WTC Uncut; 7 Days in September
Directed by Steven Mudrick and Bryan Kortis
7 Days in September
Directed by Steve Rosenbaum
Any lingering doubt that images can inflict pain were erased by Sept. 11. The sight of the burning towers doesn't just haunt tv screens one year after the attacks; it haunts the minds of Americans and most citizens of the civilized world (the part of the world that doesn't consider the deliberate targeting of civilians acceptable). It was an act of mass murder that hit so many phobias (fear of heights, fire, air travel and enclosed spaces) simultaneously.
Yet the horror went beyond a laundry list of individualized frights. There was something primal, something universally appalling, in the image of those twin, featureless columns-so smooth, so tall, so perfectly blank-gashed by planes, billowing smoke and fire. The towers reached toward the sky; they were nearly three decades old, made (seemingly) permanent by movies, tv shows, posters, postcards, snapshots; they were brought down in 102 minutes, and we were powerless to stop it.
A year later, the event still seems unreal, unthinkable. It wasn't just an act of mass murder, but of cultural rape-an attempt to ruin our lives in one fell swoop. The World Trade Center was a center of East Coast life-a business nexus, a transportation hub, a shopping center and a navigational point for residents and tourists alike. (Any New Yorker who's been downtown in the past year has probably spun around on a street corner, looking for the towers and feeling lost without them.)
As a critic of both film and television, the sheer volume of 9/11 documentaries doesn't bother me, nor does the fact that some of them are too simplistic, too slick, too sentimental, too everything. Human beings work out their emotions through words and images, and the moving image combines the two; an event this momentous was bound to inspire statements by anyone with access to a camera and an editing deck. A wise man once said that 90 percent of everything is crap, but speaking as someone who's seen about 80 percent of the nonfiction tv specials and theatrical works on 9/11 currently available for viewing, I can report that the ratio of crap to art appears to be much lower this time-perhaps because the emotional stakes for viewers are much higher. I suspect the searing immediacy of the attacks (especially for East Coast residents) made every 9/11 filmmaker a bit more inclined to do a good job instead of falling back on cliche.
Two new theatrical documentaries, WTC Uncut and 7 Days in September, fit the bill, and approach a by-now familiar subject in surprising ways. The more impressive of the two is WTC Uncut, mainly because its formal daring seems like such an honest and risky attempt to think out of the box. Directed by New York-based filmmakers Steven Mudrick and Bryan Kortis, the film is a feature-length experimental piece consisting of a single unbroken piece of footage: a shot of the burning towers taken from the window of Mudrick's production office on W. 30th St., uncut except for a single pause to change tapes.
The image is backed with ambient noise and recordings of eyewitness interviews taken after the fact by Japanese documentarians, FDNY and NYPD radio chatter, news-radio reports and audio tracks from public events (including prayer vigils, war and peace rallies and the first baseball game after 9/11). Comparisons with Andy Warhol's Empire State are inevitable. There are differences, of course-Warhol's film was an eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Bldg., while WTC Uncut zooms in and out as the World Trade Center burns and then collapses. But both films ask you to meditate on a familiar image, and think about it as both a structure and a symbol-something that occupied both field of vision and our cultural imagination.
The simplicity of the concept is breathtaking. When you say the numbers that represent that day-nine one one-the listener instantly pictures the towers on fire; what better way to universalize the tragedy than by asking us to look at that image and listen to the range of emotions it inspired?
The audio of WTC Uncut is a psychic soundscape. A 1010 WINS correspondent calls in at 10:50 a.m. to say, "I'm standing on the top of my roof and I'm looking at the World Trade Center and there's a huge hole in it and there's a fire in the building." Over the course of the next 87 minutes, we hear an FDNY dispatcher ordering all engines to take the West Side Hwy., toward downtown; radio reports of bomb scares all over the city; bagpipes; a bugler playing taps; a man rhapsodizing about the American flag ("It's gorgeous, it's beautiful...against a blue sky, you can't beat it"); a peace rally speaker declaring, "Making more victims will not end terrorism." No political point of view is favored because the monstrousness of the event pulverized politics, uniting America in fear and rage.
Hearing WTC Uncut's audio collage in conjunction with the sight of the burning towers is a disorienting experience. It's as if you're eavesdropping on the whole city, even the whole country simultaneously-or as if the towers themselves had gained sentience and become telepathic in their death throes, capable of picking up the thoughts and feelings of Americans as they perished (and even after they perished). The unbroken shot of the World Trade Center unintentionally (and luckily) complements the audio track, zooming in and then zooming back out, attempting to confront the image and then recoiling in shock.
WTC Uncut screens on Tues., Sept. 10, 7 p.m., at the New-York Historical Society, and on Weds., Sept. 11, at 1 & 3 p.m., at the American Museum of the Moving Image.