And that led to the concept of the quadrant screens, and therefore that everything could be synced and you could have these different and opposing views.”
Incident was not the first attempt to make sense of these events with the film form. In 2019, Forensic Architecture and Kalven’s Invisible Institute released The Killing of Harith Augustus, a series of videos that dissect the years, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds leading up to Augustus’s death. Each video serves a different purpose depending on its temporal scale: some contextualize the history of racist policing in the city while others zoom into the movements, reconstructed sounds, and visual information that might have been lost in the split second of his death. Together, they question the CPD’s narrative that “decisions to use lethal force are made in a split second,” as Superintendent Johnson said. The Killing of Harith Augustus’s main tactic is to rewind, fast forward, re-animate in 3D models, and slow down that split second; the aim is to demystify it. Crucially, the videos also summon the before and after to show that the officers’ behavior was informed by a history of racist policing and contemporary social attitudes rather than merely a result of the chaos of a split second.
While The Killing of Harith Augustus works with sequentiality, Incident’s split-screen approach uses simultaneity. Morrison spatializes the split second, splintering the frame into various perspectives on the same moment. This audacious representational gambit allows for a comparative view that connects the dots between different lines of sight. The film operates on a visual logic that is closer to the multi-window ecosystem of the personal computer or a multi-screen surveillance setup than conventional cinema.
Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927).
Cinematic split screens have tried to overcome the limitations of a single, fixed perspective for over a century. In its climax, Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) famously extends horizontally across three screens, each with its own projector. The system, called Polyvision, was developed especially for the film and used only in its initial screenings. A mythical close-up of Albert Dieudonné’s Napoleon is flanked by battlefields and soldiers on either side, with Gina Manès as Josephine superimposed on the right. Soon after, there is an intertitle: “Napoleon’s soul … plays with the clouds at destroying and building worlds.” The film ends with each third tinted in the colors of the French flag. The epic film, like its namesake, seeks mastery of the world, attempting to dominate the linear passage of time and eliminate physical distances between the two lovers. At times, Gance uses the three screens to composite a single panorama; at others, he gives each section a distinct image and—mimicking the temporal logic of the cut in spatial terms—creates meaning out of their complementary interactions. Together, they impress the expansive grandeur of Napoleon’s life on the viewer. But just as an overconfident Napoleon could not endlessly expand the French empire into Russia, Napoleon cannot extend the limits of cinematic representation ad infinitum. Indeed, narrative cinema will always fail in this task because it is structured by duration, and its spectators are human beings who can only contemplate so many objects at once. Split screens accumulate perspectives to approximate a god’s-eye view of an event, but you cannot add up your way to omniscience.
The viewers of Incident see more angles than the individuals who experienced the events in person, but our view is distant, cold, blurry, and often pixelated. The film is aware of this limitation; it takes advantage of it. Morrison uses composite images to gather evidence while allowing for contradictions within them. Some of the most emotionally poignant moments in Incident come when members of the community congregate around the scene, providing a counter-narrative to police stories. Throughout the film, Morrison manipulates the volume of audio sources to direct our attention to their words of distress and condemnation. This “Greek chorus,” as the director has called it, creates a sense of polyvocal uncertainty, and he has described the film as a “Rashomon project.” “The crowd is not infallible either,” he has said; “you hear two different people say that he didn’t have a gun; of course, he did have a gun. You hear the inaccuracies of the police account. So you’re hearing different points of view that reveal their sympathies.” The film embraces contradiction to highlight the limits of cinematic representation and the challenges of wielding surveillance against the institutions that produce these images to police and patrol us. The split-screen composition depicts various events at once, but seeing everything doesn’t necessarily mean understanding anything.
Incident (Bill Morrison, 2023).
There has been much debate about the absence of objective truth for the postmodern subject, but in a racist, “post-truth” society, the truth is often inoperative even when it incontrovertibly exists. Efforts to obtain evidence run into the wall of antagonistic intentions, as evidenced by continued abuses of police in the United States and elsewhere despite a profusion of incriminating evidence. In 2015, after the death of Eric Garner, David Joselit asked a pertinent question: “How can we account for the fact that the video of a police officer pressing his arm against Garner’s throat—a document that could not have been less ambiguous—did not ‘speak for itself’ before the members of the grand jury? If such a visual artifact can so blatantly fail in the task of representation before the law, both politically, as the proxy for an absent victim, and rhetorically, as evidence, doesn’t this present a challenge to how we define the politics of art?”
Incident shows that even with godlike digital technologies, we can not attain full omniscience, but that in the face of this human limitation, one should still try to approximate the truth. Morrison may not be able paint a full picture of the incident, but he can provide visual proof of vital details to counter police obfuscation. Split screens, with their evocation of simultaneity, become a tool for the filmmaker to operate within this limited zone of knowability and representability, trying to expand it, but always aware of the vast abyss that lies beyond. In its final analysis, the animating principle of the film is a desire for justice, not truth—it is a political artwork defined by its intentions, if not its efficacy. Upending the notion of blind justice, it gives visual and sonic proof of the law’s racial biases, compelling us to look both closely and widely, bearing witness to the fact that Harith Augustus was unjustly killed. (A jury ruled that Dillan Halley was not guilty for his wrongful death in July 2023, four months before the film was released.) Even if it does not speak for itself, evidence is a crucial means of navigating legal systems and understanding the split seconds in which an ordinary event turns into an “incident.”