Journal of American Studies of Turkey
14 (2001) : 111-115
11’09”01
[W]e’re entering a phase where if you start to speak about this as
something that can be understood historically—without any sympathy—you are
going to be thought of as unpatriotic, and you are going to be forbidden.
(Edward Said 2001)
11’09”01, September 11: A Film
11 directors from different origins and cultures
11 glances at the tragic events that occurred in New York City on
September 11th 2001
11 points of view committing their individual conscience
11 gestures of peace
A total freedom of expression.
This is what the audience reads with
the opening credits of 11'09"01 -
September 11, an anthology commissioned by French producer Alain Brigand to
bring together eleven renowned filmmakers from eleven countries, in memory of
the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September
11th 2001. Each auteur is
given 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame to tell their story. Although
Hollywood producers had already announced forthcoming movies inspired by 9/11,
like Real Heroes are Dead (a project
by Tim Robbins with Susan Sarandon, and The
Guys with Sigourney Weaver and directed by Jim Simpson), September 11 is actually the first
non-documentary film (or the first eleven films) inspired by the events of
9/11.
The disappearance of the Twin Towers
proved to be doubly annoying for Hollywood producers. Film companies became
extremely cautious about showing the World Trade Center in films that were
completed before the towers’ destruction. While the original marketing campaign
for Spider Man, for instance, featured the twin towers prominently, the trailer
was pulled after September 11. The original publicity poster for the film
showed Spider Man between the twin towers, but the new poster was released with
no towers. Several films were digitally modified in order to exclude any visual
reference to the towers. These strategies may prove once more that Hollywood
producers are keen to create ‘historically informed’ films or that they try to
insulate the American audience from sorrow, as writer-director Peter Hyams
stated, “If I had a film that was a comedy and there's a scene of two people
walking up the street and in the background is the World Trade Centre, I'd want
that out of my film, because that would certainly make people like me start to
cry” (Adnum 2002). It seems that seeing the towers in Hollywood movies won’t be
possible until an official 9/11 production is released.
September
11, bringing together such
important directors as Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Claude Lelouch (France),
Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Danis Tanovic (Bosnia), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina
Faso), Ken Loach (United Kingdom), Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (Mexico), Amos
Gitai (Israel), Mira Nair (India), Sean Penn (United States of America) and
Shohei Imamura (Japan), premiered on September 11, 2002 in most Western
countries, except in the USA where the film had difficulties finding a
distributor, probably because some critics had already labeled it
“anti-American”. September 11 met
with strong critical reaction upon its screening at international film
festivals. Negative comments included “not remotely adequate”, “insulting”,
“harsh”, “slow and off-beat”, “gimmicky”, “hubris”, “offensive” and so on
(Levit, no date). The Washington Post film critic denigrated the
anthology for being “ominous” and “unpalatable”, and maintained that “for a
great many people, and not just Americans, the tragedies of that day are still
too emotionally devastating to swallow anyone's filmic interpretation --
particularly if that interpretation smacks of political hostility or
admonition” (Howe 2003). A superficial glance at the anthology might indeed
give the impression that some of the films profess a strong anti-Americanism:
Youssef Chahine's didactic episode mentions the training Osama bin Laden got in
the USA and the frightening number of people in the world killed by Americans
and their policies; Ken Loach’s contribution compares 9/11 with another event
that occurred on the same date - the overthrow of the elected Socialist
government of Chile by a murderous coup arranged by the U.S. Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger and the CIA in 1973; Shohei Imamura’s film is a twisted tale of
the return of a Japanese World War II soldier who thinks he is a snake, the
director telling us that “there is no such thing as a holy war” and thus
rejecting both “wars” - the war of the terrorism and the war against
terrorism; and finally Mira Nair tells the (true) story of a New York Pakistani
mother whose son disappeared in the 9/11 disaster and is now accused of being
one of the terrorists, apparently only because he is Muslim. It is finally
discovered that the son was in fact one of the heroes, sacrificing himself for
the sake of others. Nair says that she wanted “to make a statement against the
current Islamophobia that is sweeping the world since September 11”. James
Petras reports that the FBI soon after September 11 exhorted every
U.S. citizen to report any suspicious behavior by friends, neighbors,
relatives, acquaintances, and strangers. Between September and the end of
November almost 700,000 denunciations were registered. Thousands of Middle
Eastern neighbors, local shop owners, and employees were denounced (cited in
McLaren 2002: 175). If we take a closer
look at the episodes “accused” of anti-Americanism, however, we might realize
that the authors are not radical in their statements; Chahine accuses USA of
being an organized murderer but his own statements are also confused; Loach’s
protagonist, exiled Chilean singer Vladimir Vega, writes a letter of sympathy
and solidarity to relatives who lost loved ones in the Twin Towers, and ends
his letter with a poignant wish: “we will remember you, I hope you’ll remember
us”; Imamura’s story is too detached from any contemporary political context to
be labeled anti-American, the director being concerned rather with the
absurdity of holy wars, Nair shows that the Pakistani son’s coffin is draped in
an American flag at his funeral, although he was previously marked as a
terrorist. His mother tries to convince the FBI that his son is “a regular
American boy” and “loves Star Wars”.
Another criticism, along the same
lines, revolves around the claim that these episodes miss the point by trying to
stress that Americans were not the only ones to suffer. Danis Tanovic parallels
the event with the tragedy of Srebrenica and the regular demonstration of women
who lost their husbands and sons in the 1995 (July 11) massacre. A young woman
decides to march despite the fact that other women around her, touched by the
terrorist attacks in New York City, refuse to do so. When she starts her march
in solitude, she finds that other women join her. Tanovic says that he
constructed the idea of his film on the idea of forgetfulness; people easily
tend to forget events such as those happened in Bosnia, Chechnya or Rwanda.
Amos Gitai, too, links 9/11 to another terrorist bombing in Tel Aviv. As a
reporter fights to cover the incident and is about to broadcast, she learns in
outrage that her story will not be on air because a bigger terrorist attack has
just hit USA. Although Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf’s contribution might
evoke a different take on 9/11, the audience is faced, once again, with other
human “realities” and tragedies far away from New York City. Makhmalbaf tells
the story of a young teacher in rural Iran trying to teach her young Afghani
pupils about the recent events in New York City. She asks them if they heard
about a very tragic event, but all they know is that two men fell in a local
well and that one of them died. When she insists, a girl finds the answer: her
aunt was buried in the sand and stoned. When the frustrated teacher asks them
to observe a minute of silence as a sign of respect for the victims at the
World Trade Center, which is beyond the scope of the imagination of these
little children, they fail to comply until the teacher takes the class out to
stand in front of the chimney of a brick-making factory that looks like a
tower. The children keep silence this time, overwhelmed by the massive ‘tower’.
Although these little Afghani refugee children risk being killed in an American
anti-terrorist attack anytime, their teacher’s empathy links them to those who
have lost their lives in the terrorist attack on the other side of the world.
This episode allows different readings. On the one hand, the story might well
point to the absurdity of wars - terrorist or otherwise - and the absurdity of
a globalized mourning given the many other tragedies constantly shaking
forgotten parts of the world. On the
other hand (not unlike in Tanovic’s story), as Makhmalbaf says in an interview,
she wanted to show “how people who had no role in the destruction of those two
towers, who did not even know that they existed, could become homeless and
bereft of everything as a result of this incident”.
Claude Lelouch and Sean Penn’s respective episodes center on individuals who are unaware of the disaster happening on their television screens because they are lost in their own private worlds. These are two love stories with a lack, and the lack is filled thanks to what is commonly considered a loss: 9/11. A deaf woman in the Lelouch segment is writing a farewell letter to her lover, while he is caught up in the chaos near the WTC and returns home in a ruined state, like a ghost. The episode ends there, but it is almost certain that the letter will never reach the man; 9/11 thus restores their relationship. In Penn’s American allegory, an old widower, who still lives with his wife’s imaginary presence long after her death, complains about the darkness in the apartment where flowers cannot grow. When the Twin Towers collapse, sunlight returns through the window, and magically, the dried flowers bloom to become a beautiful bouquet. This makes the old man very happy but he is finally confronted with the “truth” and weeps: “my dear, I wish you could have seen this”.
The most experimental entry comes from Alejandro
González Iñárritu, who leaves the screen at black for the most of the 11
minutes, cut by flashes of bodies falling from the Twin Towers while we
constantly hear mourning chants and the newscasts of that day. When the black
screen gradually turns into white, an Arabic sentence followed by an English
translation appears on the screen: “Does
God’s light guide us or blind us?” Iñárritu confided
that he saw this project as an opportunity to express the sorrow he lived and
felt on that day. Several critics hailed this entry, as it appears to be the
only short in the anthology to relate directly to the 9/11 tragedy and to empathize
with the pain that those in the WTC on that day would have felt. He is also the
only director not trying to link the event with another story or incident.
Although Idrissa Ouedraogo’s story is the most
charming and funny of all, it shares the viewpoint of other films in the
anthology: local, and sometimes personal, concerns are more important than
global(ized) sensibilities. The director says: “Like all Africans, I was
shocked by the violence of the attacks. Like them, I felt sympathy, for the
pain of the families and for the American people. I am also waiting (like all
Africans everywhere) for the same surge of solidarity with an Africa beset by
malaria, AIDS, famine and drought”. The story revolves around a group of
schoolboys living in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, one of whom spies a man in town
who looks exactly like Osama bin Laden. The group decides to capture the
terrorist and receive the reward. But they fail to realize their dream and beg
Bin Laden to come back: “we all need you!”
9/11
did not only take place in New York City; it did not only take place at the
World Trade Center. September 11
offers only eleven of those countless stories; there are many other 9/11s.
Adnum, Mark. “World
Trade Center Vanishes Again. ” 2002. http://alternet.org
Howe,
Desson. “September 11 Lacks Direction. ” The Washington Post. September
5, 2003.
Levit,
Donald. ” Make No Mistake. ” N.d. http://www.reeltalkreviews.com
McLaren,
Peter. “The Dialectics of Terrorism: A Marxist Response to September 11.” Cultural Studies. Critical
Methodologies, 2
(2), (2002): 169-190.
Said, Edward. Interview with
D. Barsamian. The Progressive. November
2001. http://www.progressive.org
Alejandro
González Iñárritu
Samira
Makhmalbaf
Mira Nair
Idrissa
Ouedraogo
Danis
Tanovic