“9/11” is one of the most difficult documentaries I’ve ever watched, but also one of the best.

In the summer of 2001, French filmmakers Jules and Gédéon Naudet, with the help of FDNY firefighter James Hanlon, began work on a documentary meant to show the experiences of a rookie firefighter during his first assignment to a firehouse. Their subject was Antonios “Tony” Benetatos, a probationary firefighter or “probie” assigned to the Engine 7 Ladder 1 Battalion 1 firehouse near City Hall in Lower Manhattan. After an interesting but relatively uneventful first few months of filming, Jules, wanting more experience behind the camera, accompanied the firehouse’s Battalion chief Joseph Pfeifer on a routine call one morning, while Gédéon stayed behind at the firehouse. It was the morning of September 11, 2001.

While Jules filmed and the firefighters investigated an odor of gas call less than a mile from the World Trade Center, they were suddenly startled to hear jet engines roaring directly above them. What turned out to be American Airlines Flight 11 streaked overhead, impacting the North Tower of the WTC seconds later. Jules captured the clearest known footage of this first impact on the Twin Towers.

What followed was a harrowing, horrifying, and remarkable playing out of two parallel perspectives of the events of that morning, as Jules went with the fire company to the WTC while Gédéon filmed the reactions of hundreds of stunned people on the streets as well as Tony’s unexpected vigil as the sole firefighter left to watch the firehouse. Jules’ footage is the only known surviving video taken from inside the WTC as the attacks were happening, and includes him and numerous emergency personnel running for shelter as the South Tower collapsed above them.

The resulting documentary is simultaneously too appalling to watch, and too compelling to look away from. Aside from interviews with the people involved with the film, there are few cutaways to anything that the firefighters and the Naudet brothers did not see themselves - one gets a real sense of the confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety of that day that even those right on the scene experienced. The film, which was first released on DVD and aired on CBS in March 2002, is a snapshot of a time when victims were still being recovered from Ground Zero, when the original Engine 7 and Ladder 1 trucks remained buried beneath tons of debris, when the far-reaching impacts of the attacks and the subsequent “War on Terror” were still just beginning to play out. It offers very little in the way of commentary on the socio-political implications of the day, or on the reactions of politicians or the wider public outside of New York, focusing instead on the experiences, challenges, and lingering pain of those relative few who actually lived through it - and those who did not. And at this, it excels tremendously.

Today, some of you may feel compelled to watch some of the myriad documentaries, news footage, and other accounts of 9/11. I highly recommend including 9/11 in your viewings if you haven’t seen it before. It can be watched for free on YouTube, in the US at least (search “9/11 Naudet brothers” and it should come up).

Thanks for taking the time to read this. And thanks most of all to the first responders who worked unflinchingly to save lives at the WTC and Pentagon that day, in some cases at the cost of their own.

Submitted September 11, 2023 at 09:35PM by SmoreOfBabylon https://ift.tt/FE6Ap9P