SEPTEMBER 11? WHO CARES - LET'S TALK ABOUT FEMINISM, OR GLOBALISATION, OR HEGEMONIC CORPORATE GREED, OR ...

Mark Adnum

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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 Trying to be blas¨¦ about the globe-rattling events of September 11, they come across as detached, outdated and irrelevant.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

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