Though this collection of short films
was conceived as a global response to the events of September 11, the only film
maker that looks directly at those events - the hijacked planes, the flames, the
deaths - is Mexican director Alejandro Gonz¨¢lez Iñ¨¢rritu. It's no
coincidence that his segment is the highlight of this very mixed film.
Iñ¨¢rritu uses sounds and images
from live television coverage, and nothing else, to flabbergasting effect. The
bulk of the segment is black screen, interrupted every twenty seconds or so by
blink-and-you'll-miss-it shots of people falling/jumping from the towers, or the
towers beginning to cascade. Panicky journalist¡¯s voices overlap then get
drowned out by increasingly loud and hellish noises, such as steel meeting
steel, and flesh meeting concrete at impossibly high speed.
Iñ¨¢rritu's segment is a dark and
brilliant short film/art installation that pays due respect to the impact of
September 11, and the other segments look a little bit flaky by comparison.
September 11 was so incredible,
outrageous and "fictional" that no kind of creativity from the film
makers was necessary - the sounds and images from that day were so unprecedented
and so portentous that applying any kind of personal emotional or artistic spin
is always going to look a little smarmy or stupid, or both.
Several film makers involved in 11¡¯
09" 01¡¯ embarrass themselves this way, while others reduce themselves to
undergraduate level, bemoaning other sadnesses of the world, and dismissing the
woes of the corporate capitalist hegemony (how boring). Trying to be blas¨¦
about the globe-rattling events of September 11, they come across as detached,
outdated and irrelevant.
Youseef Chahine, for example, fills his
segment with walking ghosts, reversed footage of the falling towers, and a
meaningless reminder that people have died in Palestine, Egypt and Israel, too.
It¡¯s a creative and poetic piece, but intellectually, it¡¯s dead in the
water. Ken Loach, too, makes a very fine short film about US-funded political
mass murder in Colombia in 1973. But like Chahine, he¡¯s too reliant on the
weak premise that we should moderate our reaction to September 11 because
America has lots of blood on its hands, and lots of people have died around the
world in the past.
But September 11 received the media
coverage it did and was assigned so much historical significance not because
people beleive that an American loss is worse than any other kind of loss, or
that America is a sweet innocent place harmed unfairly, but because the events
of that day were so eye-poppingly spectacular and unprecedented. September 11
appealed to our primal interest in watching death and destruction. Think the
sold-out Colloseum, or the blow out popularity of disaster movies such as
Titanic. People have always been aroused by the sight of blood and fire. Despite
the unthinkable pain and misery of the victims, from a distance, visually, big
disasters are majestic and kind of beautiful.
Whatever your personal politics are, if
your response to September 11 is to shrug and start talking about something
else, then you¡¯re living in your own world. September 11 was the first
opportunity people have ever had ¨C courtesy of the mass media ¨C to watch
such bold and destructive attack on a great world power from the comfort of
their living rooms. No one was around to film Hannibal and his elephants crest
the Alps, for example. Get out of comparative fantasyland ¨C past world horrors
are one thing, but sensational September 11 sits completely within its own
genre.
Sean Penn (I'd always thought of him as
an actor) apes Spielberg by bringing a pot of dead flowers back to life in his
segment. Through the magic of special effects the dried flowers burst into bloom
the second the North Tower hits the ground, and the sunlight previously blocked
beams back onto Ernest Borgnine's lonely windowsill. Penn has said he wanted to
make a movie about loss and grief, two of the primary products of the events of
September 11, but his Disney-meets-Scorsese fairy tale is inappropriate and
mawkish, along the lines of his performance in I Am Sam.
Mira Nair does a better job, but again,
insists on using September 11 as a backdrop for, this time, a meditation on
racism, and maternal grief in general. Next.
Better segments are those by Samira
Makhmalbaf, about an Iranian teacher looking for a way to communicate the
attacks to her brick-pit working pupils, and Claude Lelouch, who looks at
detachment and loneliness, but puts the Towers centre stage.
Makhmalbaf and Lelouch seem to share Iñ¨¢rritu¡¯s
appreciation of the gravity of September 11, and respond more intelligently to
the idea of a diverse global response to that day than do most of their peers,
who still seem a little tentative, dull and "on-campus".
From markadnum.com