Honolulu Academy of Arts
attempts to sidestep the media
blitz to remember 9/11By Gary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.comAs we approach a day of national reflection and remembrance, there will be another gathering place here tomorrow to view and experience other voices and visions of what transpired on Sept. 11.
Where: Doris Duke at the Academy, Honolulu Academy of Arts "In Remembrance of September 11"
When: 1 and 7:30 p.m. tomorrow
Admission: Free
Call: 532-8768
A video program entitled "In Remembrance of September 11" will be presented at the Honolulu Academy of Arts Theatre by its film curator Ann Brandman, a former longtime resident New Yorker.
When asked why she felt compelled to present this program in light of the media blitz that will occur tomorrow, she said, "I've been asking myself that same question. There's been so much news coverage that, in some ways, everyone's been getting in on 9-11. But my impulse is from a different place. I think the program is important as part of a grieving process and I wanted it in such a way that it's not a sensational program. Only one film has shots of the World Trade Center, and it's off of Chinese television.
"I feel that what happened that day deserves commemoration, and it's important that people have a place to go and be with others. For me, theaters can serve as a kind of cathedral," she said.
She will also be showing a video short, "December 7/September 11," that she created with Paul Nishijima, Neal Izumi and Dan Garab, featuring six WWII Japanese-American veterans from the decorated 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
Funded out of pocket and with the distribution help of the alternative Third World Newsreel organization, the video is intended to allow the vets to share their experience of the Pearl Harbor attack and subsequent racial profiling and internment, to last year's events and what was happening to Arab- and Muslim-Americans at that time.
Brandman said the video short has since become part of a compilation of excerpts from the Third World Newsreel's Call to Media Action program being shown nationwide. "December 7/September 11" has also been accepted to the Hawaii International Film Festival in November.
A short about the reactions from elementary school children in Brooklyn called "Through My Eyes" will also be screened, as well as "a beautiful 7-minute film called 'Site,' which just show faces of people reacting to the center attack while it was unfolding, and a whole short-film series from the San Francisco-based Initiative called 'Underground Zero,'" Brandman said.
One of the shorts included in that series is Robert Edwards' "The Voice of the Prophet." It's an interview with retired Army colonel Rick Rescorla, who was head of security for the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's office at the World Trade Center. In an eerily prescient interview from 1998, Rescorla, in the 44th floor office in one of the twin towers, speaks of the possibility of a terrorist attack occurring. (Edwards was killed on 9/11.)
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