Les Actualités by Susanna Space

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After a mob of MAGA insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol building in the final days of the Trump presidency, former Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine told The Washington Post the scene was “like watching a real-life horror movie.” 

“It sounded like a bomb,” Florinda Yatchub recalled of Hurricane Eta’s arrival in her Guatemalan village. The water rose quickly toward the home she shared with her four children while other families began fleeing up the mountainside. “It was like a movie,” she said. “No one could believe what was happening.”

Jennifer Oberstein was walking to work on the morning of September 11, 2001, when she looked up to see the highest floors of the World Trade Center’s North Tower consumed in flames. A former NBC producer, she called the network and was put through to the Today Show as the South Tower was hit. Frantic at the increasingly incomprehensible scene before her, she exclaimed on live TV that “It looks like a movie!” 

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Susan Sontag observed that before movies took over the public imagination, people often described traumatic experiences as “like a dream.”

Filmmakers and critics have long argued about the relationship between human consciousness and film viewing. Is the purpose of a film to reproduce reality for the spectator? Or is it instead the filmmaker’s role to mimic the hyperreality of dreams? 

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The first public movie screening took place in December of 1895 at Paris’ Grand Cafe. Thirty-three people paid one franc each to watch ten movies of just under one minute in length. One depicted a crowd of factory workers exiting a building in Lyon at the end of the workday. In another, parents fed their baby breakfast. A man who attended said the audience was “flabbergasted” to see reality unfolding before their eyes. “We stared,” he said, “stupefied and surprised beyond all expression.”

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The filmmaker Michael Bay began writing the screenplay for his movie “Songbird” during the first Covid-19 lockdown. The film, which began production at the height of the initial wave of infections in the US, is set in Los Angeles in 2024. The city has been rendered dystopian by a deadly strain of the virus, which now attacks the brains of victims. Most of those infected are left to die. 

Movies, like dreams, offer signals from their own unconscious content. But is this the film’s unconscious or the filmmaker’s? Or is it the viewer’s?

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The first movie audiences were so unused to the medium that a film of an approaching train caused people to leap from their seats and run. The films’ creators were two French brothers. They called their new art form “actualités.”

For those few survivors who witnessed it, the spectacle of bodies falling around the twin towers on 9/11 were among their most vivid memories of that day. The images of the “jumpers,” as they were called—people so desperate to escape the heat and smoke that they leapt to their deaths—were quickly erased from nearly every video of the catastrophe. 

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The video of the murder of Eric Garner by white police officers has been viewed millions of times. The shooting death of Philando Castile after he was pulled over for a broken taillight has been seen 1.5 million times. Walter Scott’s killing as he ran from a white officer has been viewed almost 3 million times. There is no movement to alter these documents, to censor these deaths. 

Sontag was first moved by photography when, as a child, she famously became both horrified and fascinated upon seeing published images of Holocaust victims at the liberation of Auschwitz. Later she wrote of such images that “… one can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-spectatorship.”

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No one would say the recordings of killings of Black Americans by white police officers resemble a movie. Yet we do not censor the videos. Instead, as with bodies returning from war and drowned migrant children washed up on a beach, it is our duty to witness them. 

“To display the dead,” Sontag wrote, “is what the enemy does.” 

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When al-Asad military base in Iraq was struck by Iranian missiles in 2020, communications with American drones in flight above the base were severed. Staff Sergeant Costin Herwig and 13 others operating the drones scrambled through the night and into the morning to repair the damage and land the planes. Exhilarated by their success, Herwig told the New York Times “It was a scene out of an action movie.” 

In 2015, Bay apologized publicly when his production company used film of a real plane crash in the fictional movie “Project Almanac.” A family member of one of the people killed in the crash saw the trailer, which included the clip, and recognized the scene. 

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Bay’s “Songbird” was panned almost universally. Critics disliked its style and its cliched romance, but most of all they objected to its timing. It was in poor taste, most agreed, to release a movie about a national crisis as it was still unfolding. 

When Oliver Stone’s film “World Trade Center” premiered in New York in 2006, many New Yorkers said it was too early to watch a film about 9/11. By then, videos of the towers burning and collapsing had been viewed billions of times. 

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“We had cars flying over our heads … Persons were literally tying themselves to their roofs with ropes to keep them down,” an Antiguan woman told the BBC of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irma in 2017. “What we experienced,” she said, “is like something you see in a horror movie.”

Modern American existence means being a spectator of calamities taking place in other places, Sontag wrote. White America accepts the parks, roadsides and sidewalks where Black Americans are chased, beaten and killed the equivalent of elsewhere, as distant as Barbuda, Aleppo, Fukushima. A land of terminal otherness. 

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Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” portrayed the choking death of Radio Raheem by three white police officers. Lee’s documentary “3 Brothers” places this fictional death against those of Garner and George Floyd.

Lee’s portrayal of Raheem’s killing was modeled after the real-life murder, in 1983, of graffiti artist Michael Stewart. For the crime of tagging a wall in a subway station, Stewart was strangled to death by police. There were no cameras present. 

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The images and video of people falling from the towers on 9/11 interrupted our ability to view the attacks as “like a movie.” The outcry from the public to erase them became, then, an editing job of epic proportions, a nearly immediate transformation of real life into the film version. 

People watch movies over and over again because predictability is comforting. Repetition seals the event into our memories, where it can be accessed by our subconscious, which is more interested in potency and relevance than whether or not something actually happened. 

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Louis Lumiere, one of the French brothers who created the first motion pictures, saw his invention as pure novelty. He was much more interested in the potential of color still photography to transform imagemaking. “Le cinéma est une invention sans avenir,” he said. “Cinema is an invention with­out a future.” 

The French word “actualité” translates to “the news.” Its root, “actuel,” dates from the 13th century, meaning “current.” In English, “actual” was first used in the 14th century. It meant real or existing, as opposed to potential or ideal. 

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The police arrested Ramsey Orta, the man who made the “I can’t breathe” video of Garner’s killing, one day after his friend’s death was ruled a homicide. He was a few blocks from home when a police van pulled up beside him. As officers handcuffed him, they held cell phone cameras inches from his face. “Smile, motherfucker,” they said. 

In his dreams, Orta is released from prison, walking in the light of day. Soon, though, figures emerge from the shadows, blocking the sunlight, pulling him down.

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Sontag’s father died of tuberculosis eight thousand miles away from her, when she was a child of five. As an adult, she could not shake her belief that he was still alive, and for years she dreamed of him appearing at her doorstep. The photographs and film she kept of him were her evidence that he remained as he was pictured. She had no proof, she wrote, that he was dead.

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Susanna Space’s essays have appeared at Guernica, The Rumpus, and Longreads as well as in journals including Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, and Third Coast. Her work has received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, which provides grants to feminist women in the arts.

15 September 2021