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11/25/02:

from Salon.com-

The 9/11 movie Hollywood won't let you see -
"The "stridently anti-American" anthology film "11'09"01" is sometimes arty, sometimes preachy and sometimes brilliant. In Bush's America, it's also commercially untouchable..."

I'm sure many of us are waiting for this to find its way to Chicago somehow. The only two films I've seen that deal with this (besides watching fifteen cringing minutes of that horrid CBS Special wherein two French filmmakers stumble upon footage from inside the WTC while filming some otherwise inexplicably banal documentary on New York firefighters) was one series of shorts "personalizing" the events, but resulting in a rather vain two hours of navel gazing (I can't remember the name of this, and I haven't the time to look up this title right now, but it screened at Facets last April) and a second one of unnarrated footage from a videographer wandering Ground Zero on the day after. The second film complicates the typical news coverage of sweaty flag-raising heroism with a strong sense of the events sheer chaos. to be quite honest, after these, I really haven't any interest in 11Sep as a film subject, though i'm sure this won't stop hundreds of bad attempts in the next few years.

While on the subject of the political documentary, I had the chance to see The Trial of Henry Kissinger in Vancouver last month. I'm not familiar with the book that it's based on, but I found it to be a powerful use of subjective filmmaking that mining documents and popular footage toward a chilling indictment of Kissinger's will to power. If you need a few good quivers in your sack left-leaning political arguments, there's plenty to pull out of this film.

posted by jeremy @ 12:49 PM