Artists want to have their say too on this, the second anniversary of the disaster that struck the United States two years ago today. So what is “September 11” all about, a French production playing in theaters around the US this month, consisting of 11 shorts, each exactly eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame long, directed by filmmakers from around the world? (Okay, we get it, 11.9.01 — which also happens to be the original title that the French producer, Alain Brigand, gave it.)

Is this film a vanity project designed to showcase international filmmakers’ take on the horror of that event? A chance for radical directors to express their ideological hostility to the US? A cinematic interpretation of how people in Egypt and Israel, Iran and India, England and France, Japan and Chile, whence many of the contributors hail, feel about what happened that day? Or the solipsistic whining of disillusioned artists?

It’s all of the above. If this omnibus tells us anything about Sept. 11, it tells us that people around do not agree on any one thing. No event touches people uniformly, for they are the product of different cultures, historical realities, political reflexes and twists of national feeling.

Thus, “September 11” is a polyglot of separate takes — some documentary, some fictional — that show only a begrudging degree of responsiveness to the visceral sense of grief and outrage that Americans continue to feel about the event. In their artistic self-absorption, some of the directors are not even above displaying a veiled hostility to a US that they see as relentlessly smacking little people around.

Sean Penn’s offering — the only American contribution — while not meandering there, has a widower, in the fine actor Ernest Borgnine, feeling buoyed by the chaos of that day. The radical British filmmaker Ken Loah, uses his 11 minutes to remind Americans that, hey, you guys, let’s not forget that Sept. 11 is also the anniversary of the American-backed coup that toppled the Allende regime, when thousands of Chileans were tortured, assassinated and “disappeared” by the Pinochet dictatorship.

The French segment, artistically the best entry by far, is by the French master Claude Lelouh, where he manages here, as he had done in his 1966 masterpiece “Man and a Woman,” to evoke the preoccupation of a middle-aged couple with their blissfully petty concerns while the calamity swirled around them.

The two most annoying entries, mere narrow projections of provincial nationalism, without any redeeming artistic vision, are by the Egyptian director Youssef Shahin and his Israeli counterpart, Amos Gitai. In the former, Shahin, sporting a pencil-thin mustache a la Mel Ferrer in “Lawrence of Arabia” (and, yes, he’s not above acting in his production and giving himself the best lines) conjures up the ghost of a dead marine killed in the Beirut barracks bombing, to argue with him about “American imperialism.” And in the latter, the entire film is made up of a single 11-minute take, whose tendentious thrust is that, hey, it’s a pity that no one is paying attention to what is happening here in Israel, where another bombing has just taken place that day. (That’s where you’re glad Andy Warhol is long gone, since he would have given these two insufferable filmmakers 15 minutes of fame, instead of 11, and that would have been 15 minutes more than they both deserved — together.)

And so it goes. All of which, as this cinematic musings by international artists would attest, goes to show that, as Americans commemorate the second anniversary of Sept. 11 today, the rest of the world is saying, in effect, that the United States cannot act like a drunk waving a broken bottle around to get its way. (Neocons out there, are you listening?)

Yet, though it is all well and good for foreigners to tell America that, as a big power, it is party to history and to the grit of man’s condition in our time, as these filmmakers in “September 11” appear to be doing, it is Americans and Americans alone who will in the end hammer out for themselves the meaning of that gust of murderous exasperation that drove terrorists to stab at them, killing 2792 of their compatriots at the Twin Towers alone, and do so at a time of America’s cultural, military and economic high noon.

- Arab News Opinion 11 September 2003