Now TV| ★★★✩✩
How long does it take for a world event to transition beyond lived experience, to become a part of History capital ‘H’? Effects may be ongoing and ramifications still be felt, but time will always do what it’s always done, rush ever onwards.
Hence for my generation, it’s not through memory that Neil Armstrong walking on the moon or the murder of JFK live on, it’s through the films, books and television that were inspired by memory. The attacks of 9/11 though, may have a different quality for our children; it’s better suited to resisting those currents, to still linger at the forefront of our collective psyche, due to it coinciding with the age of video.
As such, Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 has an abundant amount of footage to draw upon as it retells the events of the planes hitting the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Unfortunately, it’s precisely the ubiquitous nature of those images, that work to lessen their impact. They might be 20 years old, but with their quality, detail, and the endless rewatching, it’s made it more difficult to be able to develop perspective. That quality’s also understandably lacking in the initial testimonies of survivors and those impacted that artist Ruth Sergel recorded less than a year after the fact in a specially built plywood box.
Memory Box 2021-1-
The 'Memory Box'
Parents, spouses, and friends of those killed, are still in shock, still raw, still trying to make sense of their tragedy. It might’ve been healing for some of them to try and talk through their pain, but it feels exploitative watching it. Observing the survivors, onlookers, and volunteers trying to process their helplessness and guilt isn’t much easier.
A young Jewish Orthodox bystander, Eric Tischler brings a welcome matter of factness, “I saw someone distraught and tried to help them, then I took some photos because what else was I meant to do”, but with others there’s an earnest solipsism that makes you wince. A young man rapping comes across less as a means of coping, and more as a way to centre himself. Another man wails about one of the terrorists who’d been living in the US, “How could he not fall in love with us?”
Fortunately this is a documentary of two halves, and as some of the same subjects return to the box 20 years later, the bubble of imagery that keeps 9/11 frozen is popped. Through their continued stories of how they’ve healed and moved on, on the influence on their lives and the lessons learnt, in how they’ve physically aged, and in recent events and how America has changed, we get a welcome sense of time having passed. It’s just a shame it takes so long to get there. Watching this documentary is like a branch you’ve been staring at for a long time eventually becoming dislodged from the bank and pushed further down the river. There is satisfaction, but also relief that now you might finally be able to see it from a different angle.
