Despite its success last fall at film festivals in Canada and
Italy, and even though it features the work of several
internationally known directors, 11’09”1”’ — September
11 has still not been released in the United States. Its
distributors apparently fear that America will take offense. And
some of the movie is clearly calculated to offend Americans, yet
there are other parts that viewers of any nationality and political
persuasion should find moving and thoughtful.
The movie is made up of 11 short films — each precisely 11
minutes, 9.1 seconds long — by 11 directors from 11 different
countries. Most of the stories are about ordinary people far away
from New York and Washington whose lives are affected indirectly by
the terrorist attacks.
“The world has gone mad,” says a man in an East African
marketplace, cradling his head in his hands, after he hears the
news on the radio. A teacher tells her class of Afghan refugee
children to keep a moment of silence for the dead. Bosnian women
turn a protest march into a ceremony of mourning for those in the
States.
In two cases, the conceit of international solidarity rings
hollow. The left-wing British director Ken Loach contributes a
mini-documentary about the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government
in Chile, which also occurred on a Tuesday, September 11th. One
needn’t justify the actions of Pinochet, Nixon or Kissinger to
conclude that this bit of propaganda is out of place here. Since
Loach suggests no link between the events, the point seems to be
simply that the U.S. had it coming.
That claim is even clearer in the Egyptian entry, in which a
movie director confronts the ghost of one of the U.S. Marines
killed in Beirut in 1983, reminding him of America’s millions of
victims from Vietnam to Iraq. The Marine is appropriately
remorseful, and his interlocutor explains that he has been misled.
The young fighting man is thus another victim of American
power.
The Japanese episode, which is set in 1945, ends with the
slogan: “There are no holy wars.” The explicit target here is the
Japanese Imperial Army, and by extension al-Qaeda, but given that
the segment also mentions Hiroshima, we may infer an equal
condemnation of any “holy wars” that America might think to wage in
response to 9/11.
The Israeli entry, a bit of black humor set in the aftermath of
a suicide bomber’s attack in Tel Aviv, mocks the efforts of
journalists (and filmmakers) to make sense out of violence by
putting it into moral or historical perspective.
Many will also regard it as black humor that the American
episode is directed by Sean Penn. In it, Ernest Borgnine plays a
lonely old man living in a New York apartment with a light-starved
plant, holding imaginary conversations with his late wife. When the
Twin Towers fall, the sunlight is unblocked and the flowers on his
windowsill bloom. The point seems to be that 9/11 was a wake-up
call (an alarm clock is prominently featured) and, though it
meant the loss of comforting illusions, an opportunity for
growth and change.
Only three films deal directly with victims of the attacks. The
Indian director Mira Nair tells the true story of a Pakistani
immigrant living in New York who was suspected of complicity with
the terrorists — until it was discovered that he died trying to
save lives at the World Trade Center.
Claude Lelouch’s fictional tale, of a deaf Frenchwoman whose
lover goes to the WTC on its last morning, is a poignant
illustration of history brutally intruding onto private life.
The finest of the 11 films is also the hardest to watch,
precisely because there is so little to see. The Mexican director
Alejandro González Iñárritu keeps the screen
black for almost the entire time, occasionally flashing one of
those obscene images of people falling from the Towers. The
soundtrack is a jumble of sounds, including fragments of news
reports and an answering machine message from one of the plane’s
passengers to her child. You strain to see and hear, yet you can
hardly bear to do so.
