Re-Enacting Crime’s Witnesses in the City
More than other films on or about the Genovese case, the 1975 made-for-TV social problem film Death Scream examines the fragile sense of community among apartment building residents, the limited communication that structures their social relationships with each other, and for some, the legitimate reasons for why they feared speaking to the police about what they saw or heard of the crime against female character Jenny Storm. Five years before Groping, Death Scream portrayed apartment dweller's refusals to engage with the violence being committed against their neighbour and in front of their apartments by also depicting them dropping their window shades. Shot from the street, viewers of Death Scream see bystanders' collective non-response in the shadowy profiles of residents cast against their opaque window coverings.
Death Scream retells the Genovese murder from the perspective of the diverse apartment-living witnesses to the crime, set in the context of 1970s New York. The film's all-star cast includes Raul Julia as Latino Detective Nick Rodriguez, Diahann Carroll as a depressive, African-American suicidal woman, Tina Louise as a white female singleton, Ed Asner as a married man who encourages his wife, played by Cloris Leachman, not to talk to the police because of their fears of involvement, and a 12-year old Helen Hunt who plays Det. Rodriquez’s daughter Teila. German-born actor Eric Braeden, well-known for his role playing corporate patriarch Victor Newman in the long running U.S. daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless, plays an undocumented Polish immigrant whose fears of having his and his wife's immigration status discovered, waits until days after the murder to report to the police what they saw and heard of the murder from their street-facing first floor apartment.
Death Scream’s re-enactment of the Genovese murder opens the 1975 telefeature (warning: the clip may be triggering for some viewers). Shot at night, with several references to the dominant news account of the Genovese murder, viewers see the victim, Jenny Storm, park her car near her apartment building as the camera shifts view to a man who follows her movements from the sidewalk. After being frightened by a cat’s meow, Storm turns and is faced with a male attacker who grabs her, pulls her out of the light and starts to stab here as she yells out 'Help me! Help me!' A male resident of the apartment building hears her screams and gets up from his bed, opens the French doors to his balcony and yells out 'You there, get away from that girl! Get away from her!' His wife urges him to get back inside, warning him that the assailant might have a gun. ‘Do you want him to come up here at shoot us?' she asks. 'It’s all right, I scared him away,' her husband Harry states matter-of-factly. Throughout the scene, Storm implores her neighbors to help as her killer continues to stalk her, but no one comes to her aid.
Across the rest of the scene, we watch the crime being committed from the multiple perspectives of different apartment residents. Mrs. Kosinsky looks out the window to see Jenny Storm crouched in agony on the sidewalk; her face pained with concern, Mrs. Kosinsky follows Storm’s movements from the apartment’s other windows. Ed Asner’s character peeks out through the lace curtains that cover the bedroom window above the bed he shares with his wife, who sleeps through the initial screams only to be awoken later by the victim’s screams from the apartment stairwell. Her husband tells her to go back to sleep, explaining that she is just having a nightmare. Another couple stands together at their apartment window in their night clothes, watching with concern as the victim struggles to climb the front exterior stairs of the building. They argue later about what they would tell the police if they called them, calling into question the veracity of what they have witnessed with their own eyes and ears. Rather than risk embarrassment from not being able to answer police questions, the husband, played by Art Carney, tells his wife to put down the phone. She ignores him and calls the police, who are not receptive to her call, but their neighbor is already dead.
The Kosinksy’s see Storm’s assailant return to the scene, and they argue about whether to help. Another neighbour, Betty, played by Diahann Carroll, swallows a handful of pills as Storm collapses in the building’s lobby. Storm calls out repeatedly for Betty as the latter falls into a pill-induced stupor, unable to offer her neighbor aid as she watches the Jenny being attacked again by her assailant on the stairwell of the apartment building.
Death Scream's portrayal of Mr. Kosinsky and other characters in the film places social responsibility for the crime squarely in the hands of the crime's witnesses, deflecting it from the police, who are depicted as hard-working, responsive and morally innocent upholders of the law, contrary to most popular opinion of New York police in the mid-1970s. In a series of clips from the film Death Scream, shown above, the undocumented couple from Poland refuses to help the police out of fear of being deported. After first refusing to talk to the police, Mr. Kosinsky goes to the police after he sees the assailant steal a chicken from a local street market, after which the man then threatens him and his wife with a knife. After going to the police to report the man as the woman’s killer, Kosinsky confesses, ‘I am not afraid, I have a problem.’ Realizing Kosinksy is undocumented, Latino Detective Rodriguez reassures Mr. Kosinsky that the police do not care about his immigration status. In a portrayal of police less common today in depictions of largely white-identified anti-immigrant police cultures, the police in Death Scream offer to assist the Kosinsky's with their immigration problems in exchange for help with the murder case. The offer appears not as a ploy but as a genuine promise to help. Throughout the film, the police appear above reproach.
Death Scream depicts the witnesses struggling with their inaction from within the tight space of their apartment living room. In the process, the film reveals the range of reasons neighbors gave for not calling the police. One resident attempted suicide the night of the murder; the Kosinsky couple fears deportation as illegal immigrants; and a middle-aged couple lives by the credo of not getting involved in other people’s business. Intercut with scenes where the each couple talks privately about their reasons and fears of involvement, the killer remains loose in the city, assaulting other women while the police continue to investigate. The entire case hangs on the witnesses to the first murder, who over the course of the film begin to reluctantly report what they saw and heard. In one scene, viewers watch a couple from the apartment building watching news of the murder that reports on neighbors’ lack of involvement in the case. News here functions as the moral witness in place of the apartment dwellers who failed to act on what they saw and heard of the murder outside their windows.
Death Scream, and later the film 38 Témoins, directly references one of the witnesses to the Genovese murder, Robert Mozer, who, testified during the Winston Moseley murder trial that he yelled down to the street during Moseley’s first assault on Genovese 'Hey get out of there!' or 'What are you doing?' (1964, 55-6). In his own testimony at his murder trial, Moseley reported, 'I didn’t think the person that called [out] would come down to help her regardless of the fact that she screamed, so I came back…' (1964, 236), implicating the witnesses to the murder in his own justification for his assault. Death Scream re-stages Mozer’s speech act in order to judge its inadequacy in stopping Moseley’s attack on Genovese.
In 38 Témoins, a police officer forces a middle-aged male character, Mr. Petrini, to reluctantly re-enact what he yelled down to the street after seeing a man attack a woman below his apartment window. ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ he screams out, echoing the infamous scene in the 1976 film Network in which anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, instructs his viewers to stick their heads out their windows and exclaim ‘I am mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ The ‘this’ to which Beale refers is a litany of mid-1970s urban and economic problems: people out of work and frightened of losing their jobs, the declining value of the U.S. dollar, shopkeepers arming themselves against potential robberies, ‘punks running wild in the streets,’ ‘air unfit to breathe and food unfit to eat,’ and a news system invested in the normality of urban homicide and homelessness. ‘It’s like everything’s going crazy now,’ Beale intones, ‘so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller. We say, “please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say a thing. Just leave us alone!”’ Shaking in his anchor chair, wet from the rain and still wearing his overcoat on air, Beale urges his viewers to testify with him. Later in the scene, urban apartment dwellers open their windows and repeat after Beale. Before entering the studio, Beale tells a security guard that tonight, ‘I must make my witness,’ and by extension, the city residents do as well as they verbally express their anger from their windows, just as the reluctant male witness is coerced to do by the police in 38 Témoins.
Unlike Death Scream, in 38 Témoins the witnesses are for the most part unable to provide reasons for why they did not call the police. They instead make excuses, perhaps none more seemingly unfeeling than main character Pierre’s statement that he thought the woman had simply gone home after her screams pierced the air while she was being assaulted. Across several scenes, the film visually dwells on Pierre’s apathetic, and depressive, ennui. Pierre saw and heard the woman being assaulted across the street from his second story corner apartment. Many of the film’s scenes are shot from within the apartment he shares with girlfriend Louise, who was away on business at the time of the murder. After confirming that Pierre was home at the time of the murder, Louise begins to suspect Pierre witnessed more of the crime than he is willing to admit. His window provides a full view onto the crime scene and, later, the victim memorial that residents construct in the aftermath. In a series of scenes, a journalist, a police detective and a police lieutenant interrogate Pierre, and at times Louise, about what he heard and saw the night of the murder from his living room window. As with Death Scream, women in the film occupy the moral center of action, taking responsibility for their own and others failures to act on behalf of a female neighbor being assaulted.
Like Death Scream, 38 Témoins dramatizes the process through which apartment dwelling witnesses are compelled to admit what they heard and saw of a violent assault against a woman in their immediate vicinity by intimates, police officers, and in the case of 38 Témoins, a journalist who covers the case. More than a revelation of what they heard or saw, in 38 Témoins the film’s main action is in bringing the witnesses to admission through a process in which they are made to participate in a police re-enactment of the murder. The re-enactment occurs late in the film, after a news story reveals how neighbors failed to report what they saw and heard to the police. The scene is reminiscent of the one in Death Scream where the crime is re-enacted, only the scene in 38 Témoins is shot as an intentional re-performance of the crime, in which the production of the re-enactment is fully in view.
Over seven minutes, the film shows the police re-enacting the murder scene. A police officer is assigned to each of the witnesses, who asks what they heard and how they heard it. The witnesses' answers direct the action of the re-enactment, telling the police officers how to stage the screams and the silent pauses between them. The re-enactment forces the witnesses to physically remember the crime, ‘putting what has been dis/membered back together again’ as Richard Schechner argues (1981, 4). Pierre describes to a detective how the screams should be longer and stronger, to more accurately reflect what he heard that night. Louise listens to his description of the screams as his failures as a witness become blatantly clear to her, and to the films’ viewers, through the process of re-enactment.
Re-enactment here becomes its own act of witness. In showing viewers how the crime’s witnesses heard and saw the crime from the interiors of their apartments, they now become witnesses to the crime in so far as the re-enactment forces them to testify to what they heard and saw. A crowd stands in the street listening to the re-enactment, performing a visibly collective act of witness after-the-fact and depicting an idealized mass witnessing subject that stands at heightened attention to the scene in front of them. In this way, the film refigures the urban crowd, not as a mob or menace, but as an ideal of public witnessing in the city. No such collective stood witness on the night of the murder, for there was no crowd to act as witness. The witnesses instead appear segregated into their separate apartment units and unable to speak to each other. They represent, not a collective, but a failure to form collective action.
In another scene, the police chief explains why from his perspective people did not intervene: some take too many painkillers to feel anything, others incorrectly assessed the situation, and some just do not care. Understanding will not help redress the situation; judgment will, according to the police chief, for it requires involvement that both films show witnesses failed to enact.