kagablog

The Matrix
The image seems so familiar. It has the essence of being seen many times over and over again and yet we were all seeing it for the first time. I am reminded about The Matrix. Keanu Reeves’ character, Neo sees a black cat walk past him. Then he sees another black cat walk past him again. “De ja vu,” he says. He is stopped and questioned by a member of the pack about what he saw. It’s revealed that when there is a repetition of an image there is a glitch in the matrix. It’s the same Matrix that has a helicopter smash into a building. It is in the Matrix that Neo gets slammed against a building. Was that where the feeling of de ja vu was coming from? Was that where I saw it?

On the 11th of September I was putting final touches to my movie God Is African. It had rained that day and at the time when my friend Thuli called me, the sky was overcast. Her timing was off though. I was in the middle of explaining a cut to the editor, Francois. I told her I would call her back in a few minutes. I called her back the next week. Because what happened in those next few minutes will always be imprinted in the disk that keeps the memory of my experiences. I had my basketball in my hand and Francois left me to watch the scene with the new cut. Almost immediately he was back to tell me: a plane has just crashed into The World Trade Centre. Shit! I thought. As we walked to the dinning room to listen to the rest of the news, my mind overtook me and started constructing scenarios. Was the pilot drunk? Had he made a mistake and turned off course? Had the plane dropped from the sky and landed on the building? As we got there, we were just in time to see a second plane fly straight into the building. My phone rang. It was my mother. I thought she was phoning about the reality TV unfolding in front of me. She wasn’t. In fact she didn’t even know. Ironically, she was phoning to confirm my flight to Cape Town.

Didn’t I burst out laughing in the cinema when a car crashed into a building and came out on the other side? Didn’t we all smile when buildings exploded left right and centre and Bruce Willis/Steven Seagal/Arnold/Van Damme and who ever else came come running out without a scratch?

There is a word in Yoruba called odu. Loosely translated it means something isn’t true. As children we would watch movies and shout odu at anything that wasn’t real. Countless fights occurred in our backyards over what was true and what was an odu. Some believed that Bruce Lee could fly through the air like a bird. I believed there was trampoline somewhere. Did people die in movies? That was another odu. I remember asking my father whether the producers went out of their way to find people who were ready to die to take part in scenes that required a death scene. To this day I still can’t close my eyes at night without thinking of the scene from Death On The Nile where the killer puts a gun to the lady’s head. Up until that point the concept of being killed in your sleep wasn’t in my sub-consciousness - that film brought it there. Odu or not.

For as long as I remember I have always feared air travel. I don’t think it was linked to watching films that showed planes getting into disasters. I asked my mother why they made films that showed such disasters. She told me, it was to show that when such disasters occurred, the airlines had ways of dealing with it. The movies were supposed to be a reflection of the reality. An expose of the advancement of rescue services. I felt this could be an odu. My gripe with the air however, I think came from a different train of thought. Something about being so high and not being the one in control. When I was a teenager, a friend of mine’s grandfather tried to comfort me with these words of wisdom ‘remember the pilot knows that he is responsible for the lives of all the people aboard, there is no way he is going to let that plane go down’. I find that when I travel now, I often remember his words. I can’t say it makes me feel one hundred per cent but hey, it’s a security blanket. What I do when I am airborne now is sleep. Some people can’t sleep in the air. I can. After the meal, I doze. Wake me when we get there. Don’t wake me if we don’t reach it.

I watch that plane fly into the building and the scenarios let rip in my mind. If I were in the plane, what would I have done? How would I have behaved? It starts to play itself out like an action movie. The hijackers would announce whatever they have to announce and we are all shuffled to the back. Everyone would be scared. The camera would be on a steadicam, flying in and out of Close ups. Wasn’t that how they did it in Air Force One or was it in Executive Decision? The camera would zoom in on me looking outside trying to make sense of what’s going on. In my mind I would be thinking where are they going to land? Hijackers normally land in some stuffed up area to meet with people and then they make their demands. Isn’t that how they did it in Con Air? Didn’t the plane hit a building in Con Air? That image is now getting less blurry as I scroll the archives of celluloid I have in my memory. At what point would the camera make the passengers realise what was going on? Would the director opt for a deafening silence as a child looks out of his window and sees The World Trade Centre? Would the shot be from the reverse? A South African is making a presentation that morning in the building. Would the director show the presentation at an end and everyone with smiles on their faces? Someone looks out the window and finds it strange that a plane is headed towards the building. Close up on me and as that plane hits the building I would probably say some inane line like ‘I knew I should have gone to Nigeria’.

New York was on my list of places to go to. I haven’t been there in a while. I wanted to say hi to members of my family. Would I have gone to the World Trade Centre as a tourist that morning? I brace myself to imagine the sounds of the passengers on those planes. No sound designer could ever create that sound. No one would ever know that sound because to know it would mean that you were knocking on death’s door.

People talk about how ‘it looked like a movie’. When someone gets robbed and they describe the story they say, ‘it was like a movie’. The scene that blows my mind is the depth of knowledge the hijackers had of the visual medium. They knew that after the first plane hit, there would be cameras focused on the buildings. Cameras that would immortalise that second plane flying into the other building, forever. They didn’t want anyone trying to mess up their job with dodgy descriptions. To me those guys are no different to the two American boys who went into their high school and shot the place up, knowing fully well that they would be front-page news forever. There is even a video recording of them. In this day and age of reality TV (which I can’t stand) I wonder what the use of such reality shows are? The lines have been blurred so much that I question the reality I am living in. If I can describe to my friend an incident that happened to me and break the story down into fast motion bits and slow motion like a movie, then aren’t we, like The Truman Show actors in a great sound stage? A movie pretends to be reality, reality pretends to be a movie, contestants go on TV representing reality in a make believe reality (Big Brother can you hear me?). If someone is watching me, I pray that they got all the right coverage.

There is another angle I wish to be photographed. On the cover of the newspapers were the pictures of the victims. On the news were the various memorials being erected to the victims. I wanted someone to reverse that camera angle. I want to see the faces of the Palestinian children that have been killed. I want to see the faces of the lives lost in the US Embassy bombing in Kenya and Tanzania last year. Who has that footage? Who covered those stories? Where is that tape and if anyone can hear me, can it be viewed? I want to have the whole experience. I don’t want to see only one picture. I want to see all the pictures. I want to hear all the stories. I want to watch a film by an Arab filmmaker telling me the story I haven’t been told in the press. Can someone commission that movie and have it play across the world?

I dreamt that I was in a plane last night. The dream was vivid in that everyone seemed to be carrying knives. At a certain time, someone got up and said he was hijacking the plane. We were all bundled to one side of the plane. I was pissed off. I think there was an atmosphere of ‘which building are you going to fly us into?’ This guy was on some other stuff though. He was flying the plane into the sea! I had a look out of the window and watched as the sea came towards us-bracing myself for the moment when my memory and experiences would disappear forever in the flames of the sea. The plane didn’t explode. It broke. Next thing I knew I was walking around in one of those white robes and glowing in green like in a movie. I was a ghost but I wasn’t ready to accept it like Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Then suddenly I felt myself being lifted up like that shot from Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ when they hoist the Lord up. I opened my eyes in the dream and I was alive and in hospital. That flight my mother confirmed for me, I take on Saturday the 29th. I have no idea how I would react in the plane now. My number one position has always been fear, so I am probably terrified now.

I watch that plane fly through that building and I want to turn the camera in a different direction. I want to record something else. I want to record the scenes where such decisions are made. Would it be a high angle shot covering the smoky images like the scene in Malcolm X, where the killers are getting their guns ready? Who would have come up with those lines? We are going to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. Would the camera track around like the opening scene in Reservoir Dogs? What kind of music would be playing? I would want to record the scene where the pilots are selected to do the mission. Is there a moment of silence? Is it pure gung ho? How would the hijackers look at the passengers when they seated. What raced through their minds as the airhostess went through the safety procedures? At what point in the scene would they identify each other with eye contact and know that, it’s going down now!

When I went to bed on Monday the tenth, the only thing on my mind was finishing my movie. When I went to sleep the next night my world had turned upside down. The President Of The United States speaks like he is in a movie. He says “There’s a saying out West. Wanted dead or alive.” Very Magnificent Seven. In this time as the world waits for the next step, and there are theories going back and forth, I turn to JFK. Kevin Costner says “..the official legend is created (in reference to Lee Harvey Oswald) and the media takes it from there. The glitter of official lies and the epic splendour of the thought numbing funeral of JFK confuse the eye and confound the understanding.” I am trying to have my eyes wide open, trying to see beyond the glitter, for the real picture.

this article first appeared on coffeebeans.co.za