A Reflection
the winds of change begin to move
hurts of which, they've come before
telling silent sides to mend their ways
upset by random effects and sways
signs of peace have no place tonight
I slap you hard from the...
Watching from a Distance: September 11 as Spectacle
I switched on the TV soon after the planes hit, and there were the twin towers smouldering like giant cigarettes. As I watched this 'live' spectacle unfold from the safe distance of my lounge room in Melbourne,...
Terror, Disaster, Cinema and Reality – A Symposium
The relation between cinema and reality changed on September 11. All distinction between screen fantasy and the crises of history seemed to disappear in a flash. Immediately, people registered the horror they w...
Email from Australian Documentary Filmmaker Tom Zubrycki to Friends, New York, September 18 2001
Dear Friends,
It's hard to describe the last few days except that they've been traumatic and difficult – yet also strangely life-affirming.
Last Tuesday I was having breakfast with my Australian friend Ir...
Reality and Illusion
In a recent article published in the Melbourne Age's lifestyle supplement, The Good Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard castigated Steven Spielberg, and by extension the Hollywood Dream Factory, for using cinema to entert...
A Reflection
In Cinema veritas
“It was like a scene out of a movie.”
Everybody who saw September's* Grand-Guignol show has voiced or thought some variation of those words.
Of course it was. Our films reflect us. On t...
A Reflection
Has the cinema brought about September 11? Did the terrorists learn their tactics from the action blockbusters of Hollywood? Is the cinema culpable? Such questions presuppose that the cinema can determine or in...
The End of Cinema?
PROPOSITION: The wound to New York and the wound to cinema are inextricably linked and it is only when New York figures out what it needs to do to heal itself that cinema will be able to do the same.
Theodor...
On the Big Set
Following the advice of a few New York City friends and family, I decided to walk from my 34th Street location and into the core of Lower East Manhattan during a recent trip to the Big Apple.
Arriving, I fel...
A Reflection
One need not be a psychologist or a semiotician to recognize that the destruction of the World Trade Center's arrogant Twin Towers was a symbolic castration, annihilating the world's most widely known symbol of...
A Reflection
Some 50 days after that tragic day in September, which may come to divide our lives, I feel uncomfortable in speaking openly and honestly about the consequences of and responses to the event. This is an issue w...
A Reflection
Thank you for your invitation to reflect on the September 11 events.
Rather than emphasizing – as the American media have done, for example, for their own purposes – how “everything changed” on September 11,...