Before we are inundated with what will no doubt be a lions share of indifferent movies about the events of 9/11, take the time to see UNDERGROUD ZERO, a thoughtful, intelligent take on what that day and its aftermath mean.
The film is an anthology of thirteen short films commissioned by producers and filmmakers Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi as meditation on the attacks of 9/11. Each short examines one facet of the emotions and thoughts that ran through each of us on that day. Some are exquisitely edited kaleidoscopes, like Eva Ilona Brzeskis CHINA DIARY (9/11) that pieces together scenes her September 2001 trip to China with her mother, using serene clips of the Great Wall and verdant gardens cut with shots of the TV in her hotel as it shows the towers collapsing. Later we hear her asking a Beijing resident if she has seen what happened on television. Television? is the puzzled reply.
Some are less artistic but no less powerful, like THE VOICE OF THE PROPHET, an oddly prescient piece by Robert Edwards that shows an interview with Ric Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, New York, whom he filmed in his office on the 44th floor of the World Trade Center in 1998. A veteran of two armies and of actions in Cypress, Rhodesia, and Vietnam, Rescorla explains in a clear, spare military style why Americas actions abroad will make the next battlefield the United States itself, with the enemy at our gates terrorists, not organized armies engaged in traditional assaults. Closer to home, and in many ways equally instructive, is Caveh Zahedis THE WORLD IS A CLASSROOM, which starts a few days before 9/11 with Zahedi explaining to his students what his documentary film class will involve and then shows students verbalizing what the bombings made them feel. Conflict resolution takes on an immediacy for these students when one students unhappiness with class policy escalates into class-stopping confrontations that seem insoluble.
From a little girl in the suburbs to Tibetan Monks to a tearful 14-year-old rapper from Tribeca, individuals try to make sense and come to terms with a world that changed radically and in an instant. UNDERGROUND ZERO reflects that new world with all its newfound national pride, balancing insecurity, ambiguity, and a search for answers that might not be there. Reflecting that, one of the most haunting and cautionary of the shorts for me is 21, a three-minute film by Laura Plotkin. Its a first-person account from Niomi, a Brooklyn-born and -bred woman with the accent to prove it, who was walking down the street ten days after 9/11 when a stranger grabbed her by the shoulders, spat in her face, and told her to go back to the Middle East. In gritty black-and-white, and in tight close-ups of her face dominated by large and still-scared dark eyes, she tells of people watching the assault and urging her attackers on. Tellingly, Plotkin never identifies Niomis ethnicity.
The film ends with UNTITLED by Ira Sachs. Six eerie minutes long and without sound of any kind, Sachs shows us the faces of those lost on 9/11. Three seconds on each face, young, old, male, female, black, white, Asian, brown, each looks out at us, reminding us that no matter what the politics that took their lives, each unique soul is gone forever because of events, because of foreign policy, or because of religious fanaticism, in which they had no say and over which they had no control.
UNDERGROUND ZERO offers a tough catharsis for 9/11. Dealing as it does with who we were as a nation, why we are what we are now, and what we may become as a result, in probing, sometimes troubling ways. It should be required viewing, no matter what your take on that day.
Your Thoughts?