From sw.maher at student.qut.edu.au Tue Sep 26 04:27:46 2006 From: sw.maher at student.qut.edu.au (sw.maher at student.qut.edu.au) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:27:46 +1000 (EST) Subject: [multipliCity] that anniversary Message-ID: <20060926122746.CHL28985@mail-msgstore01.qut.edu.au> Dear all, the recent anniversary of September 11 has stirred sufficient musings in me to finally make another contribution to the list. Get comfortable it is pretty lengthy! I was quite unprepared for the volume of material that accompanied this year's anniversary of September 11. Personally, I did not attribute a lot of weight to the idea of a 5-year anniversary but it seems when you live in a culture structured around Base 10, half of a 10-year aniversary is obvisouly something to get excited about. The first media event that signalled the oncoming tsunami of September 11 'tributes' that I came across was previews for the feature film, United 93. Then slowly but steadily the documentaries, telemovies and other features began to flow down the portals. One of the most unusual or disconcerting, was the documentary, Falling Man, following the story of the photograph of a man falling from one of the Twin Towers. The photograph created considerable controversy in 2001 and was pulled from news services soon after its initial release. It is a very powerful image, showing a man in freefall, upside down with nothing in the background other than the hard geometry of Tower 1. It is at once an abstract, serene and terrifying image. There is something foetal about the man's positioning which, through the photograph, literally sees him suspended in time and space. As an abstraction it appears almost choreographed, as documentary evidence it is a horrific moment frozen in time. I was quite uncomfortable watching the documentary which followed the photographer and the stories of individuals and events leading up to September 11. So it was with little reluctance that when my children interrupted my viewing I was happy to switch it off and attend to their nutritional needs. If I was ambivalent about this program, I had no such reservations upon seeing the trailer for Oliver Stone's epic - 9/11, "starring" Nicholas Cage. I had a veritable corporeal reaction - or put simply, my stomach churned. I was still surprised by this reaction because on the whole I have a pretty high threshold of tolerance for all things Hollywood, one that is assisted by low expectations. However, upon seeing images from this film, I was truly repulsed. The problem I think is that, depsite being used to Stone's cinematic taxonomy of American history, it is primarily sixties history thathe addresses through films like Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, JFK and The Doors. These travesties of history are palatable enough given the distance of time and the almost playful intertextual role these films function in relation to their depicted histories. Yet when it comes to recent history, or events that are still shaping the current historical paradigm, the buffer of time, just as in comedy, can make all the difference. When time and its buffer is absent, a big budget, melodramatic, Hollywood rendering comes across as premature if not grotesque. All the current crop of September 11 material reveals the capricious nature of popular culture which, in postmodern style, scours the social landscape looking for anything to represent, codify and commodify. September 11 represents a feeding frenzy because it so precisely fits our postmodern palate. It was after all a big moment of 'real' history, coded in the most spectacular of ways and deriving its force by its referentialy to Hollywood action and spectacle. Most importantly, it was also thoroughly mediated, especially the Twin Towers. So Hollywood gained fresh fodder but it is actually postmodern fodder, as this recent spate of 'product' are in fact remakes of this thoroughly mediated moment. As a remake, anything to do with September 11, is even more irresistable. Finally, one recent cinematic exploitation of Sep 11 and the Twin Towers did manage to employ its iconography in a highly poignant and understated manner. Of all people, it came from Steven Spielberg, in the film, Munich (2005). At the end of the Munich, the Mossad operatives played, coincidentally by two Australians, Geoffrey Rush and Eric Bana, discuss Bana's refusal to return to Israel and its intelligense services. The final scene involves the characters walking along the New York riverfront, somewhere up near the Bronx. The Bana character mentions wanting to be with his family, remaining in the US (New York) and getting away from the turmoil of the middle east. The Rush character is disapproving and refuses an invitation to attend a meal at Bana's. While the scene is unfolding, and remembering that the film is set between 1972- 1975, the camera movement slowly tracks around the two characters as they walk and talk. Meanwhile, in the background, the New York skyline creeps into the mise-en-scene. In the foreground are anonymous buildings from the northern end of Manhattan, and then slowly, far away at the southern tip of Manhattan island, amidst the familiar haze of urban smog, the twin towers! enter the frame. The characters continue their conversation, the camera steadies, they exit the frame, and the final shot in the film is this long view of the Manahattan skyline. It is a supreme moment in cinematic mise-en-scene because this final single image contains within it so much meaning and testifies to the cotninued power of cinema in our image saturated present. In this final scene, the twin towers have been digitally re-constructed, but not in any obvious way. They are in the far distance and veiled in the urban haze of smog and moist air. The effect is not only thoroughly convincing in a denotative fashion, but it is also highly connotative. Being in the far distance, almost at the vanishing point of the horizon, the image of the twin towers powerfully evokes the looming future and the eventual arrival of terrorism on American shores. They work within the film, undermining the Eric Bana character and his desire to flee middle eastern turmoil for American sanctuary. And in a highly postmodern manner, this digital reconstruction comments on their recent treatment. They reify the present through this digital resurrection, countering the immediate impulse that followed in the wake of September 11, which was to 'airbrush' away any traces or reminders of the towers. Sex in the City and Spiderman were the two biggest offenders. In the! opening credit sequence of Sex in the City, a shot of the Twin Towers was replaced by a glossy image of a more permanent New York icon, the Empire State Building. While Spiderman pulled all of its publicity material which featured a gigantic spiderweb spun between the Twin Towers. Sequences in the film featuring the towers were similarly pulled. So it is interesting that these enormous markers of history continue to be negotiated in this way by cinema and popular culture in general. The return of the towers is the return of the repressed which, by its very nature, is confronting. And in light of the recent efforts surrounding this five year anniversay of September 11, Munich continues to give me hope that even Hollywood cinema can represent this history without resorting to the vainglory of an Oliver Stone approach. Sean Maher Sean Maher PhD Researcher Film and Television Creative Industries Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Precinct Z6 The Hub Musk Avenue Kelvin Grove QLD 4059