Underground Zero
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Yet we all have a right to process the trauma in our own way, with or without trained specialists standing by, and the testimony of individuals has been showcased over and over. Recently CBS aired The First 24 Hours, and HBO weighed in with In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01, which drew upon video from 16 news organizations and 118 freelancers and amateurs. A more personal perspective comes from the frontline tales collected in the new volume Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11 (Bonus Books), which fuse firsthand experience and first-person expression. One of the book’s editors, an investigative producer for WNBC TV, says that for two weeks after the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, showering her with debris, she cleaned “gritty, black dirt” from her ears with Q-tips. A field producer for Good Morning America recalls how he used Sprite to wash the grime from his eyes: “My eyes were sticky for the rest of the day.” A radio correspondent for the Associated Press who stood for hours in the Virginia sun comments, “A tomato-red face would be the mark of those who were there that day covering the Pentagon.”
Smaller audiences have been treated to a diverse spectrum of individual statements by film and video makers, work whose force and beauty comes not from their marshaling of stars and research staffs but from their personal and idiosyncratic perspectives. Some have been screened at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the Double Take Film Festival in North Carolina, and the New York Underground Film Festival. And here in town, Facets Cinematheque is presenting “Underground Zero,” a 76-minute program compiling 13 short films and videos. Shortly after the terror attacks, San Francisco filmmakers Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi solicited work from some 150 experimental and documentary artists, from which they chose their program. I can’t comment on the 137 films that failed to make the cut, but most of the film and video makers featured seem to dwell in a subculture that fetishizes personal expression.
One week after the attacks Zahedi asked students in his “Personal Poetic Documentary” class at the San Francisco Art Institute to stand up, walk around the classroom, and move their bodies to communicate. All this was being recorded on videotape because, a week before the attacks, he’d asked each student to make a film or video about the class itself. Zahedi demonstrates this physical communication by making dancelike gestures toward a lithe female student. After a few minutes of this, Daniel, a student wearing a black beret, says, “This is really silly.” Zahedi is stunned. “I feel attacked,” he replies, quaking with rage and fighting back tears. “I am having an emotion here.” Daniel tells him to “chill down,” which further inflames Zahedi. He orders Daniel out of the class, and Daniel goes to the dean.
