CBS’ “9/11”


March 9, 2002


BROOKE GLADSTONE: I went to an advanced screening of a special broadcast CBS has planned to mark the 6 month anniversary of the disaster called 9/11. The two hour program is built around striking footage gathered that day by French filmmakers Jules and Gedeon Naudet. The brothers were working on a film about the 9 month training of a firefighter recruit. He waited months for his crack at a fire, and then of course came that sunny morning in September when the world changed. Are you weary of that phrase -- "when the world changed?" How about "the defining moment of our time?" or "a day they will never forget?" You'll hear them all in the CBS presentation of 9/11 Sunday night. That isn't to say it isn't a remarkable document, a living historical document, just as its network producers declare it to be. For the first time all those who lived the horror secondhand can see it as the firefighters did from the very lobby of Tower One; can hear the gut-wrenching crash of falling bodies from the upper floors, can glimpse something of what it's like to be nearly buried under debris. Nor does the film sensationalize. We don't see those falling bodies; the burning bodies or the body parts recovered in the aftermath. It does not sensationalize, but it does in some measure exploit, because the producers and editors do not trust us. After all we've seen the last 6 months and all we've heard, they still insist on spelling it out with host Robert DeNiro and slow motion and melancholy music, even at one point a choir to recall us to the presence of a higher power. These devices are used sparingly, the producers point out, to make transitions and to say the things that needed to be said. But those things don't need to be said. The material is powerful enough, requiring none of the medium's traditional trappings to command our attention. 9/11 belongs to all of us, and I would have preferred if TV had for once -just once - not told me what I'm supposed to feel. [MUSIC]