Flight 93, the first true political work of fiction on September 11 [critique]

September 11, 2001. Four planes are hijacked by terrorists with the intention of crashing into New York and Washington. Three will reach their target, but not Flight 93 thanks to the courage of the passengers. After being informed of the attacks on the World Trade Center, they decide to sacrifice themselves to prevent the plane from reaching the federal capital.

C8 is devoting its entire evening to the drama that shocked the planet 23 years ago, first showing the film Flight 93of Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday), then the documentary Surviving 9/11. A long portrait that gives voice to 13 survivors of this terrorist attack, 20 years later: this film was broadcast for the first time in 2021.

In 2006, Fluctuatewho was then a partner of Firstdiscovered Flight 93 as part of the Cannes Film Festival (out of competition), and published a glowing review. We are sharing it again below.

It is worth noting that the film, which was made with the full collaboration of the victims' families, saw a percentage of its first weekend revenue (around $1.15 million) donated by the production to the Flight 93 memorial, located near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

How not to have seen what we thought was so visible, this is what Paul Greengrass demonstrates. By taking a universal look at man and duplicating the typical device “docu-fiction”he deconstructs the media event. And creates the first political work of fiction on September 11.

Before opening the Pandora's box that is Flight 93let's start with the end. On September 11, 2001, the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 attacked the terrorists at the controls of their plane in an attempt to regain control. Rumor had it that it was a heroic act through the choice of collective suicide, Paul Greengrass opts for the more probable and less patriotic theory of survival. This key moment of rebellion, occurring during the last ten minutes of the film, is one of the most violent and unbearable scenes ever seen in cinema. The panic, hysteria, savagery, and survival instinct culminate to such an anxiety-provoking degree that the horror is tinged with an emotion of unspeakable dread. The image, torn to shreds by the editing, is as if caught in a chaotic whirlwind. The visible is replaced by a visual anarchy on a par with the panic contaminating each of the passengers and terrorists.

From this overwhelming spectacle where screams saturate the soundtrack emanates a deep feeling of sadness. A feeling mixed with dread where the event seems to take off from the moment to become a universal and timeless metaphor for our madness. During these last minutes, Paul Greengrass brings together all the perspectives in an instant where man, beyond antagonisms, borders, beliefs and necessities (all contained and surpassed in the moment), is depicted in his greatest tragedy. To leave this scene is more than to acknowledge the atrocity of the event despite the causes, it is to start from 9/11 to see further by depicting a vision of man of such violence that it encompasses all of humanity. Choosing to go to the end of the unbearable, where representation disintegrates and where realism becomes abstraction, is one of Greengrass' great aesthetic and political choices. The sensitive is linked to the symbolic for a true reflection on reality and cinema.

Paul Greengrass looks back on his career for Première [vidéo]

The moment when reality fractures
Just like Bloody Sunday, Vol 93 looks like a hyper-documented reconstruction. Except that here the filmmaker's style – a typical device “docu-fiction” that he duplicates from one work to another, whether he is the director or the producer (see Omagh) -, goes beyond the simple reporting effect where the camera is a central character that participates in the action.

Being more than a real-time film, Flight 93 reveals a certain idea of ​​live action where the panoptic staging creates a way of situating oneself in the event. Thus, if there is an irony in the fact that this filmmaker with such a televisual style is shooting the first real film on 9/11, it is also through his process that he creates a link between the two modes of expression. By imposing an implacable and unprecedented suspense on a story whose outcome we all know, Greengrass violently injects cinema into his device. The entire film is then articulated from a double point of view, that of the images and of the man. It is above all by focusing the action on the control towers seized by panic and mired in hierarchical procedures, then on the passengers condemned and forced to react, that Greengrass shows the impossibility of the event, the moment when the unimaginable occurs, the instant when reality fractures. Multiplying the shots on the screens, he first situates the film in a perception of reality that is connected and distant (abstraction of the lines and numbers of the planes floating on the control monitors, the army forced to go through CNN to obtain images of the World Trade Center, the incessant telephone connections). A point of view that reflects ours, spectators stunned and powerless in front of our televisions who, like the general staff, and in an unreal way, discovered the first televised attack.

This unpredictable and uncontrollable surge of fiction (the Hollywood-style attack) allows the film to place itself at the precise moment when our consciousness shifts from the impossible to the possible, faced with a new and incredible reality. Thus, if the part on the control towers translates the mediated perception of the event, the part on the passengers acts as its counterpart, the moment when the horror takes human form. The panic then becomes visceral, epidermal, and the proximity unbearable, we pass to the other side of the screen.

A political work
Coexistence in the multiplicity of points of view thus goes beyond the idea of ​​a realism which would have the indecency of reviving“as if we were there”the 90 minutes leading up to the crash. Flight 93 has no “documentary” than the meticulousness of its reconstruction, and if the film seems to hold to a certain objectivity, this is a trompe l'oeil that Greengrass' choices immediately cancel out. If the theoretical complexity of the device leaves open other interpretations, Flight 93 is above all the first true political work of fiction on 9/11. First by pointing out the dysfunctions of the American government and by accusing the slowness of military procedures. Then because the event is treated from the idea that a collective action can overturn reality, to the point of disrupting its image. Finally because by situating itself at the key moment when the fear of the other will contaminate the future reality of America, Greengrass opts for a common movement, against the typical individuation of the choral film (Flight 93 does not contain any “characters”) which would have justified the reasons of one and the other.

Through these choices and the final scene, Greengrass's lucid and united gaze passes. Going beyond the effects of reality in his staging so that they are no longer an end in themselves, he makes new means of perception where emotion coexists with a vision of the world. Thus what we knew since Bazin (no difference between fiction and documentary) allows him to dig behind and with the images to seek the human in its universal dimension. This is the strength of Flight 93to be a work where even the terrorists wear a human face. By not giving them any mitigating circumstances, or even trying to understand their motivations, Greengrass incorporates them into the world and looks at all of us.

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