The 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, who is pictured here at her grandparents’ home in Brooklyn, is the subject of James Solomon and Bill Genovese’s documentary “The Witness.” PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE GENOVESE FAMILY / FIVE MORE MINUTES PRODUCTIONS

It’s a familiar genre, the true-crime documentary that overturns received ideas about a notorious case. “The Witness,” which screens tonight and tomorrow at the New York Film Festival, looks at one of the most infamous of all modern crime stories, the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. The film does so through the focus of another genre, the personal documentary. Its main character—its virtual auteur—is Bill Genovese, one of Kitty’s three younger brothers, who was sixteen at the time of her murder; he was her favorite brother, and the two were very close.

The murder of Kitty Genovese—as Bill details in the film, both in voiceover and on camera—became major news less for the specifics of the attack itself than for the circumstances surrounding it. Genovese was stabbed to death between three and four in the morning, on March 13, 1964; she was attacked twice by the same man, first near the Kew Gardens railroad station and then in front of her apartment. As reported by Martin Gansberg in the Times, Kitty’s screams were heard by dozens of neighbors, who did nothing. The Times editor A. M. Rosenthal (later the paper’s executive editor), who assigned the story to Gansberg and oversaw his reporting, reinforced this narrative in his own book about the case, published later that year. (Nicholas Lemann detailed the journalistic genesis of the case in The New Yorker earlier this year.) As Bill says in the documentary, “My sister has been the symbol of bystander apathy for decades.”

It took forty years for Bill—and he alone, among the members of Kitty’s family—to look behind the headlines and try to find out for himself how so many of her neighbors managed to hide their heads and ignore her agony. The nominal director of the film is James Solomon, but Bill Genovese is its main author, and its prime virtues arise from his quest. Bill’s on-camera investigation brings him back to the Kew Gardens station of the Long Island Rail Road, and to the apartment building where Kitty lived. He enters apartments and calculates sight lines, trying with the help of residents and former residents to figure out how many people could have seen the attacks or heard Kitty’s cries and screams. Along the way, he does extraordinary documentary research in the literal sense, consulting the trial transcripts and police records, as well as meta-journalistic research that involves reporters, editors, and producers involved with the creation and transmission of the original accounts of the events, as well as with later efforts to deepen or revise that story.

In the course of his research, Bill discovers that—despite well-documented individual cases of brazen indifference on the part of some witnesses—others indeed took action of many sorts. At least one witness yelled out the window to frighten off the attacker. Another ran after Kitty and held her, trying vainly to help, as Kitty died in her arms. And, in complete contradiction to published reports, several called the police. So Bill wonders: why did the original, flawed reports remain unchallenged?

Among the journalists with whom Bill speaks are Mike Wallace, who did a CBS radio broadcast about the case in August, 1964, and who explains that it became a worldwide phenomenon because of the Times reports, and Gabe Pressman, who looked at the case critically in his journalism class at Columbia. Pressman tells Bill that, after some of his students contacted Rosenthal, Rosenthal himself got in touch with Pressman and “essentially said, ‘Do you know that it’s discussed worldwide?’ ” Rosenthal (who died in 2006) also granted Bill an on-camera interview, and, while explaining his rationale for his original reporting—his outrage at the neighbors’ non-response—he also pays tribute to his own editorial acumen (whether it reflected the events or not), telling Bill, “People all over the world were affected by it.”

Bill turns up a wide range of critical reconsiderations of the original Times reporting and of Rosenthal’s book, including from the Times itself, which published a reëxamination by Jim Rasenberger, in 2004. (Interviewed by Bill, Rasenberger says, “If the story had been reported more accurately, it still would have been a two- or three-day, maybe even a four-day story, but it would not have been a fifty-year story. We would not still be sitting here talking about it today.”) Yet the mystery hidden in the apparent range of non-responses—by some, not all, who saw or heard the crime, and, even more surprising, by the police—seems to poke through the tangle of evidence to tell a clear, simple, and shocking story. As several journalists interviewed in “The Witness” say, the original Times account long went unquestioned precisely because of the power and the prestige of the Times. The apparent inaccuracies, taken as fact, also got in the way of other contemporary investigations that might have illuminated the actual societal—and institutional and political—issues that the failed responses to the attack on Kitty Genovese suggest.

In his 2004 report, Rasenberger—referring to the work of Joseph De May, an amateur historian from the neighborhood—writes, “Many witnesses claimed they thought it was a lovers’ quarrel or a drunken argument spilling out of the Old Bailey,” a nearby bar. Rasenberger also says that De May “raises the possibility that several witnesses did call the police after the first attack, but that their calls were ignored and never recorded.” In the course of his investigation, Bill Genovese pores over the original police call log from the night of the attack. There, he discovers that in fact at least one person did call—and was told by the police that the precinct was already aware of the attack. Presumably, someone else had already called the department—which then invites the question, why did the police not head to the scene of the crime at once?

Bill never finds any evidence on the subject and never speculates on the reason. But one possible, and infuriatingly plausible, reason is the one suggested by Rasenberger’s report. Bill does learn of a handful of cavalierly indifferent neighbors who, becoming aware of the attack, simply closed their doors and walked away. But many more of the witnesses (ear-witnesses, who heard Kitty’s screams and cries for help) may well have done as Rasenberger suggests they did, and taken it as a domestic conflict, albeit one playing out in public—a conflict that they presumed was nobody else’s business, outside their purview and outside the purview of the law.

Though the movie offers no new hypotheses about the reasons for these original inconsistencies regarding the details of the case, Bill’s research nonetheless invites—and, I’d argue, suggests, even if unintentionally—a horrifying vision of what may have taken place behind the scenes, at the police station, while the crime was taking place. I found myself inevitably drawn, perhaps invidiously, to imagining desk officers deciding not to respond to the initial call, because they believed that the matter involved a domestic assault, a lovers’ fight. I imagined that, with a grumble or a chuckle, an officer hung up the phone and reacted with indifference to someone calling to complain that some guy was beating his wife. What else is new, and what are we supposed to do about it?