September 11
Various directors
Fri-Thurs Sept 5-11 at the Varsity.
Timing is everything. I saw 11'09"01 (now renamed September 11) on the first anniversary of 9/11. A few days prior, a U.S. critic who saw it deemed it "anti-American." People generally thought that was an extreme reaction, but two years and two American wars after the tragedy you have to wonder what these 11 directors from 11 countries who made films exactly 11 minutes, nine seconds, and one frame long would have come up with today--and you'd have to expect that audiences would read them differently too.
That's not to say 11'09"01 isn't a thoughtful response to September 11, but again, timing is everything. A recent trip to New York City two days after the blackout showed that New Yorkers are all about business as usual, although one resident remarked that the first dark hours saw many out on the street poised for a terrorist attack. Sure the tourists in Times Square were hyukking it up for the TV cameras, but the citizens of NYC were not going to be taken by surprise. Given what's happened in the world since 9/11, the films of 11'09"01 are less and less surprising too.
Take the measured responses from the likes of Iran's Samira Makhmalbaf, Egypt's Youssef Chahine, Bosnia's Danis Tanovic, the UK's Ken Loach, Israel's Amos Gitai, and Japan's Shohei Imamura. All of their films are firm in the cautionary context that war, violence, and terrorism happen all over the world, not just in America. ("Anti-American"? To some, sure.) The films of India's Mira Nair, France's Claude Lelouch, and Sean Penn take place in the U.S. and in the shadow of the fallen WTC (Penn's does literally). They, for many reasons outside the boundaries of film art (homeland security and U.S. foreign policy, for two), unfortunately feel a bit slight now.
Two of the best: Idrissa Ouedraogo's comedic film about three Burkina Faso youths hunting Osama bin Laden for reward money smartly plays with the ideas of profit and war; and Alejandro González Iñárritu's near-experimental montage of sounds and images from 9/11 is horrifying and abstract--perhaps the closest illustration I've seen of America's collective and fractured media memory of that terrible day.
