HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — When President Barack Obama stepped outside his well-armored SUV on Inauguration Day to walk awhile down a crowd-lined street, I can’t have been the only one watching to have held his breath.
For reasons both superficial and deep, orchestrated and inevitable, it was easy to see the new president’s own March on Washington as a fulfillment of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But King made another speech the night before he died, five years later, in Memphis, Tenn., a speech full of hope and death that provides the climax of — although not the culmination to — “The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306,” a powerful, Oscar-nominated short film that premiered this week on HBO.
The film is focused mainly on the memories of Memphis preacher Samuel “Billy” Kyles, who, along with the late Rev. Ralph Abernathy, spent King’s last hour with him.
“I knew it was more than coincidence,” Kyles says here. “I just didn’t know what.” The reason was finally, divinely revealed to him, he says, and the film itself embodies it: He was there to be a witness and to bear witness.
It was a sanitation workers’ strike that brought King to Memphis twice in the spring of 1968, a movement organized around the slogan “I Am a Man” — “as profound psychologically as a play by Shakespeare, as a great novel by Langston Hughes or a poem,” says Benjamin Hooks (a Memphis judge at the time, and later president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
The first march ended badly, in violence and looting — the only protest in King’s career to have done so — and he returned to the city to try to get it right, a bomb threat delaying his plane on the way.
Director Adam Pertofsky, whose credits seem mostly to be in advertising, clearly knows something about getting a point across in short order, and that polish is a sign of respect — “The Witness” honors its subject in part by looking good.
This is not a definitive work; it isn’t meant to answer every question about King’s assassination or the history of the civil-rights movement in Memphis, or even just about the strike itself. (The name James Earl Ray is never mentioned.) But that it’s brief (32 minutes) and narrowly focused is all in its favor. We are in the age of the blockbuster documentary, but bigger is not always better. A string quartet can cut deeper than a symphony.
This is a chamber piece in which the dominant voice is, inevitably, King’s own.
