Collateral Damages and The First 24 Hours, two documentaries about 9/11 playing as a double bill at Film Forum in New York City, offer a sober and eerily quiet portrait of the events that led us down the rabbit hole of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The First 24 Hours depicts the devastation at Ground Zero in the hours after the attacks, and Collateral Damages catalogues the psychological damage inflicted by the attacks through interviews, conducted over a year after the attacks, with firefighters from three companies.

Director Etienne Sauret was one of the first cameramen at Ground Zero, and yet in many of the shots, there is no pandemonium; the images of chaos and screaming rivers of people that I was fed on CNN and have come to associate with 9/11 are replaced by an uncomfortable silence. There is no musical score in either of these films, and the images of the rubble of the World Trade Center and the testimony of the firefighters appear all the more stark against the silent background.  

While many of the images — the enormous pile of rubble at Ground Zero, the thick grey cloud of smoke that settled on lower Manhattan, the endless teams of firefighters attempting to find people buried in the ruins of the WTC — are of the type that were broadcast by news networks in the days and weeks following 9/11. Sauret repeatedly turns to the less publicized and jarring shots from the Staten Island landfill where some of the WTC debris was dumped. Sauret’s handheld camera captures numerous scenes in which large machines in a Staten Island landfill disembowel the trucks, cars and ambulances that were damaged in the 9/11 attacks. Juxtaposed against the silence and the slow pace of work at Ground Zero — where firefighters attempt to dig out survivors by using handheld tools — the machinery at the landfill appears grotesque, monstrous and loud. The machines look like they are cannibalizing one another, and the images, while they involve only a few people, are disquieting.  

In addition to serving as a record of and meditation on the events of Sept. 11, 2001, these two films should be seen with a mind on the fact that President Bush has milked the events of 9/11 for all they are worth in his recent campaign ads. President Bush’s recent campaign ads feature images from the 9/11 attacks, and one of the ads shows firefighters carting out the flag-draped remains of a victim. Despite pressure from firefighters and the families of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said he “will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency.”

Many are still mourning their losses from 9/11, and to manipulate this tragedy for electoral leverage is certainly reprehensible and deeply troubling. Political mud-slinging is fair game; manipulating the highly emotional images from 9/11 is cheap and vile.  

Mimi Hanaoka