Ruptured Cinema as Visual Anthropology: Reflections on 11”09’01 (September 11), From Ground Zero, and Palestinian Counter-Ethnography

Abstract In this essay, I offer close readings of the film shorts in two critically acclaimed film anthologies: 11”09’01 , alternatively titled September 11 , (2003) and From Ground Zero (2025). I argue that these two omnibus films can be understood as visual anthropology texts. Both films demonstrate the power of ruptured cinema and experimental film techniques to represent political violence and trauma. By drawing on visual and sound techniques that condense and expand time and space, including the use of found footage and audio, these films depart from familiar memorialization narratives and visibility traps; they marshal experimental techniques in ways that are politically instructive and pedagogically useful. I also situate the film shorts in terms of a particular decolonial tradition of Palestinian found footage films that film scholar Samirah Alkassim describes as counter-ethnography.