11'09"01 : Cinema Catastrophe
by Carmen Nge


Every American post-September 11 will likely be able to tell you where they were and what they were doing when the World Trade Center was hit by two hijacked airplanes and then crumbled to Ground Zero. Everyone else in the world who knows of America and New York will more likely than not be able to tell you the same. In this age of visual dominance and media conglomeration, American hegemony has become absolute. In a world where George Bush’s every tic becomes international news, to escape from events American feels like a guilty holiday because somewhere in the back of my mind is the awareness that falling behind on what’s happening in America is falling behind on what will happen to the world. The reach of American foreign policy has never been so vast, so uncompromising, so blatant.

Perhaps that is why I steered clear of anniversary commemorations of 9/11 this year. But the screening of 11'09"01 at the Asia-Europe Institute (AEI), University Malaya on the 8th of this month—in part to honor the third anniversary of 9/11—changed my mind.

I had heard about this film when I was in New York last year but had no opportunity to see it because it only enjoyed very limited release in a handful of urban, art house locations and university film theatres. Comprising 11 short films by 11 filmmakers from 11 countries, 11'09"01 is the brainchild of French television director, Alain Brigand, who invited the filmmakers to conceive of a short segment, each lasting 11 minutes and nine seconds within the cinematic frame. The idea eventually culminated in a remarkable film that garnered praise and acclaim at film festivals around the world but never made it to the big screens across America. Some have denounced it as anti-American while others berate the narrow-mindedness of film distributors and exhibitors in the United States for its lack of wide release. The truth is that the film contains no unified message and proclaims no universal dictums and this is precisely why it should be seen. Despite Bush’s valiant attempts at painting the world in black and white extremes, 11'09"01 shows us that history is never so categorical or clear-cut.

The films of Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Danis Tanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Amos Gitai (Israel) and Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), illustrate exactly how the lens of history is very much subjective; perceptions of 9/11 across the world are as uneven and nuanced as American understanding of world events. And if truth indeed comes from the mouths of children, then Makhmalbaf’s piece, which opens 11'09"01, is a curiously whimsical but nevertheless insightful debate about God, religion and tragedy.

A young Afghan schoolteacher tries to explain to her kindergarten age student refugees that an event of great significance has occurred in America but they are oblivious. They are more intent about a villager who fell into a freshly dug well and a neighbour who broke his leg than the destruction of the World Trade Center. As their teacher grow more and more exasperated and impatient, the children gleefully chortle, chuckle and debate whether God can fly airplanes and if he would want to create new people after destroying old ones.

The delightful honesty and directness of children are echoed in Ouedraogo’s short film about a young African boy who spots Osama bin Laden in the streets of his village and discovers that the latter’s capture could yield him a handsome US$25 million reward. Together with his friends, they imagine using the money to cure his sick mother and to rid the world of AIDS, meningitis and a whole host of other illnesses and poverty. They contemplate giving the money to their elders but then dismiss the thought because the older folk will only spend it on “wine, women and cigarettes.” Thus begin their hunt for Osama, trailing him along dusty pathways and meandering riverways, capturing him on film as he prays, and chasing him all the way to the airport, brandishing their spears and guns. Their earnestness underlies the urgency of their mission: "Osama, come back! We need you! We need that money!" they cry when he boards the plane, beyond their grasp.

The two films convey, with remarkable simplicity and humorous candor, how the events of 9/11 must be understood in the context of a world where poverty, sickness, war and death is lived daily but elicits no global attention. In an interview with Alain Brigand, Ouedraogo says: “Like all Africans, I was shocked by the violence of the (9/11) 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.” By turning our eyes away from the spectacle of the World Trade Center towers, the filmmakers ask us to consider other human tragedies occurring elsewhere with greater frequency and higher casualties.

Taking this impulse one step further, Ken Loach invites us to consider a tragic event perpetrated by the same America that now cloaks itself with the shroud of victimhood. Loach’s film is a mini-documentary about a September 11 few people today are aware: the day in 1973 when the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende was overthrown with the backing of the Nixon administration. The black and white footage of the bloody coup, the reign of terror of puppet leader General Pinochet, and the 30,000 deaths that followed, give us a glimpse of the kind of terrorism that the United States has inflicted upon the rest of the world on a calculated, concerted basis.

According to Loach, his short film aims "to point out the irony of the situation that on September 11, 1973, the United States had inspired a terrorist attack. In fact, there is a case for saying that the major terrorists of the second half of the 20th century have been the Americans." The Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and Shohei Imamura from Japan would agree. Both directors give us films that interrogate and challenge the naked aggression of the U.S., whether propagating Zionist tendencies in Palestine or dropping the A-bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Films set in the U.S. convey domestic dramas but are less charged with overt political implications. Mira Nair (India) explores racism and anti-Islamic sentiment in the streets of New York after 9/11, while Frenchman Claude Lelouch tackles an unusual subject: a deaf-mute’s experience of the tragedy. The lone American representative, Sean Penn, presents a beautifully shot, aesthetically somber and devastatingly poignant elegy on the state of American consciousness.

His is a film about a pudgy, elderly man who goes through the mundane routine of the everyday firmly trapped in the illusion of his wife’s presence. He spends time talking to her, laying out her clothes and gazing at her flowers even though she has since passed away. When the towers collapse, his dark, dank apartment—overshadowed for years by the looming symbol of American economic dominance—is miraculously bathed in a golden light and the once dead flowers on his windowsill burst into bloom. Faced with such beauty, he can only weep for the pain of his wife’s death becomes all too real.

Penn’s film is a provocative and philosophical engagement with American public consciousness. Like his film’s protagonist, the American people have grown fat and complacent, living in a world of illusion propped up by financial might and superpower status. When 9/11 happened, Americans were faced with an event that blinded them with its impact and consequence. In a sense, Penn captures the bittersweet aspect of what it means to be a conscious human being—it gives us sight, it allows a new bloom of ideas, but it also causes us to grief because we know that we can no longer envelop ourselves in the safety of illusion.

Perhaps no segment denies us the safety of illusion better than Alejandro González Iñárritu’s haunting experimentation in the limits of formal cinematic expression. His film is almost exclusively a blacked-out screen; we only hear sounds—actual sounds and voices taken from the within the World Trade Center and on board the hijacked flights—but we see nothing but flashes of people throwing themselves out of the WTC windows, committing suicide in the most public arena imaginable: live simulcast television.

Iñárritu explains that the images he used of the people falling is “as a metaphorical representation of Icarus. It was not only this man but all of us who were falling. I put the tower collapsing as a metaphorical representation of the Tower of Babel in which everyone speaks a different language and no one can communicate with each other, thus, the collapse of a romantic idea of global civilization.”

If, according to Makhmalbaf, “the process of globalisation is more reliant on the power of image-making than anything else,” then Iñárritu consciously resists the lure of such an overdetermined process. Instead, he shows us that the power of our collective imaginations is far greater than we have been socialized to believe—perhaps even powerful enough to alter the course of history in the long-term.

In the final analysis, it is impossible to discuss 11'09"01 as a single entity because each short film segment has its own character, creative impetus and cinematic style. But there was no denying the extent to which, taken as a whole, the film assaulted me with the kind of visceral, unabating intensity that left me numb and speechless when I exited AEI’s auditorium. A great many in the audience remarked that 11 films were too much, too intense for too short a time. Initially, I felt the same.

After a time, and upon reflection, I realized that we give in to American hegemony, we become complicit in perpetuating its spread because the heterogeneity of the world is too much to consider. War, death and catastrophe in Iraq, Russia, Indonesia, Palestine, China and turmoil in our own backyard have become too much for us to take in, to discuss, debate and consider as citizens of the world. So we retreat into the needless, inconsequential ‘too much-ness’ of life given to us by capitalism’s lifeline: consumer power. We like that there are too many choices in the supermarkets, too many programs and channels on television, too many discounts to count at too many malls to visit, offering too many sales to occupy our free time. We welcome this ‘too much’ because it saves us from having to consider the overwhelming effects of imperialism and globalization in all other facets of our lives.

After all, isn’t it ironic that George Bush’s clarion call to the American public after the tragedy of 9/11 is to ask them to shop? Catastrophe meets commerce—capitalism never had it so good.

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This piece was published in the October 2004 issue of Options2, The Edge


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The Asia Europe Institute at University Malaya screens international films every Wednesday for free at 8:30 p.m. For an updated listing, please check out: http://www.asia-europe-institute.org/