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10. Catastrophe and Periphery: July 18, 1994, and September 11, 2001, on Film
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178 u 10 Catastrophe and Periphery: July 18, 1994, and September 11, 2001, on Film Hernán Feldman Caminó contra los jirones de fuego. Éstos no mordieron su carne, éstos lo acariciaron y lo inundaron sin calor y sin combustión. Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo. —Jorge Luis Borges (“Ruinas Circulares”) (He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.) Paul Virilio argues in City of Panic that we currently live in an era in which an informational war is taking place. Virilio contends that under the guiding premise of exacting revenge for the September 11 attacks, “ambition knows no bounds since it is now a matter of smashing the mirror of the real and thereby causing each and every one of us, whether allies or adversaries, to lose our perception of the true and the false, of the just and the unjust, the real and the virtual” (43). In sum, Virilio considers that this war has become a “fatal jumble of words and images that leads to the throwing up of this very last TOWER OF BABEL” (43). In a more cautious vein, nonetheless, Jean Baudrillard claims that, after a lack of significant events during the 1990s, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York became “the absolute event, the ‘mother’ of all events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have never taken place” (4). In arguing that “[t]he collapse of the towers is the major symbolic event” (47), Baudrillard shows how the image of the Twin Towers crumbling down became a primal scene of sorts that would exert an enduring influence on Western society for years to come. This notion of the primacy of the image in the midst of an informational war forging an absolute event whose critical mass allows it to engulf various events to the point that they have “never taken CATASTROPHE AND PERIPHERY 179 place” merits further analysis, and it thus leads us to consider the way in which September 11 has been operating in the public sphere; as it were, as a device with the Janusian ability to cast a powerful light whose revealing strength is sometimes equal to its blinding force.1 Concerned about these overpowering images that ostensibly flooded American television thereby constructing its viewership, French television producer Alain Brigand decided to sponsor 11’ 09” 01 (2002), a film intended to commemorate the first anniversary of the attacks. The project summoned eleven filmmakers from different parts of the world who would each deliver a short of eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame. “To me,” said Brigand, “it seemed that the rest of the planet had to be able to react, not just Americans and Europeans. I wanted to get people to talk, to bring forth other images” (quoted in Frodon). While Brigand reputedly intended to capture the universal dimension of September 11, it is notable that some of the shorts attempt to interrogate precisely how a “pure event,” in all its blazing enormity, can become the condition of possibility for a pervasive shadow to be progressively unfurled on the fabric of people’s memories. A shadow that, among other things, renders the 1990s as a period in which nothing significant happened, if we were to follow Baudrillard literally. This work intends to interrogate the avenues through which the release of 11’ 09’’ 01 dialogues with the production of 18-J, an Argentine film consisting of ten shorts that commemorated the tenth anniversary of July 18, 1994, the day in which the building of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) was leveled by a bomb that severed the lives of 85 people and injured another 200. In putting into question the aesthetic choices that these films channel as they attempt to commemorate tragic events, I will be seeking to gain a better understanding of the ways in which classical concepts such as center and periphery are apparently dissolved under the cloud of globalization only to reclaim their enduring weight, particularity and currency. Perhaps the best point of departure to discuss this phenomenon can be found in the short directed by Sean Penn, in which Ernest Borgnine plays an old widower struggling to move on with...