'9/11: The Days After' tick-tock doc
The World Trade Center site seen from the south side, from left, World Financial Center, Goldman Sachs, 1 WTC, 7 WTC, the postal building and the under-construction 4 WTC is seen August 22, 2011. The 9/11 Memorial is situated around the footprints of the original towers. (Ari Mintz/MCT) Credit: MCT/Ari Mintz
THE DOCUMENTARY "9/11: The Days After"
WHEN | WHERE Friday night at 9 on History
REASON TO WATCH A you-are-there tick-tock documentary on the minutes and days after the attack.
WHAT IT'S ABOUT History has assembled footage from a handful of shooters -- some of them clearly amateur -- who collected a dizzying and voluminous stream of impressions just moments after the towers collapsed. There is no narrative or omniscient narrator who will guide you through this maze, but only the pictures -- of firemen groping through shards of hot metal; daughters weeping over a lost father; or someone in an apartment, just a block or so from Ground Zero, checking messages on a phone answering machine that is smothered in white dust.
MY SAY We all, or most of us, have intense visceral recollections of 9/11, and one of mine remains an odor -- an acrid, bitter stench that wafted over Queens and the Newsday bureau there. Or the memory of all the faces -- contorted, confused, or simply lost faces in the crowds that seemed to aimlessly wander in the city for days afterward. Or of a pale robin-egg blue sky, without a hint of malice, until a brief violent storm broke a day or so later to settle some dust by the weekend. From those fractured days, this documentary collects a vast number of other similarly disjointed impressions -- all quantitatively more powerful and wrenching. There's rawness to this film -- a bandage pulled from an old wound that hasn't quite healed.
GRADE B+
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