11'09"01 -- SEPTEMBER 11 2001: A Mobius Flip of Our Tragedy x 11.
Written: Mar 16 '04 (Updated Jun 11 '05)
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Pros: Eleven short films giving national reactions to our Tragedy, by top World Directors.
Cons: Several films collapse under the time stricture of eleven minutes, nine and a nano seconds.
The Bottom Line: Despite the fact several short films fail to succeed or may anger certain viewers, 11'09"01, suppressed for a year and a half, is one we should all see.
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| macresarf1's Full Review: 11'09''01 - September 11 |
As I sat down, at last, to finish my review of 11'09"01 -- September 11, 2001, I thought of the terrible attack in Spain by al Quaeda. As I predicted in my review of OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS (Schroeder, 2000), by our manic over-reaction to 9-11, we have succeeded in creating out of a relatively small group of disgruntled former CIA employees and their fanatic minions a Worldwide movement in over 60 countries, with ourselves and a tiny group of allies as the principal targets. It was then that I came across the passage below:
"The first four years of the twenty-first century have produced strange and unsettling developments to haunt a far longer period. They include the September 11 attacks and widespread terrorism by suicide bombings; the descent into savage despair of that well-spring of hatred and violence, the Israeli-Palestine problem; the opening of a dangerous gulf of misunderstanding between the United States and much of the rest of the world; the growing and terrifying threat of nuclear proliferation; the proclamation by the United States of the policy of preventive and preemptive war and at least one questionable experiment with it. The relative optimism that attended the beginning of the century has largely evaporated." -- Opening of former UN Under-Secretary-General Brian Urqhart's review of Disarming Iraq by Hans Blix, and The Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr. David Kelly, CMG. [New York Review of Books, March 25, 2004].
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The suppressed film, 11'09"01 -- SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, encompasses much of the above.
Americans blithely expected people from the Nations of the World to fall on their knees, wailing and weeping, over the slaughter wrought by the minions of bin Laden on that day two and a half years ago -- and rather reassuringly for us and the Human Race, many did -- but then, we arrogantly used the World's sympathy to announce, in so many words, the coming of the New American Empire, fulfilling the greedy promise of our Eminent Domain doctrine from 1845 and 1898. Of course, when it came to nearly 2000 casualties in the Madrid subway last week, our main interest appears to have been the fall of the Conservative Spanish Government, and its effect upon our Election Campaign. Nothing to be condemned here; it's our human nature; but realizing it puts things in perspective.
As does 11'09"01 -- SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.
Produced by Alain Brigand and Jacques Perin (WINGED MIGRATION, 2002), directed by eleven distinguished independent directors from eleven countries (Dyoussef Chahine, Amos Gitai, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrritu, Shohei Imamura, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Samira Makhmabaf, Mira Nair, Idissa Queldraogo, Sean Penn, Danis Tanovic), this portmanteau picture consists of eleven short films, each running eleven minutes, nine seconds (and a nano), each presenting a perspective on the attack by the Osama bin Laden Gang which destroyed New York's World Trade Center and our Pentagon. Excoriated by Right Wing Talking Heads when it test screened in 2002 at the Toronto Film Festival, like THE QUIET AMERICAN and THE GREY ZONE, the picture was held up from release here for over a year, in deference, it was said, to American sensibilities. And so, 11'09"01 (as much of the World marks a date) was released briefly late last year, and turned out to be an honest collection of top-drawer frank and artistic reactions to the terrible events of that day, reflecting national or cultural points of view upon our tragedy.
To be sure, one or two of the shorts fail to achieve Art, lapse into heavy-handed moralizing or propaganda, but each is worth seeing. Who would have thought, for example, that the most maudlin, and therefore, truly callous of them would be tough Sean Penn's American entry? Or that Danis Tanovic would recall a Bosnian massacre at Srebrnica, which Americans -- if they ever noticed -- have long forgotten? Or that Amos Gitai's Israeli effort would be a satire on Israel's obsession to dominate disaster media? Or that Shohei Imamura would see a sly myth about how the snake of Japanese military aggression might escape its cage in the wake of the American disaster?
Shocking?
Not really. Not in the context of what has been done in our name during the last 30 months -- what is being planned now, if we don't exercise our shrinking democratic rights to stop the creators of The Project for a New American Century.
Overwrought? you ask.
Perhaps. World domination, as the President's think-tank stated in The Project for a New American Century, may be what a majority of us want.
We are a democracy, and "the past is [always] prologue."
Think about it. Did you howl, "The World has changed!" upon hearing of the recent mass atrocity in Spain? Of course, not; we're Americans. Unless we are exceptionally sensitive or have a personal link to Spain or 911, our attitude tended to be, here was another demolition derby or several segments of "Cross Fire" on TV.
The great strength of 11'09"01 is also its weakness. Aside from its general theme, none of the short films connects in a logical fashion with most of the others. The one common thread, through almost all of the eleven short films, is that of the necessary and pervasive presence of Radio and TV. Yet the sequence in which we see each film seems largely arbitrary, and each must be viewed on it own merits.
In other words, 11'09"01 is Democracy in Action.
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So what follows are eleven thumbnail reviews of the eleven entries. [ No individual titles were given for them, and (necessarily -- because of their brevity) occasionally will appear the abominable . . . SPOILERS]:
1) IRAN -- A fine young woman director from (ironically, many would say) one of the most creative film industries in the World begins the series well. Daughter of Mohsen Makhmalbaf (the superb GABBEH, 1996), Samira Makhmalbaf (BLACKBOARDS, 2000), shows us a normal day [9-11] for a group of Afghanstani refugee seven or eight year-olds. Their people had already suffered 20 years as a punching bag between Russia and the United States (covert forces, including Osama bin Laden); then rose the puritan rule of the Taliban when we won; and soon these children would see their country invaded because of the event of this day. The children are making mud bricks with their feet for a village kiln, to pay their way. Their Iranian teacher (Maryam Kirimi) calls them inside for mandatory schooling, which today centers on the news from New York.
Anyone who has ever taught can empathize with the teacher's efforts to concentrate their fidgeting attention on the object of the day's lesson, a far place they cannot imagine. The girls wear black scarves, and the boys look like little warriors, but there is, recognizably, the proud little girl who is "head of the class" (who smiles and arches her back when she gives a right answer), another confused little girl trying to please by repetition, those who hang back with fingers in mouth, and the wise guy who personalizes everything to get a rise out of the females. All are natural and delightful -- but very frustrating. They keep coming back to a man who got stuck in a well back home in Afghanistan.
Eventually, using good pedagogic technique, the teacher takes them outside to their work site, where she asks them to look up the tower of the kiln. Can they imagine this tower tumbling down like one of the Twin Towers? In close-up, we see the gestalt light up some of their eyes.
Wonderful little film.
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2) FRANCE -- Claude LeLouch (A MAN AND A WOMAN, 1966) characteristically understands the event in terms of a love affair, but this couple is deaf, and the male may be dumping his mate on this fateful morning. Jerome Horry goes to work near the World Trade Center in New York, leaving his lover (Emmanuelle Laborit) in their apartment to practice a meditation of despair. As she types out dark mystical prophesies and ideas about their love, a TV Set in the corner of the room is showing the disaster, the announcer shrieking the sensational news, but of course, she cannot hear and does not notice. LeLouch's film is a kind of skilled essay on our inability to convey emotions, or notice the depth of other people's troubles, not too dissimilar to LOST IN TRANSLATION, but with a context of disaster certain viewers of Sophia Coppola's film might have preferred. In this case, I shall not reveal the Gallic twist at the end.
A Beauty.
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3) EGYPT -- One of the most senior of the directors represented, Yousseff Chahine (CAIRO STATION, 1958), produces perhaps the most ambitious of the pieces. Shot with various techniques, on several locations, and using an expressionistic story which zeros in on the politics behind 9-11, it is also the least successful. An Egyptian director (Nour El-Sherif) is shooting a documentary in downtown New York, but he does not have satisfactory permits. Officious police drive off his crew, and they fly home to find themselves the center of media attention because the Twin Towers have been bombed in the interim. What was the Great Director's impressions? Did he recognize how close to death his crew came? Declining to comment, the director goes off to the banks of the Nile to calm himself. A kind of Unknown Marine turns up in his reverie, and the director gives him a history lesson about why this American was one of 400 Marines blown up in Beirut (October 1983). More history lessons follow, as the police who barred the director from future Ground Zero show up; as does a suicide bomber (chased by his mother with a forgotten schwerma), heading for Israel.
A number of other short films in this collection make the same points less portentously than Chahine's film. I thought it mediocre as art, certainly as propaganda.
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4) BOSNIA-HERZGOVINA -- One of the seemingly distant of the short films, the brilliant Danis Tanovic (NO MAN'S LAND, 2001) made a brilliant contribution, which was, in my opinion, also one of the most effective, in that it should have encouraged the viewers to become curious to know more. A woman in her late 30's (Dzana Pino) hears a radio report at her home near Srebrnica, in Bosnia. She sets off for the town. At a crossroads, she meets a one-armed man (Aleksandr Seksan), who asks her where she is going. She says, to the monthly observance of the great massacre of Muslim men, which began in Srebrnica, on July 11, 1995. The one-armed man tells her that few women will be at the march because they will be listening to news of the destruction of the Twin Towers. She disagrees, saying that the TV News Services will have returned, after several years of neglect, because of the event. She is wrong, but she rallies the women -- mothers, widows, sisters, daughters, those who were raped -- to bear witness by their circular march, as they have, according to the film, for six years on the eleventh of each month.
In early July 1995, Bosnian-Serb forces, in a recent civil war having satisfied their desire for revenge against old Nazis among the Croatians (and having liberated much private property), advanced under General Radko Mladic against Srebrnica, where tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims had been placed under the protection of a Dutch UN Peacekeeping Force. Mladic (on orders from his boss, Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, it is thought) was determined to teach the UN a lesson and wreak revenge on the Muslims, who -- like the Jewish and Roma minorities before them -- have been persecuted there since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, nearly a hundred years ago. For five days, beginning on July 11th, the Bosnian-Serbs took Dutch forces hostage, terrorized the women, and tortured and murdered the men [most of whom had turned their weapons over to the UN]. At the end of the time, 7000 men had been slaughtered. Milosevic is on trial at the Hague for these and other crimes, but General Radko Mladic is still at large.
Americans used the massacre mainly as an argument, pro and con, about the UN or President Bill Clinton's role. A lot of complexity suggested by the segment, I will leave you to research for yourself.
Subtle and effective, if you know a little of the background.
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5) BURKINA-FASO -- Idrissa Ouedrago (AFRIQUE, MON AFRIQUE, 1995) creates an entirely different piece, a breezy tragi-comedy, which has undertones of Huckleberry Finn, set in a small former French colony (Upper-Volta), one of the poorest countries in the World. A young black teenager (Lionel Zizreel Guire) hears on a radio in the homeless camp market where his sick mother sits every day, that there is a $25,000,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden. Shortly, he observes in the market a wealthy-looking Muslim, who is an image of Osama. Sensing main chance to help his mother, he enlists his pals (Renee Aimee Bassinga, Lionel Gael Folique, Rodrigue Andre Ioani) to track and videotape their suspect. Once they have documented the Evil One, they run, pall-mall, after the man's limo to the Airport. As Osama prepares to board his plane, the young men approach a policeman with their evidence. And . . . I can't go on.
Laugh until you cry.
An excellent sweet and bitter, funny and sad, short film.
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6) GREAT BRITAIN -- Crack British Director Ken Loach (SWEET SIXTEEN, 2003) called upon his recent scriptwriter, former Scots Lawyer Paul Laverty (very interested in abuses of human rights in South America), and Chilean Singer, now Writer/Actor Vladimir Vega, to create a piece about another September 11 -- September 11, 1973. On that date, General Augusto Pinochet, with the help of the CIA, overthrew the legally elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, which began a dictatorship that continued for nearly two decades. Early in Pinochet's Regime, he undertook a campaign of terror, Operation Condor, reaching talons all over South America, into Europe, and (in acts like the bombing death of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington, D.C.) even into the United States. The object was to crush "by any means necessary" socialist and "liberal" parties and individuals.
This week, a new study of the coup and its aftermath, The Condor Years by Charles Dinges, was published. It supports, in newly released Freedom of Information Act documentation, the view of Loach, Laverty and Vega, that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon took a direct hand in helping General Pinochet prosecute his reign of terror, which killed thousands and thousands of innocent people, and tortured many thousands more. [When Ambassador David Popper expressed dismay to General Pinochet over Condor's torture, rape and murder, the Embassy soon received from Secretary Kissinger a memo: "Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures."] Mr. Kissinger was President Bush's first choice to head up the Commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding 9-11.
Loach's film takes the form of black and white/color documentary footage on the overthrow of Chile's democracy and the atrocities which followed; interviews with men and women scarred and mutilated by interrogators, who learned their techniques at The School of the Americas, then outside Washington. [Our cadre/instructors followed syllabuses often prepared by Nazis brought to the States in service of our Cold War Intelligence people, following World War II.] The film is narrated through the frame of a commiserating letter from Vladimir Vega to friends, explaining the significance these acts.
Stolid, serviceable, about actions of the American Government that should be familiar, but which I often find are not.
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7) MEXICO -- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrito (AMORES PERROS, 21 GRAMS) created the most abstract of the films, one which enraged some of the critics. It is also one of the most imaginative. His eleven minutes, nine and a nano seconds, are ladened with dark bands and grainy electronic glimpses of exploding towers and falling bodies. The soundtrack consists of audio "noise" and gradually wavering shortwave snatches of media reports, and finally truncated conversations of people in and around the Twin Towers. The key to Inarrito's picture is to understand that his long years as a Mexico City disc jockey, and in TV advertising, have taught him how many of his people, living in isolated mountainous areas, receive their news, without the benefits of modern cable or dish services. They only get part of the picture, a distortion of the message, perhaps draw wrong conclusions.
But then, so did we in affluent America.
A Muslim aphorism appears in Arabic in the final frame. Translation: "Does God's Light blind us or guide us?"
The Art Award in 11'09"01 goes to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrito.
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8) ISRAEL -- How surprising that the only outright satire based on 9-11 should issue from Israeli Director Amos Gitai (KIPPOUR)! He presents us with a more or less normal day in Tel aviv, as a blonde babe roving TV correspondent (Karen Mor) is doing a street remote. Through the camera-eye and recorder-ear of her TV production crew, in real time, we see an explosion somewhere in her background. A terrorist bomber has struck. Here is her big chance, and so setting her trendy sunglasses firmly, she begins to push victims, police, fire-people, and army members out of the way to cover the disaster. Alas, woe is her, at this exact instant, across the World, terrorists have crashed airliners into the World Trade Center. If you have the slightest taste for gallows satire (as I confess I do), the TV correspondent's frantic efforts to anchor her story on the Tube, everyone be damned -- and her frustration as she realizes that the feed has gone to New York -- is very sharp and fresh commentary, indeed.
Critics took out after this one, too. Some said it was tedious and pointless. Others said that it was tasteless in making fun out of our American disaster. And some said it was disrespectful toward sacrifices the Israeli people make every day.
Well, Amos Gitai has produced a very good satire, and as with all good satire, there's a truth that everyone should pay attention to in it somewhere. I conclude that Gitai was taking an opportunity to present the Israeli dilemma against a screen of a relatively more significant tragedy, and to wring some bitter laughter from it.
Very sharp, edgy, very well observed.
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9) INDIA -- Mira Nair gives us a picture much different in style and content from her hugely successful MONSOON WEDDING. Basing it on a true story, she shows us a Muslim mother (Tanvi Azmi) whose son (Tomer Russo) disappeared on his way to work, September 11, 2001, in New York City. At first, she was given great sympathy in her lower middle class neighborhood, but when FBI agents came to question her and those around her, when the newspapers intimated her son may have been a terrorist, she was ostracized. Eventually, it is revealed that her son actually volunteered to assist the victims at Ground Zero, and died a hero. There is a memorial observance, a citation, etc.
A straightforward documentary sort of work, taking the part of a minority population, both in India and in the United States. An admirable if somewhat pedestrian work.
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10) THE UNITED STATES -- Sean Penn's contribution is perhaps the most disappointing. It begins so well. Grand Old Character Actor Ernest Borgnine (now in his late 80's and going strong) is a retired widower living in an old apartment, under the shadow of the Twin Towers. Because his wife was the Apple of his Life and the Light of his Existence, he keeps the place just as she left it. He sleeps on his side of the bed, her nightie draped on the bedspread beside him, and he chatters to her constantly and reacts as if she is answering him back. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he turns on the lamp and climbs out of bed in the artificial darkness of 8:30. He turns on the TV and goes into the bathroom to shave and begin his normal activities. Suddenly sunlight floods through the windows for the first time in years --
Enough . . . the maudlin, sentimental pathetic fallacy in the last half minute of the film ruins the whole thing.
How sad that the American entry should rise so high and fall so short.
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11) JAPAN -- A fable is Shohei Imamura's choice to illustrate Japan's view of the tragedy. At first look, one might think that it has absolutely nothing to do with September 11th. Rather, in 1945, a rabidly patriotic Japanese soldier is placed in a bamboo cage by his wife and kept there for years. In time, the wife despairs of his ever reforming his Bushido Code and moves his cage out of the house, into the backyard. Unfortunately, the soldier comes to believe that he is a snake, crawling around the floor of his cage, refusing to eat prepared food, but only live rats. Then, the neighbors complain to the wife that the soldier is somehow escaping his imprisonment and devouring their poultry. They come and mistreat the soldier, rattling his cage, etc. One morning, they discover him gone and go to hunt him down. At the film's end, the wife spys him, now a snake slithering under a waterfall. The moral of the film rises on the screen: "There is no such thing as a Holy War."
To what do we apply that enigmatic statement? Your guess is probably better than mine. A wise interpretation would be that Imamura (WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE) is simply saying that the terrorists like his fellow Japanese at Pearl Harbor will rue the day. On the other hand, if all news is local, he may intend a sly warning to his people that the attack on the World Trade Center might increase American pressure for them to abandon the Pacificism we insisted they embed in their Constitution after World War II. If so, the Fable is prophetic because that is just what the Bush Administration has done, wheedling the Japanese (largely unsuccessfully so far) to return to Militarism. Finally, given the universality of fables, could Imamura's moral suggest that as the militant anger of Fundamentalist Islamists was unleashed on our Financial and Military Centers, so our own Militarism might escape us into the World?
One of the valuable things about fables is that they may have many valid interpretations.
When you see 11'09"01 -- SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, what will be your various interpretations?
Few people in America saw 11'9"01 -- SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. More should have had the opportunity to view it.
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For the moral I draw from the film as a whole, I devote my remaining 9 and a nano seconds: "Oh what a gift it is to see ourselves as others see us." -- Robert Burns.
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For links to reviews of several films mentioned above bearing on the subjects discussed, click on the links below:
THE GREY ZONE --
http://www.epinions.com/content_79403585156
OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS --
http://www.epinions.com/content_40908590724
THE QUIET AMERICAN --
http://www.epinions.com/content_89755258500
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