9/11: The Falling Man

Raises some big questions about human nature and beliefs, yet fails to explore them with sufficient depth. The reaction to the jumpers by the public and media is fascinating. Their existence an affront to Americans self image, their actions misread as cowardice, leading to denials. As pointed out within, the search for his identity is the least interesting thing here and way too much time is spent on it.

The initial refusal for most Americans to acknowledge the photo of 'the falling man' (the 'the' is important) and then for those who fought for its acknowledgement to conclude that it ought to be viewed as symbolic of all those who died (and not the photo of a particular individual dying), strikes me as a mass aversion to accepting that death is inextricably tied to some specific individual Dasein. A not wanting to accept that the death of the falling man was 'his' in a radical sense.

Personally as someone who's a journalist, I think this movie captures why inadequate journalism can cause problems. I think people misinterpret this documentary being about the survivors of 9/11 as it is about the effects of photography and what an image can do to people. While it contradicted itself at the end by saying it doesn't matter, I feel that the search for the identity of the person shows how you should not approach the subject and how a simple mistake could affect a family.

This is more about the media's infatuation with creating a story from a morbid event than it is about the victims of 9/11 or the "falling man." While it is interesting and sad to hear the thoughts of families it feels a bit exploitative. The documentary wraps with the conclusion that it doesn't matter who the identity of the man was and in a sense it addresses the documentary's own pointlessness as a half-assed tribute. It doesn't reveal anything about 9/11 or human nature we don't already know.

It's very easy to make a documentary like this, and profit from it. An interviewee from one of the papers that published the photograph says he thought it was "obscene" and took away from the subject's humanity. And yet he printed it. And this film was made about it. Why? The Falling Man isn't a chore to watch, it might even be a guilty pleasure, but it surely is disaster porn.

This documentary takes a close look at the famous picture of "The Falling Man". The Falling Man didn't leave as much of an impression on me as I thought it would. The film spends at least half an hour solely on the quest to identify the falling man, even though the film itself finishes off by concluding that his identity isn't important. It felt like padding.

Decent docu.