911 - JUST LIKE THE MOVIES - LIVE PERFORMANCE (Part 1 of 2)

Short Film/Experimental, 21 minutes

Director, Writer, Editor: Michal Kosakowski
Music: Paolo Marzocchi

STORY

Just Like The Movies is a 21-minute video with music by Paolo Marzocchi.
Almost all of us saw the events of September 11, 2001 (911) on television. We knew these images from our cinematic experiences and thus found it almost impossible to recognise them as events that actually occurred, and even more difficult to accept them as such in the moment we witnessed them.
It was at this early point in time that Michal Kosakowski stepped in: minutes after the event
he was sketching out a first draft for his project
Just Like The Movies.
In more than 600 Hollywood movies (produced before 2001) Michal Kosakowski looks for images of what he just saw and finds, in 52 films, the entire sequence of events that happened on that day in September 2001. His reconstruction begins.

Intimately involved in the project, Paolo Marzocchi is a composer and musician. His perception of the 9/11 events led him a century into the past, right to the early days of cinema. For him it is the style of the silent picture era that sets the tone for Just Like The Movies. A century of image construction by the media collapses in the face of the events of September 11, 2001, in the early 21st century, the beginning of the third millennium AD.
The defencelessness we experienced when we stared at the live broadcast on the screens was similar to that felt by the first moviegoers who, with the Lumière brothers film, found themselves exposed to a train that seemed to rush directly at them at full speed. Now, however, it is today. 2006.

The underlying themes of provenance and use of images run parallel within the reality of production and the work itself.
It has become apparent that the borders between political reality and media-generated fiction are wide open one way or another.

STATEMENT OF THE DIRECTOR

How indeed should we separate the images we experience in reality from all those movie depictions (and their impressive realism) of which we saw so many, so often, that much earlier?

In fact, it is wrong to claim that the attacks of 9/11 were completely unimaginable. It would be more accurate to say that something that had long been imaginable and visible in movies had now appeared on an unexpected stage, albeit with lethally real consequences.

THE MUSIC OF JUST LIKE THE MOVIES
BY PAOLO MARZOCCHI
ORIGINAL MUSIC COMPOSER

I started to think of the music as a glue for the heterogeneous material of the movie. You should not notice that in one scene its raining and it isnt in the next, or that its winter in the early seventies, and few seconds later people are playing chess in Central Park, dressed in a much later style. And, in certain cases, Id like to preserve in the music the Hollywood feeling the film images of the genre.

So I decided to write silent movie music, for piano solo. The naked sound of the piano contrasts starkly with the stunning impact of the images, binding them together. There is the ghost of Hollywood music atmospheres, as well a clear tribute to the ragtime-based music of the first silent movies. In certain passages, electro-acoustic sounds are added to the acoustic piano notes, and the performer has to interact with them. The electro-acoustic parts are taken from a piece B1, Study for a Night-Crossing Journey that I had written earlier, and fit the atmospheres of the film perfectly.

We can also say that our collective journey across the Night started with September 11th..

SYNOPSIS

"Its just like the movies!" was usually the first reaction of those watching the events of 9/11 in New York unfolding on their TV screens, no doubt recalling the endless number of catastrophes that Hollywood has proposed over the years. Now confronted with the reality of one such scenario of unprecedented destructive and symbolic resonance - a feeling of déjà vu arises while looking at these images.

This paradoxical déjà vu presents a great challenge to our realism. If documentary images are graphic testimony of real events, then footage of 9/11 is evidence of the realization of the existing fiction.

Just Like the Movies is an attempt to re-construct the events of 9/11 by highlighting the parallels between the fictive worlds and the images of the real events.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• destruction
• movies
• 911
• 9/11
• September 11
• 2001
• Sept. 11
• Terror attacks
• found
• footage
• foundfootage
• deja vu
• images
• hollywood
• cinema
• seen before
• image
• re-construction
• people jumping
• politics

[amelancier]

Just saw it at the Centre Pompidou. Stunning montage work!

[Monomode]

thank you for sharing.

[DAVIDDAMIENR]

This is EXCEPTIONAL Music... I love the decending chromatic lines in the Bass and in the Melody. Sounds sounds SO Beautiful. ... Kinda Joplin meets Gershwin

Thank you for sharing.

DDR