The Sky is Clear and Blue Today (Ricky D'Ambrose, 2019) (Patreon)

After Ricky D'Ambrose's expansion into feature-length territory with Notes on an Appearance, it's gratifying to see that he is still a master of the short form. There are so few filmmakers who can produce brief narrative works that don't feel like truncated sketches (or worse, advertisements made to secure more funding). But D'Ambrose, like Ted Fendt, is a contemporary cine-economist, having deeply imbibed the lessons of Bresson and Straub / Huillet and fully understanding how to compress maximum formal information into each shot.

The Sky is Clear and Blue Today will likely be misperceived as a "9/11 film," but that's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This is fundamentally a film about art, signification, and memory, the way that the Unrepresentable becomes not only displayed by stage-managed for historical purposes. We could not live with the horror and confusion of 9/11, and so the trauma had to be narrativized. And that process, and how it would be achieved and by whom ("Mission Accomplished!") is a deeply political problem.

The Sky tells the story of a German-American filmmaker named Helmar (A.S. Hamrah) who is commissioned to make a film for German television about 9/11. In particular, he wants to interpret a controversial photograph from that day taken by a relative of his. The image in the film is Thomas Hoepker's well-known shot of five young adults chatting on the Brooklyn waterfront, seemingly oblivious as the Twin Towers smoulder in the background. Prevented from shooting at the original site of the photo by the restaurateur (Glenn Kenny) who owns the property, Helmar reconstructs the scene in a warehouse in the Bronx.

Interpolated with scenes of auditions, rehearsals, and a bilingual press conference in which Helmar defends his project, we see four elementary school kids enter a classroom to recite, in full, the text of My Pet Goat, the reading primer that President Bush was sharing with the kids in Florida when the planes hit the towers. In both cases, D'Ambrose is reconstructing scenarios in which U.S. citizens were fully cognizant of the unfolding of the 9/11 attacks and, for presumably different reasons, were choosing to behave with casual indifference.

But more than this, The Sky explores the crisis of representation by identifying a particular example -- 9/11 -- where one's choices regarding how one depicts the event, and how one interprets it, imply an almost instantaneous moral judgment on the one doing the representing. D'Ambrose includes music by, among others, Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was castigated for stating that 9/11 was, in a sense, one of the greatest works of art in human history. On the other hand, the seemingly endless refrain that it "looked like a movie" carries no moral opprobrium. The simple act of employing a simile, rather than making a direct declaration, insulates one from charges of tastelessness.

Within the mise-en-abyme of D'Ambrose's film, the recreation of indifference to disaster (if that's in fact what it was) results in a new form of disaster. (Of course, it really doesn't. No actors were harmed in the making of The Sky is Clear and Blue Today.) On the other hand, governmental indifference to the causes of 9/11 -- its actual perpetrators and where they lived, let alone Osama bin Laden's stated grievances regarding American imperialism -- resulted in thousands of additional dead. When we refuse to face the Unrepresentable, we resign ourselves to the Political Sublime. That's a force that is always mobilized by whoever has the biggest bullhorn.