"102 Minutes That Changed America" (2008)

Last Friday, on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, I watched an unconventional documentary on the History Channel entitled "102 Minutes That Changed America." The film was constructed in real time as the events of that morning unfolded, and was broadcast without commercials. The film has no voiceover or formal interviews besides the voices of people filming or short on-camera conversations, no structure beyond the occasional punctuating timestamp, and only the subtlest underlying musical score. What was most intriguing about the film, however, was that the video footage was entirely drawn from normal people who picked up their cameras that morning in various points throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and even New Jersey.

In my classes we are constantly talking about the nature of journalism and the state of the industry, which leads ultimately to discussions about the rise of blogging, and the increasingly interactive role of the non-journalist. In these discussions, “citizen journalism” has become a buzzphrase for an element of this new technological world of ours that signals a drastic transformation of professional reporting, if not its death. News consumers are increasingly turning to free, easy forms of information that more easily adapted to their fast-paced, blackberry-toting lives, while printed news slowly (and in some cases, quickly) fades from recent memory. Bloggers, twitterers and aggregate news websites that link out to articles are becoming more prevalent avenues through which people are learning about their world. It’s typically a grim picture for a journalism student to be told that they are become more and more irrelevant.

However, this piece from the History Channel highlights the positive aspects of relying on citizen journalism, as well as provides a reaffirmation of the continuing need for media professionals. Many of us have argued that without trained journalists, the quality of news gathering may suffer and the handheld footage for “102 Minutes That Changed America,” collected by people on the streets as the buildings were hit and as they came tumbling down, is by no means perfect. However, put into the hands of capable editors who were able to sequence the footage chronologically and make choices about which footage to cut to at key moments (the striking of the second plane, the collapsing of the first building) creates a strong picture of the chaos, the terror, and the sadness. Without these multiple perspectives, the only vestiges of that morning may have been mainstream media coverage, by reporters who were often unable to get close enough as things happened so rapidly. As it was, there were cameras of all kinds trained on lower Manhattan that morning, capturing what happened from a hundred angles.

The documentary is also notable for its almost complete lack of dramatic restructuring. In my reading for one of my classes this week, writer J. Herbert Altschull (in From Milton to McLuhan) states the following:

"What purports to be reality in the newspapers and on radio and television is inevitably a reconstruction of reality to fit the needs and requirements of journalism. A story rarely starts with a 'lead' that begins at the beginning of the event. Events are reorganized so that the most important (that is, the most important in the judgment of the writer) comes first. Journalists who seek to make their stories interesting by pulling out for the lead the most dramatic aspect of an event are inevitably distorting reality, for reality is always neutral."

This film is the exact opposite of this critique, and tries to approximate the reality of September 11, 2001 for the citizens of New York City who experienced the attacks firsthand. It was highly worth watching for me, not only for its unconventional documentary structure, but also to better understand the events that took place when I was only sixteen years old, at around 6 AM when I was living in California.