Never Forget, Always Remember: 9/11, 25 Years Later

What was 9/11? It depends who you ask. A news anchor would tell you it was a national tragedy; a conspiracist, an inside job; a leftist, an empire’s comeuppance; a film critic, the year’s biggest blockbuster; and your cousin, a meme. In his typically blasé fashion, Baudrillard called it “the absolute event,” while the renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen controversially called the attacks “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” A pattern emerges: from the moment American Airlines Flight 11 was piloted into the North Tower, it has been remarkably difficult to comprehensively define 9/11.

The attacks were encoded in the national memory over seemingly endless minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of media coverage. A quarter of a century later, it is tempting to think of 9/11 as a media event announcing material reality’s final, total subordination to the image—as Baudrillard said, “They did it. We wished it.” Yet to conceive of 9/11 in only these terms would be to overlook the lived horrors of the day and the insidious reverberations of a nationwide psychic trauma. From our historical vantage, the events of September 11 seem as fundamental to our current reality as the air we breathe. In recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001, Spectacle presents a selection of films that confront the phenomenal and psychic impact of the attacks, and the indelible scar they left on the world. There was before, and this is after.

Program 1: REICHSTAG 9/11 & DISINEGRATION LOOP 1.1

REICHSTAG 9/11

Dir. Ken Jacobs, 2016.

United States. 38 min.

Silent.

“The Eternalism is a method of making images more real. … Time and space are monumentalized.”

—Ken Jacobs

“I fear cruelty, despise it, and it exists. It exists. It’s often called patriotism.”

—Ken Jacobs

With Reichstag 9/11, Jacobs applies his Eternalism method to heavily distorted witness-recorded footage of the September 11 attacks. Here, the metaphysical qualities of the method assume a mournful tone—as we watch the towers repeatedly collapse, we simultaneously watch them rebuild themselves. It is as if Jacobs still sees them and their occupants there, as if the space itself wore a scar. The title alludes to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, suggesting a similar exploitation of a population’s fear and anger by an imperial power seeking to expand its reach.

WARNING: This film contains sequences of intense strobing effects.

Special thanks to Azazel Jacobs.

screening with

DISINTEGRATION LOOP 1.1

Dir. William Basinski, 2001.

United States. 62 min.

“All of a sudden the world had changed. It had taken on new meaning. As the days and months went by, people just cascaded into their own disintegration loops of fear, terror and anxiety. But also there was a rethinking going on about what had value. There was a lot of compassion in the public sphere amongst New Yorkers.”

—William Basinski

August of 2001 found William Basinski, uninspired and unemployed, at a personal nadir. Rummaging through his old work for inspiration, he rediscovered some loops of slowed-down muzak he had recorded on tape in the 1980s. He began digitizing the recordings, intending to use them for a new piece. In the process of rerecording the loops, the ferric oxide coating the tapes began to flake away, the fidelity of the recordings decreasing with each loop. The Disintegration Loops are thus a record of Basinski’s real-time capture of information disappearing into nothingness. Basinski completed his rerecording process on the morning of September 11, 2001, a few hours before he was scheduled to interview for a job at the World Trade Center.

That evening, from the rooftop of his Williamsburg loft on North 11th Street, Basinski played the loops and watched the smoke plumes from lower Manhattan billow out over the Upper Bay. He borrowed a friend’s video camera and recorded the last hour of the day’s light, until the black plume of smoke was indistinguishable f