Screening 9/11 and its aftermath in film and media studies

Image from In America (Jim Sheridan, 2002), the first film to be (partly) shot in New York after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Seán Crosson's article "‘They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever pa, ‘cause we're the people'..." (2008)

The absence of the Twin Towers from the post-9/11 New York City skyline posed a number of dilemmas for the creators and producers of television shows and movies that were ‘symbolically’ set in New York City after 9/11. Whilst the World Trade Center towers had been destroyed, editors in studio lots in California faced the prospect of the late 2001 ratings season commencing with stock reels of New York City that prominently featured the Towers prior to 9/11. This posed an odd dilemma for the producers of television shows such as Friends, Sex and the City, and Spin City, programs in which the Twin Towers often appeared as a backdrop and a powerful signifier of being in New York City. The response seemed universal – the Twin Towers must be removed from the tele-visual pop-cultural locations. They needed to be purged, exorcised and air- brushed out of the shot. But by airbrushing out the Towers, the producers have purged post-9/11 television of more than just the steel and concrete of the iconic buildings. I suggest that this purging is powerful, a little odd, and deeply symbolic. In order to recover, perhaps some space – and some forgetting, if only temporary – was needed. But I argue that the missing Towers also represented a missing terror, a missing city. It was as though the creators and producers of some post-9/11 television believed that the world’s viewers would have no stomach for seeing images of a pre-9/11 New York City – a city that in many respects no longer existed. Perhaps the problem lies in how the destruction of the Twin Towers was witnessed – live on TV, in real-time, as heinous, immediate and real violence. It was ugly, sickening, horrific, terrifying. Yet it was also difficult to look away. [Luke John Howie, 'Representing Terrorism: Reanimating Post-9/11 New York City', International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 3, No 3 (2009)]

It is the eve of another anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America.

Film Studies For Free respectfully remembers the tragic and traumatic events of nine years ago tomorrow, and other closely related ones since, with a list of links to important, insightful, and openly accessible studies of the cultural depiction and (re)media(tiza)tion of the 9/11 attacks, as well as of their aftermath.

• Marco Abel, 'Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11', PMLA, 118.5, 2003 
• Raúl Álvarez Gómez, 'Terrorism and Social Panic in British Fantastic Cinema', in The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror edited by Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson, InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009 (scroll to p. 3 in pdf)
• Kari Andén-Papadopoulus, 'The Trauma of Representation: Visual Culture, Photojournalism and the September 11 Terrorist Attack', NORDICOM Review 24, No. 2 (December 2003): 89-104
• Francis A. Beer and G. R. Boynton, 'Globalizing Terror', Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003
• James Brassett, 'Cosmopolitan Sentiments After 9-11? Trauma and the Politics of Vulnerability', Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, Issue 2 (2010)
• Gordon V. Briggs, White Masculinity in the American Action Film Pre and Post 9/11, Masters Thesis, College of Fine Arts of Ohio University, June 2007
• Mary Caputi, 'Ground Zero, an American Origin', Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003
• Steven Alan Carr, 'Staying for Time: The Holocaust and Atrocity Footage in American Public Memory', Violating Time: History, Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. Christina Lee, ed. New York NY: Continuum, 2008
• Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra, 'Chameleon Conservatism: Post-9/11 Rhetorics of Innocence', Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003 
• Dana L. Cloud, 'Therapy, Silence, and War: Consolation and the End of Deliberation in the “Affected” Public', Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003
• David Crawford, 'Realism vs. Reality TV in the War on Terror: Artworks as Models of Interpretation', Geometer, January 19, 2009 
• Seán Crosson, "‘They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever pa, ‘cause we're the people' - Misrepresenting death in Jim Sheridan's In America (2003)", Estudios Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies, Issue 3, (2008)
• Sven Cvek, 9/11: Event, Trauma, Nation, Globalization, PhD Thesis, University of Zagreb, 2009
• Marieke De Goede, 'Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination', Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155
• Arne De Boever, 'The Politics of Retirement: Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men after September 11', Image and Narrative, 10.2, 2009 
• Elizabeth Ellsworth, 'Media and the Un-Representable: The Brief Time of Audience-as-Witness to 9/11', MIT3: Television in Transition International Conference, Cambridge, May, 2003
• Phoebe Fletcher, 'Apocalyptic Machines: Terror and Anti-Production in the Post-9/11 Splatter Film', in The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror edited by Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson, InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009 (scroll to p. 81 in pdf)
• Gabriel Garcia Mingorance, 'Monsters, Feérie Fear, Threaten Global And the Uncanny in the Cinema of M. Night Shyamalan', in The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror edited by Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson, InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009 (scroll to p. 23 in pdf)
• Silvia Herreros de Tejada, 'Drumming the Horror Away', in The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror edited by Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson, InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009 (scroll to p. 47 in pdf)
• Will Higbee, 'Ungrounding the Narrative of Nation" - Review: David Martin-Jones (2006)', Film-Philosophy, 13.1, April 2009 
• Luke John Howie, 'Representing Terrorism: Reanimating Post-9/11 New York City', International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 3, No 3 (2009)
• Luke Howie, 'I’ll be there for you – the meanings and consequences of 9/11 in Friends', TASA: Re-imagining Sociology, The University of Melbourne, December 2-5, 2008
  
• Carolyn Jess-Cooke, 'Narrative and Mediatized Memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Scope, Issue 8, June 2007 
• Jonathan Kahana, excerpt from Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (Columbia University Press, 2008)
• E. Ann Kaplan, 'Feminist Futures: Trauma, the Post-9/11 World and a Fourth Feminism?', Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol 4 #2 April 2003
• Mina Karavanta on C. Cilano’s From Solidarity to Schisms », European journal of American studies [Online], Reviews 2010-1, document 7, Online since 16 March 2010
• Laurie A. Manwell, 'Faulty Towers of Belief: Part II. Rebuilding the Road to Freedom of Reason', Journal of 9/11 Studies, August 2007
• Alan S. Marcus, '“It Is as It Was”: Feature Film in the History Classroom', Social Studies, March/April 2005
• Peter Knight, 'Conspiracy Theories about 9/11', Centre for International Politics Working Paper Series, No. 34, August 2007
• Allen Meek, 'Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture, Transformations, Issue No. 15, November 2007 
• William Merrin, 'Total Screen: 9/11 and the Gulf War Reloaded', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,  Volume 2, Number 2 (July 2005)  
• Robin Marie Merrick Murphy, 'Post-9/11 Rhetorical Theory and Composition Pedagogy: Fostering Trauma Rhetorics as Public Space, PhD Thesis, Bowling Green State University, August 2007
• John S. Nelson, 'Rhetorics of Response to 9/11: The Aftermath of Terror', Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003
• John S. Nelson, 'Four Forms for Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir', Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003
• Marc A. Ouellette, “I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This”: Pedagogy and Allegory in “Post 9/11” Video Games', Game Studies, Vol. 8, Issue 1, 2008
• Chrysavgi Papagianni, 'American Multiculturalism after 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives, by Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul', European journal of American studies [Online], Reviews 2010-2, document 5, Online since 12 August 2010
• Isabel Pinedo, 'Tortured logic: entertainment and the spectacle of deliberately inflicted pain in 24Battlestar Galactica', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010
• Maria Pramaggiore, 'The global repositioning of the city symphony: sound, space, and trauma in 11’09”01—September 11', Jump Cut, No. 52, 2010
• Susannah Radstone, ‘Trauma theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’, Paragraph 30 (1): 2007, 9-29
• Christina Rickli, 'An Event “Like a Movie”? Hollywood and 9/11', COPAS, 10.10, 2006
• Araceli Rodríguez Mateos, 'Cinema and Social Trauma after Terrorist Attacks: the Spectatorship Perception. Approaching to the Spanish Case', in The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror edited by Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson, InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009
• Antonio Sánchez-Escalonilla, 'Hollywood Under Siege: The Entrenched As a Dramatic Role in the Wake of 9/11', in The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror edited by Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson, InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009 (scroll to p. 13 in pdf)
• Thomas Shevory, "From Censorship to Irony: Rhetorical Responses to 9/11," Poroi: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, 2003: p. 8-4 
• Elisabeth Siegel, '“Stuff That Happened to Me”: Visual Memory in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)', COPAS, 10.7, 2010
• Louise Spence, 'Teaching 9/11 and Why I’m Not Doing It Anymore', from Cinema Journal 43, No. 2, Winter 2004
• Lynn Spigel, 'Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11', American Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2 (June 2004)
• Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, 'Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)
• M. Karen Walker, 'Analyses of Post-9/11 Media Coverage: A Review of the Communications Literature', RhetoricaLens.info, July 17, 2006
• M. Karen Walker, 'Visual Rhetoric: A Literature Review', RhetoricaLens.info, July 17, 2006
• Cynthia Weber, 'Fahrenheit 9/11: The Temperature Where Morality Burns', Journal of American Studies, 40 (2006), 1, 113–131