CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Experiencing the Cataclysm, From the Inside
By CARYN JAMES
Published: March 6, 2002
It feels like you're being buried alive. You're on the ground, gray ash falling everywhere, as if it were being shoveled over you, and you can hear debris rattling on a car overhead, dropping like hail. From the perspective of Jules Naudet's camera, you have run on the street after escaping from the lobby of Tower 1 of the World Trade Center just six or eight minutes before it would collapse. When it does, you are pushed to the ground, and soon everything gets dark. Then a piece of paper flutters in front of the camera lens. A voice yells, ''Let's go before the car blows up.''
Although it has been only six months since the World Trade Center was attacked, already it seems as if we can't be shocked by those events anymore. But this extraordinary piece of film, to be shown in a two-hour special called ''9/11'' on CBS (Sunday night at 9), has such immediacy that it brings back how unimaginable the events of that day once seemed. An important, firsthand piece of history, the program is also amazing to watch.
It draws on 180 hours of film shot by brothers, Jules and Gedeon Naudet, who since June had been making a documentary about a rookie fireman at a station close to the World Trade Center. Gedeon, 31, was the more experienced filmmaker. Jules, 28, was just learning to shoot, and on Sept. 11 he tagged along with the battalion chief to practice his camera work. Even before he found himself in the lobby of the first tower, he showed a remarkable filmmaker's instinct. Hearing a roar overhead, he pointed the camera up and captured the first plane crashing into the tower, which erupts in a giant burst of bright orange flame. The crash occurs so suddenly, is caught so crisply on screen, and (unlike shots of the second crash) is so rarely seen that it seems to be happening for the first time. ''9/11'' allows us to claim this moment directly, even as the events of that day are increasingly filtered by hype and blather, by organized tours to ground zero and by uninformed complaints about this broadcast itself.
Although the Naudets' raw film has been shown in firehouses, studied by the New York Fire Department and borrowed by the F.B.I., showing it on network television is a different step. CBS has shaped it well. Robert De Niro appears briefly in three segments as host, warning that the firemen's language is rough. (He's right; it is far from what a network usually allows.) The film is narrated by James Hanlon, a firefighter who had been working on the documentary with the Naudets, and by the brothers, who describe what they shot and why. But most of the images and sounds -- background noise, conversations, screams -- stand on their own.
The film begins with innocence and even some wit as it follows Tony Benetatos, the fresh-faced probationary fireman from Engine 7, Ladder 1, through the slow days of summer, scenes that establish the echo of the normal past. Even on Sept. 11, the sense of the normal didn't vanish at once. Thirteen men from the firehouse went to examine a possible gas leak, and were called from there to the World Trade Center.
On screen, Jules recalls that he walked into the lobby and saw two people on fire; he chose not to film them, thinking no one should see such a thing. There are no gruesome images in the program, and at a news conference the brothers said they had not shot such scenes. The descriptions of what happened are often more disturbing than what appears.
As Jules films in the lobby of Tower 1, we see people calmly walking along the mezzanine, leaving through other buildings. The narration says they couldn't leave through the lobby because they might have been hit by falling bodies and debris. The thudding sounds we hear in the background may or may not be bodies landing. ''The entire world knew more than we did,'' Jules says. ''We didn't have a clue what was going on outside our lobby,'' with firemen's radios their only link to the outside.
The program follows Jules's experience so closely that it seems to unfold in real time. For a while he thinks the fire can be controlled. Then the second plane hits. We see the stunned faces of the firemen, full of the same disbelief that the television anchors and everyone else displayed that day.
When the tower next to theirs collapses, the lobby where Jules is standing is abruptly filled with darkness and debris. He uses the lights from his camera to help the firemen extricate bodies near an escalator, and the jolting, unfocused images capture the sense of overwhelming, chaotic disaster. We clearly hear, ''Mayday, mayday, mayday'' on a radio, and when everyone is ordered to evacuate the building, Jules runs and is later protectively pushed to the ground by the battalion chief, who covers him, the camera running the entire time.
Meanwhile Gedeon Naudet had been filming outside, capturing more familiar images, including the ash-filled streets that look like nuclear winter. The scenes resonate here because he is on the exact spot where, earlier in the film, people have stood in the bright sunlight gawking at the tower in the minutes after the first plane hit. That afternoon, each brother thought the other must be dead. Remarkably, everyone from their firehouse returned alive. And they all go back in the days after to the devastated site, where the Naudets capture astonishing film of the recovery. Among cranes and bucket brigades clearing rubble, the noisy site freezes when someone yells ''Quiet,'' and everyone listens, fruitlessly, for the sound of a human voice.