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Review by John Shand
Sydney Morning Herald Sept 7th 2001.
Aeroplanes flying into skyscrapers. Images of everlasting horror. The impossible made real, and the world changed forever.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, touched us all, even here, 22 nervous flying hours from the epicentre.
After the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were reduced to rubble, the public response was left to George Bush and
his cronies in America and around the world. Talk about compounding a tragedy.
The exception was the performance poet and actress Wednesday Kennedy. Originally a Sydneysider, Kennedy happened to be
in New York that day, and for the next month she filmed, recorded and interviewed her way into the heart of the trauma. The
results have been edited and interspersed with her delivery of a live, spoken-word component
Kennedy's perspective helps make the unreal real, and even if we cannot make sense of it, we can sense the making of the
America that would soon wage wars in response.
She did not catch the attack on the towers on camera, nor has she used stock footage. Rather, she has opted to create
an audio montage of the initial catastrophe, thereby engaging our imaginations rather than shocking us anew.
A sense of apocalypse leaps at you, whether metaphorically - a sale sign that screams "Final Days" in a shop
window - or more literally, with a bull-necked New Yorker urging the nuking of the entire Middle East.
There are bizarre stories of McDonald's and KFC having "emergency" mobile units to feed the workers at Ground
Zero, and footage of mobile evangelical broadcasters cruising the streets and blasting out the message of the one true faith.
It is sensational filmmaking, which is lent an added layer of density by Kennedy's lively spoken material.
Review By John Shand. SMH.
September 7, 2004
LAST NIGHT IN NEW YORK
After 9/11, New Yorkers were united in grief, united in their interpretation of the events, and united behind their President.
It seemed so to me from California, where I then lived. It seemed so as I read the polls, watched documentaries and spoke
with New Yorkers over the last three years. And it still seemed so to me early this week, when I walked into Wednesday Kennedy's
show, Last Night in New York.
The show is a film overlaid with live spoken-word performance. After each of the film's 'chapters', Kennedy's rhythmic
monologue tampers with spectators' mood, preparing them for the next scene. Unlike a director who ships a film and anxiously
waits to hear whether the faceless public 'gets it', Kennedy accompanies her reel, working alongside it to help its meaning
flow into spectators' minds. Kennedy, an Australian, says that in 2000 John Howard's chilling influence on the arts led
her to take 'cultural refuge' in New York City. When the planes struck the towers, Kennedy sought meaning and balance by
walking the streets for days and nights, filming and recording people as she went. Perhaps because she filmed at other
hours, perhaps because she walked other streets, Kennedy's New Yorkers behave unlike those the networks have shown us, the
men and women whose lines sound like scripts of the series they watch. On Union Square, overflowing with incompatible certainties,
people yell at each other. A guard improvises an articulate deconstruction of Ground Zero, suggesting he ignored his true
calling, the stage. In the first half hour, my tension rose as the world on the screen refused to fit conventional reality.
Where were the suits and their Wall Street analysis? Where were their obligatory counterparts, the sloppy white guy and the
stylish black chick always ready with an inane comment for the camera? In places, the soundtrack played over still images.
This sometimes jarred me -- but I am a conservative viewer who gets headaches after two minutes of modern television. And,
by divorcing image from sound, Kennedy moved my attention to the words. In one of Kennedy's monologues, the character, a
white foreigner, shares that she fears speaking out and feels trapped and lonely in her New York room. Palpably true, this
piece released the tension, letting me sink in Kennedy's America for the rest of the show.
News programs show us one side of America. Like them, Kennedy does not present an 'objective' America. Rather, she goes
to the other side to balance the view. We see New York through the eyes of a foreigner attracted not by the postcard, but
by the streets and their life -- artistic, dissident, alcoholic. Eighty-nine per cent of Americans supported President
Bush after 9/11. Yes, many of them felt united during those weeks. But the more united they felt, the more isolated felt
the other eleven per cent. I know this for having lived those weeks, and for having felt imprisoned and gagged, until taking
off for Australia, where I was migrating, six weeks after 9/11.
When you're in the other eleven per cent, where do you go? Some of us go to Australia, including Kennedy, who has now
returned. In New York, many were on the street late at night, speaking in front of Kennedy's camera, playing music in her
microphone. Last Night's New York looks fragmented, not united. Even when a fireman hugs people in a crowd, the crowd
remains a collection of fragments -- individuals. This reminded me of a New York that 9/11 had made me forget, the place
where millions come in order to be alone together. Kennedy's world exists. It's not the only world, but it's one world.
Last Night in New York rescues our ideas on post-9/11 New York, rescues them from the neat drawer where most documentaries
had kept them filed.
In the flood of films and books (mine included) about America, when we risk becoming transfixed with America's ills,
Kennedy's show reminds us that America spawns some of its most active critics. May their example inspire us to fight the
chill that had driven Kennedy overseas.
(c) Julian Ninio 2004. Julian Ninio is the author of The Empire of Ignorance, Hypocrisy and Obedience.
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