Having learned by telephone that, forensic examination concluded the previous day, at that precise moment the fifty-year-old remains were being reburied in the Alsip, Illinois, Burr Oak Cemetery, filmmaker Keith Beauchamp asked for a moment of silence prior to the sneak advance screening of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.

Then, and during a Q&A seventy minutes later, he repeatedly stressed his watchword that, if we forget our past, history will repeat itself. That few will recognize the phrase’s origin in George Santayana or even have noticed its paraphrasing in Bob Marley lyrics, is indicative of Beauchamp's problem and purpose, to bring awareness and involvement to a Hip-hop Generation brought up in a Now world. Past and present are indeed linked through this “not just a movie [but] a movement,” for seventy-nine actual recent Southern lynchings have been ruled “suicides.”

Belying a youthful appearance, Baton Rouge native Beauchamp has spent ten years researching, interviewing, organizing and uncovering “missing,” misrepresented or overlooked facts for his documentary.  For eight of those ten, he had been “nurtured [as] an activist by Mrs. [Mamie Till] Mobley,” who died in 2003 after forty-seven years seeking justice for her fourteen-year-old son who “was the catalyst that started the Civil Rights Movement, who was not only mine but chosen by God for this mission.”

The director has just completed a thirty-two-city tour speaking at universities and is in frequent contact with state, federal and FBI people regarding the matter. Although certain sensitive material cannot yet be revealed publicly, he points with satisfaction to the reopening of this case, along with that of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, three others in Jeb Bush’s Florida, and more than a dozen elsewhere, as examples of the “snowball effect” that Mrs. Mobley foresaw.

Together with Stanley Nelson’s fifty-three-minute 2003 The Murder of Emmett Till and information uncovered in making the two -- including the existence of up to fourteen living but never tried possible coconspirators, five of them black -- this documentary seeded that snowball and stirred the Department of Justice to return to the investigation. Thus, although nowhere mentioned, Lincoln’s Gettysburg admonition is served, in that the heroic dead are best honored when those left behind dedicate themselves “to the unfinished work [of] the great task remaining before us.”

Both filmmakers deserve thanks and applause for, as Film Forum Director Karen Cooper put it, carrying on the torch of “film as a way to promote justice.” Along with such highly worthy ends, cinema that aims beyond the not negligible goal of entertainment pure and simple, should unsettle and give nourishing food for thought. In this instance, aside from the obvious and more recent -- yes, the O.J. carnival was brought up -- is that most troubling question of why, when diligent ordinary citizens have unearthed previously “unknown” evidence a half-century after the fact, were the infinitely greater resources of state and national governments unable, or unwilling, to do so, then and now?

Well and good. Considered as film, however, The Untold Story of Emmett Till is carried by its subject matter, “coasting,” as Caryn James wrote in a non-related article, “on the strength of its context and its similarity to a better, more artistic film.” For samples of the latter, one might do worse than turn to In the Heat of the Night (actually shot in less volatile Illinois), Mississippi Burning (loosely based on Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman), and non-fictions King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis, 4 Little Girls and last year’s Home of the Brave.

The current film’s mix of actual footage and current interviews tells the story clearly if unimaginatively, a sad, outrageous tale unfamiliar to those not old enough to have followed it during those Eisenhower years. Visiting Mississippi relatives for the summer, Chicagoan Till allegedly wolf whistled at white Carolyn Bryant -- she later claimed lewd remarks, as well -- was abducted at night, tortured and shot, his body tossed into the Tallahatchie River (technically, Black Bayou). Most graphically unbearable is a black-and-white of the victim’s mutilated wired-together head, accompanied by his mother’s detailed description of it four decades afterwards. No autopsy was performed, the local sheriff insisted on immediate burial in a sealed box, and some went as far as to deny that the cadaver was Till’s.

In a then-“trial of the century” in Sumner, an all-white-male jury deliberated an hour and acquitted Carolyn’s husband Roy and J.W. Milam of murder, and a twenty-minute Greenwood grand jury soon refused to return an indictment for another trial, on a charge of kidnapping. One of the earlier examples of media frenzy, the circus of foregone injustice attracted the hordes to bear witness to the real trials of Till’s mother and family and the nose-thumbing of locals.

The film attempts a bird’s-eye feel for the blatant Jim Crow era via old footage and interviews but concentrates on more recent ones with the teenager’s family and friends and witnesses, most of whom, African-American, were never called or permitted to testify. (Al Sharpton expresses his opinion, too, though New Yorkers at least are used to Rev. Al’s hogging any available red-light-on camera.) The interviewees are identified in titles only on first appearance, and, as in all too many documentaries of heads over story, subsequently are hard to keep apart and differentiated.

What happened that August 28 seems now as legally clear as it was plain humanly obvious in 1955. Neither the film nor the Q&A was terribly edifying about the two accused men’s admission of guilt in William Bradford Huie’s criminally neglected Look magazine piece just four weeks later, for which they were paid $1,000. Both defendants died of cancer long ago, and, never taken into custody at the time despite a warrant, Mrs. Bryant is apparently still spry enough at seventy-one to elude those who would run her to ground.

In Evangeline “the idyllic, most beloved American poet” affirmed that “finally justice Triumphs,” and while that finally beats never, Longfellow is neglected and others probably side more with the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Whichever, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till has forced some measure of justice and closure and may achieve its other social gadfly goal, that of reviving awareness – in spite of its lack of distinction in terms of cinematic technique. You usually can’t have it all. 

(Playing at the NY Film Forum, August 17- 30, 2005.)