The Witness is a remarkably compassionate addition to the increasingly popular true crime genre. The documentary takes on a story which is, as the film’s narrator puts it, “geometric.” But director James Solomon never lets the intricacies, the convolutions of his material trip him up.
Solomon has a powerful adhesive in Bill Genovese, who narrates The Witness and is the film’s ultimate subject. Genovese is after the facts at the center of what has become a cultural myth. As The New York Times put it in 1964, “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.” That woman was Genovese’s older sister, Kitty, and the story The Times ran established Kitty as the international symbol of bystander apathy for decades to come.
It also profoundly altered the course of Bill Genovese’s life from the time of his sister’s death when he was just 16. After The Times published a retrospective in 2004, questioning the accuracy of its original report, Genovese began to search for answers. His explicit purpose in The Witness is to uncover whether there really were 38 bystanders to his sister’s murder, but every answer yields another question.
The film covers a remarkable scope. It follows Bill through Kew Gardens apartments in Queens, as he speaks to witnesses and determines sightlines out their windows. Skeletal animations—pencil suggestions of form—seamlessly illustrate scenes where no footage is available, including illustrations of witness testimony. But the focus quickly moves away from who saw what to an interrogation of big name media players and disturbing suggestions about power, truth and narrative.
The search for answers becomes an admitted obsession for Genovese, who tells his weary family that he cannot stop until he feels that “it’s over.” An idea that confronting Kitty’s murderer might lead to closure begets the film’s most excruciating interview. While Winston Moseley, 50 years into his prison sentence, refuses to meet with Genovese, his son, Reverend Steven Moseley acquiesces. The son’s denial is evident, but Bill comports himself with absolute dignity, the camera holding close on his face to reveal tension, anguish, anger. The Witness does not dwell on the Moseleys. It does not fall victim to a common obsession with evil. This perpetrator holds no answers.
While the film concludes hopefully—shots of a family reunion in honor of Kitty, an acknowledgement from Bill that his sister would want him to find peace—it seems unlikely that Bill really feels that “it’s over.” He has addressed witnesses and the perpetrator to no satisfying end; he has even hired an actress (Shannon Beeby) to reenact Kitty’s screams for help, with a claim that this is “one last thing” he needs to do.
Yet the only real answers he attains have to do with Kitty’s life, details which in the painful wake of her death the family had for years suppressed. Solomon employs enchanting found footage of Kitty as a young woman. She dances, smiling, glamorous, in soft color tones. Bill interviews fond old friends from the bar she managed; he speaks to her lover, Marianne, and to Sophia Farrar, the woman who held Kitty as she passed away. He uncovers a gutsy young woman, undeniably full of life.
Solomon tracks Bill’s journey and cherishes his voice. In this way, he set his film apart from notable true crime like The Jinx, Serial or Making a Murderer. What is fascinating and important in The Witness is not the nature of human evil, nor even the failure of the system. Solomon instead documents the ripple effects of a tragedy. He reveals a life irrevocably altered. Bill would not be a bystander; he joined the Marines and deployed to Vietnam, where he lost both of his legs. His story is an act of mourning and of witness to Kitty Genovese.
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