September 11
It was probably inevitable that the terrorist attacks of September 11 were immediately seen as a blow against America rather than as crimes committed against humanity, the world community, or even just the people, many of whom were not American, who happened to be occupying three particular buildings. We deduced from the reported beliefs and intentions of the terrorists that America and what it represented to them was the desired target. But the willingness to privilege this vision over every other possible understanding of the tragedy may be dangerous. It even suggests a certain ideological defeat, because it has allowed the enemy to set the terms of the conflict.
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For this reason, September 11–a feature consisting of 11 11-minute responses from around the world to the tragedy of September 11, originally called 11’09″01–is indispensable. It premiered a year ago in at least 15 other countries, and the delay in showing it in this country–it opens this weekend at the Music Box–might be explained by what some critics have labeled its anti-Americanism.
Nevertheless, I think this film takes a healthy step toward giving us a broad, enlightening survey. At the very least, it fulfills four of the five aims cited by Alain Brigand, the film’s producer and artistic director: “Evoke the sheer scale of the shock wave that followed September 11, testify to the resonance of the event throughout the world, better convey the human dimension of this tragedy, bring reflection to emotion, give a voice to all.” Only the last of these aims isn’t achieved, nor is it achievable. (Incidentally, this film’s antithesis will be on Showtime this Sunday, a fictionalized glorification of Bush’s romantic self-image entitled DC 9/11 that’s described by the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman as “a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president”; of course we’ve already been getting the same sort of material in TV news broadcasts.)
The most problematic episode for me–apart from the Chahine, with its scattershot ruminations, and the Penn, with its mawkish irrelevance, despite a good performance from Borgnine–is the most experimental, by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the Mexican director of Amores perros. It begins potently as a complex sound mix over black leader chronicling the New York attacks with fragments of news reports, sound effects, and music periodically broken by almost subliminal flashes of falling bodies–a striking effort to make the unbearable perceivable by resensitizing us to sound and image. But this achievement is overtaken and contradicted at the end by the grandiosity of the symphonic music used and a translated Arabic sentence, “Does God’s light guide us or blind us?” Gitai’s episode, which is also about the confusion of sensory overload–the media hysteria following a September 11 terrorist explosion in Tel Aviv–seems compromised rather than enhanced by the filmic bravura of Gitai shooting it all in one take.
