Hacker Cinema
9/11
2002 · Film · documentary · 128 min
Directed by Gédéon Naudet, Jules Naudet, James Hanlon
An on-the-scene documentary following the events of September 11, 2001 from an insider's view, through the lens of two French filmmakers who simply set out to make a movie about a rookie NYC fireman and ended up filming the tragic event that changed our lives forever.
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3 comments on Hacker News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_(2002_film)
A crazy watch. Two brothers are making a documentary on rookie firefighters in late 2001. The crew goes out to look at a possible gas leak, a loud plane is heard, the camera pans up, and the North Tower is hit. It was one of three recordings of that hit and the only clear one. The rest of the documentary follows the crew into the towers. No one knows what's going on, the scenes are chaotic but also calm as the firefighters try to figure out what to do. Then the second tower falls while (one of the brothers) is in the first. One of the most incredible things I've ever seen.
I think it was well known when it came out, but it's been overshadowed especially since searching "9/11 documentary" gives a million results. If you want to see one of the craziest human experiences unfold in front of you, there's no other film like this.
Fixating on an uptick in the occurrence of a low probability event (hate crimes) is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like analyzing the performance of a website under a major DDOS and fixating on the fact that 99th percentile response times went up, while ignoring that the site stayed up. It’s sloppy analysis.
America’s domestic response to 9/11 was nothing short of amazing. Had Muslims killed 3,000 people in India in a similar attack, Muslims would have been driven out of their homes en masse. You would be able to see the effects of that on aggregate statistics such as income, health, wealth, etc. 9/11 had no effect on the fact that American Muslims are among the most affluent groups in America, much more so than white Christians (which is an achievement unmatched in pretty much any other country).
As a brown guy with a Muslim name who moved to the south in 2002, I didn’t even notice any anti-Muslim reaction. What I noticed was there were suddenly all these movies about civil liberties, and the TSA was conspicuously searching white women at the security line. (Contrast with say Japan or China, where to this day I have a nice airport lady follow me around before boarding.) That is of course not to say there wasn’t none. But when shit goes truly goes sideways for a minority in a country everyone notices it.
9/11, directed by the Naudet brothers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_(2002_film)
Notable for containing the only footage I know of that shows the first plane hitting the tower, because they were already in the middle of filming a documentary about New York firefighters. Here’s a clip of that part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miA8Td4oNcY