Souvenir (November 2001) Screening Recap

I’m quite behind, obviously. Thursday went very well, as I wrote earlier. Souvenir (November 2001) screened last in a program of four short films which, in the words of Festival Director (and MoMA curator) Sally Berger, were “different from all the Sept. 11-related things we’ve been saturated with…These ‘makers use a more essayistic, and in one case [mine, -ed.], narrative form to explore issues and ideas.” The other three films were:

Encounters of the WTC Kind, 2002, dir. by Kristin Lucas, in which the artist and friends wandered the empty halls of the WTC speculating about ghosts, a whimsical idea at the time (it was shot in 2000) which now has a painful, prescient resonance. The film is part of Lucas’ Invisible Inhabitants Network.

WTC: The First 24 Hours, 2001, dir. by Etienne Sauret. Sauret essentially slipped into Ground Zero and got images and sounds that were otherwise unavailable and captured the raw, dazed, and unregimented rescue efforts.Sauret and producer David Carrara’s film has already received widespread attention; it was in Sundance 2002 and other festivals. Their site is thefirst24hours.com.

Scenes from an Endless War, 2002, dir. by Norman Cowie. A still-growing collection of critiques of the methods, manipulations, and messages of war in the US media, Cowie’s sharply crafted video re-presents the news and its apparatus in an eye-opening way. Watch a clip at normancowie.com.
Before the screening, I met David and Etienne in the theater, when we were caught off guard by the opening music from Souvenir; the projectionist was checking the levels. Family showed up, a wave of people I didn’t know, then a couple of familiar faces. The whole thing was more nervewracking than I’d imagined. Sally Berger got up to introduce the films, then we were off.
I was very interested to see the other three films, which were very different from each other and very good in their own ways. Inevitably, I was caught up, trying to anticipate what kind of context the program was creating for my film. (The only line I remember from Beaches: “But enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”) The various settings, pacing, tone and styles worked well, though, and people seemed to take Souvenir in quite readily.
Watching it on the big (did I say big, I meant HUGE) screen was intoxicating; repeatedly, self-consciousness would build (“oh no, this shot’ll be too long!”), and then a gorgeous image or a nice cut would come. People reacted to lines I worried were too obscure. A couple of shots were kind of dark, but if you look back to the location notes, lighting was one of our major challenges then, too.
Then, it was over. Lights came on, the woman in front of us bolted, I knew no one’d stay for the Q&A, and they did. Norman and Etienne both took questions, Sally talked about putting the program together, and then people asked about Souvenir, how memorials change over time, what French people thought, what should happen on the WTC site, about repeated references to emptiness and voids in the film (something I hadn’t really considered), and then it was over. People came up, we got shooed to the lobby, we talked and talked, there were hangers on, it was very, very cool. Just like you’d see in a movie. theater.