Just Like the Movies

Synopsis

“It’s just like the movies!” was usually the first reaction of those watching the events of 9/11 in New York unfolding on their TV screens, no doubt recalling the endless number of catastrophes that Hollywood has proposed over the years. Now confronted with the reality of one such scenario – of unprecedented destructive and symbolic resonance – a feeling of déjà vu arises while looking at these images.

This paradoxical déjà vu presents a great challenge to our realism. If documentary images are graphic testimony of real events, then footage of 9/11 is evidence of the realization of the existing fiction.

Just Like the Movies is an attempt to re-construct the events of 9/11 by highlighting the parallels between the fictive worlds and the images of the real events.

Director’s Statement

How indeed should we separate the images we experience in reality from all those movie depictions (and their impressive realism) of which we saw so many, so often, that much earlier?

In fact, it is wrong to claim that the attacks of 9/11 were completely unimaginable. It would be more accurate to say that something that had long been imaginable and visible in movies had now appeared on an unexpected stage, albeit with lethally real consequences.

Watch Film

The Music of Just Like the Movies by Paolo Marzocchi, Original Music Composer

I started to think of the music as a glue for the heterogeneous material of the movie. You should not notice that in one scene it’s raining and it isn’t in the next, or that it’s winter in the early seventies, and few seconds later people are playing chess in Central Park, dressed in a much later style. And, in certain cases, I’d like to preserve in the music the “Hollywood feeling” the film images of the genre.

So I decided to write “silent movie” music, for piano solo. The naked sound of the piano contrasts starkly with the stunning impact of the images, binding them together. There is the “ghost” of Hollywood music atmospheres, as well a clear tribute to the ragtime-based music of the first silent movies. In certain passages, electro-acoustic sounds are added to the acoustic piano notes, and the performer has to interact with them. The electro-acoustic parts are taken from a piece “B1, Study for a Night-Crossing Journey” that I had written earlier, and fit the atmospheres of the film perfectly.

We can also say that our collective journey across the Night started with September 11th.

Festivals

2007

16e Festival du Film de Vendome / France
Festival Tous Courts / Aix-En-Provence, France
12th Siena Int. Short Film Festival / Italy
FIKE 2007 – Evora Int. Short Film Festival / Evora, Portugal
Short Film Festival Opere Nuove No Words / Bolzano, Italy
Amsterdam Film Experience 2007 / Netherlands
KunstFilmBiennale Köln Bonn / Germany
Flanders 34th Int. Film Festival Ghent / Belgium
Underdox 02 – Dokument und Experiment / München, Germany
Mecal 2007 – X Festival Int. De Cortometrajes de Barcelona / Spain
Viewmaster 07 – Courtisane Compilation / Ghent, Belgium
EMAF – 20. European Media Art Festival / Osnabrück, Germany
IndieLisboa 2007 – 4th Int. Independent Film Festival / Lisboa, Portugal
Next Film Festival / Bucharest, Romania
Videoformes 2007 / Clermont-Ferrand, France
Tampere Film Festival / Tampere, Finland
9. Int. Festival für Stummfilm und Musik / Berlin, Germany
36th International Film Festival Rotterdam / Netherlands

2006

6th KaraFilm Festival / Karachi, Pakistan
Rencontres cinématographiques de la Seine-Saint-Denis / France
Where is the Love? – International Short Film Festival / Bucharest, Romania
SFF.006 – Sopot Film Festival / Poland

Exhibitions

Just Like the Movies / Städtische Kunsthalle München – Lothringer 13 / Munich, Germany / 7 April – May 25, 2006
Kava Kava – Facets of Fear / Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr in der Alten Post / Germany / 1 April – 28 May, 2007

Credits

Producer, Writer, Director and Editor: Michal Kosakowski
Music Composer: Paolo Marzocchi
Title Designer: Rafal Kosakowski

Official Poster