As a document of the unfathomable depths of evil, Keith A. Beauchamp’s The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till belongs in the historical record alongside a movie like Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental oral history of the Holocaust. But it affected me, a proud white Southerner, far more personally than films about the atrocities of Nazi Germany. An ocean separates me from the homeland of Hitler’s willing executioners. An interstate connects me to Mississippi, where proud white Southerners seized a black 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, and butchered him for the crime of wolf-whistling at a white storekeeper. This isn’t some outpouring of liberal guilt. If anything, the brutal murder of Emmett Till gave even bigots permission to feel superior to the animals who killed him. But Beauchamp’s invaluable film permits no easy detachment, no glib moral superiority. The question it asks is the same one underlying every Holocaust documentary: what, if anything, would you or I have done? The result of nine years of research and interviews, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till lays out the case with a sober lack of melodrama. A Chicago teen, Till had gone to Mississippi in 1955 to visit relatives. Cousins, now old men, remember him as a mischief-maker, the kind of wiseguy who would holler on a city street that his companions were looking for a fight. With chilling matter-of-factness, one recalls trying to warn him how to act in the South. In 1955 Mississippi, you didn’t just answer a white man “Yeah,” or look directly at a white woman. Till’s capital offense was that he whistled at a storekeeper as she walked to her car. For that, two men, her husband Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, showed up at the home of his grandfather near Money, Miss. With the help of as many as 12 conspirators, they abducted Emmett Till. Three days later, his decomposing body was found in a bayou, bound with barbed wire to a 70-pound cotton-gin fan. He had been beaten so severely that one eyeball dangled on his cheek. The teeth his mother remembered as “the prettiest thing I ever saw” had been knocked out, all but two. His face was nearly cleaved from his skull. The details of Till’s murder were evidently horrible enough to shame racists: the local sheriff pushed for a fast funeral. Till’s capital offense was that he whistled at a storekeeper as she walked to her car. For that, two men, her husband Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, showed up at the home of his grandfather near Money, Miss. With the help of as many as 12 conspirators, they abducted Emmett Till. Three days later, his decomposing body was found in a bayou, bound with barbed wire to a 70-pound cotton-gin fan. He had been beaten so severely that one eyeball dangled on his cheek. The teeth his mother remembered as “the prettiest thing I ever saw” had been knocked out, all but two. His face was nearly cleaved from his skull. The details of Till’s murder were evidently horrible enough to shame racists: the local sheriff pushed for a fast funeral. Emmett Till might have disappeared in racism’s cemetery among a thousand unmarked graves. When Beauchamp unearths footage of an attorney dismissing his death as “ordinary criminal activity in Mississippi,” one wonders how many other bodies lie mute in the swamp. But his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, refused to let him be buried without a fight. When a funeral director told her he was forbidden to open the pine box that held her son’s remains, she asked for a hammer. She put his body on display in Chicago, where thousands filed past his open casket. A sham trial later acquitted defendants Bryant and Milam after an hour (which included a break for sodas). But the image burned into people’s minds. With documentaries, the issue often comes up: why not just read or write a book on the topic? One of the movie’s interview subjects, the Rev. Al Sharpton, has the answer when he talks about the photos of Till’s unrecognizable face. “People can sort of deal with things they don’t have to look at,” he observes, and the enormous value of Beauchamp’s film is in seeing the firsthand testimony he has gathered. We see the teenage companion, now a grown man, who heard Emmett Till whistle; he saw the storekeeper recoil when Till put a dime in the woman’s hand. We see the woman, then a girl, who heard his distant screams in the night. Above all, there is the heartrending evenness of Mamie Till-Mobley’s remembrances, recorded before her death in 2003, as she calmly describes sights no mother should ever have to see.   The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till doesn’t just refute the notion that “it can’t happen here.” It refutes the idea, raised from time to time, that it didn’t happen here. The movie introduces a jarring note of self-congratulation in its closing scenes, but perhaps it’s deserved: as a result of Keith Beauchamp’s research, the Justice Department reopened Emmett Till’s murder in 2004. This competently assembled, quietly devastating film isn’t history written in lightning, as Woodrow Wilson said of The Birth of a Nation. But it just may be history recorded in light. Beauchamp’s organization of the interviews is simple and arguably artless. He tells the story chronologically, in chapters; the interviews often overlap and repeat small details. A more assured filmmaker might have trimmed the excess and whittled down the personal reminiscences. I prefer the cumulative power of his technique: the witnesses have room to explain what they saw, and their overlapping details have the impact of corroborating evidence. He buttresses their accounts with archival footage that renders any dramatizing unnecessary—not when the defendants smile with their own children for the camera, or when the Tallahatchee County sheriff complains everything was OK until “our niggers went up north and talked to the NAACP.” Or when women peer into Emmett Till’s casket and faint. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till doesn’t just refute the notion that “it can’t happen here.” It refutes the idea, raised from time to time, that it didn’t happen here. The movie introduces a jarring note of self-congratulation in its closing scenes, but perhaps it’s deserved: as a result of Keith Beauchamp’s research, the Justice Department reopened Emmett Till’s murder in 2004. This competently assembled, quietly devastating film isn’t history written in lightning, as Woodrow Wilson said of The Birth of a Nation. But it just may be history recorded in light. Note: After Tuesday’s 7 p.m. screening, the Fisk Race Relations Institute hosts a panel discussion at the Belcourt on the legacy of the case. Panelists include Dr. Tony Brown, Vanderbilt assistant professor of sociology; Dr. Tommie Morton-Young, education committee chair for the Nashville NAACP; Dr. Sheila Peters, interim director of the Fisk Race Relations Institute; and Rev. Janet Wolfe of American Baptist College. A portion of the night’s ticket sales will go to the Fisk Race Relations Institute; in addition, a portion of ticket sales throughout the film’s run will go to victims of Hurricane Katrina. For more information, call 846-3150.