United 93 (2006), directed by Paul Greengrass, is one of the first films to recreate the catastrophic day (September 11, 2001) as witnessed by the air traffic control administrators in the Newark Centre. The film was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2006 and received two Academy Award nominations including Best Director. United 93 is a visual narrative of what might have happened inside the fourth plane hijacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001, which crash landed in Pennsylvania by the resistance and protest of the passengers on board, leaving no one alive. The narration was visually imagined with the help of the families and friends of the deceased with whom the passengers had contacted over phone. The screenplay also used the 9/11 Commission Report as the only available data. 

The film stands out for many reasons. It features a mixed cast of largely unknown professional and non-professional actors. Paul Greengrass wanted to establish a docudrama feel with real life characters, breaking the convention of unexpected twists and turns and Hollywood heroics that an audience would expect from a cast of stars. Greengrass had attempted this technique before in Bloody Sunday (2002), which narrated the 1972 civil rights march in Ireland on January 30, 1972.  Stephen Prince writes, “Instead of the fantasy superheroes fighting terrorism that viewers had enjoyed in Hollywood movies for more than a decade, Greengrass shows average people caught in a situation that was unimaginable and unthinkable and in which they nevertheless had to act” (107). Many of the characters in the air traffic control scenes are played by actual persons who witnessed the events of the day.

The style adopted by Greengrass is realistic in the sense that editing, camera and other techniques are not used expressively. The visual narrative employs cinema verité as described by Susan Hayward: “Cinema verite is unstaged, non-dramatized, non-narrative cinema. It puts forward an alternate version to hegemonic and institutionalized history by offering a plurality of histories told by non-elites” (59).  In United 93, Paul Greengrass adopts camera setups that purposely block viewer’s line of sight and often the main narrative focus is either out of focus, sidelined or partially glimpsed which helps in creating intentionally “bad” scene compositions: “the camera setups tend to be off-angle, with unclear and often blocked sight-lines on the violence, and the editing imposes a choppy, staccato rhythm that serves to occlude details about the killings as they are happening” (Prince 112).

Greengrass is indirectly responsible for the “worst” changes that have taken place in action movies over the years. Nathaniel Lee establishes this argument by placing together action sequences from Bourne Trilogy by locating the drastic changes in the average shot length (ASL) that Greengrass has deliberately reduced, added with “jittery handheld cameras”. Lee notes in the first Bourne series if the ASL was 4 seconds, it was reduced to 2 seconds in the third, Bourne Ultimatum. The camera shots became “shakier and closer to the action” (Lee). Similar cinematic techniques are used in United 93; but here they serve the purpose of creating a realistic docudrama. Stephen Prince argues that this camera style is adopted to ‘simulate’ reality. He substantiates, 

Scenes in the control centers and on the airplane were shot using multiple cameras, with staggered start and reload times. This permitted Greengrass to obtain takes of up to one hour and offered the performers the extraordinary advantage of performing in real time for extended intervals. The sense of authenticity conveyed in these scenes is undeniable. Real air traffic controllers, flight crew, and military personnel played their roles in the film in an uninterrupted span of time that broke down the artificiality of the filming process. By working in ways that emphasized realism and authenticity, Greengrass was aiming to evoke what he has called “a believable truth”. (108)

A stylistic analysis of the movie shows that it is driven by persistent camera movements and made up of shots of short duration, fragmented and blocked shots, and few establishing shots. Together these elements allow for only a cursory and partial glimpse at characters and their spatial relations. Though the close-ups of individual passengers identify them as specific individuals engaged in their small but specific activities (reading a magazine, eating an apple, looking at a map for hiking), the cursory camerawork and montage transforms them into a collective. The positioning of the viewer also enables them to identify themselves as the collective passenger experience rather than an individual experience, thus, transcending the narrative to the story and struggle of ‘everyman’

United 93 is regarded as a memorial. Paul Greengrass has taken efforts to weave a plot, collecting information from all available sources, including the recollections of the family members and friends. In that sense it is a speculative movie rather than real life story. Paul Greengrass has called it a “hypothesis” (qtd. in Lynchehaun 111). The film also details the actions and disorder of the officials at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) who struggle hard to handle the situation. These two, along with the hijacking plot, intercut to maximize the tension even if this tension may be  undermined by audience fore-knowledge of the incident. Audience anticipation  and  recent memory may make the movie a more painful and traumatic  watch than most disaster movies. Since the movie does not attempt a position on the political machinations of 9/11, the result is that America comes out looking like innocent victims. Zizek makes this point on the absence of political stance in United 93 and World Trade Centre thus:

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC [sic] grasp the full picture. All of a sudden, they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it. This lack of cognitive mapping is crucial…The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimizes the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. (“On 9/11, New Yorkers”)

Both movies in their own way endeavor to apoliticize the context that culminated in September 11 incidents. The films thus become the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) of the State which deliberately want to create or write a distinctive history that supports the dominant order. Can we accept the innocent creative spirit behind the making of such histories when plane crashes on 9/11 are suggested, along with Islamic terrorists but without a reference to American involvement in the Middle East?

The camera can function, to borrow a term from Frederick Jameson, as the “political unconscious” of our everyday reality. Though cinema has the potential to become an alternative medium; most often, it restricts itself to the formal and established patterns reflecting the dominant ideological order. The formal elements of mainstream Hollywood cinema, according to Mulvey, “reflect the psychical obsessions of the society that produced it”, alternate cinema operates by “reacting against these obsessions and assumptions” (Mulvey 306). Though cinema verité has said to offer “alternate version of hegemonic and institutionalized history”, the close watching of the movie United 93 raises some significant questions regarding the ideological content in it. Though every attempt has been made to make the movie a realistic one, certain key points have been neglected. In the movie the usage of language has been strategically exploited to project differences. The significant one is the portrayal of the hijackers and how they are made an ‘other’ through the language and subtitles. Meier notes,

To further highlight the difference between the hijackers and the terrorists, the former are depicted as speaking predominantly in Arabic to one another and to the passengers once the plane has been hijacked, though one of the terrorists is depicted as having a near perfect command of English when he turns down an offer of a drink from one of the stewardesses. Nonetheless, once the terrorists take over the plane, their English is broken, ruptured and monosyllabic as one of the terrorists commands the passengers: “Sit, sit. No talk!”  In truth, the hijackers’ command of English was likely more sophisticated. The film favors a representation consonant with the reification of the ‘us and them’ binary over a potentially more accurate portrayal. (198-199)

The clash of civilization is again established and cemented through visual imaginations of the “Us” and “Them”. Even in using language, the film has created a demarcation of good English and bad English when they are made to speak. The translations of Arabic or other languages are broken or distorted. The Other is always kept as an alien figure by way of their unkempt representation and awkward language.

Research on subtitles in films has been a recently added interdisciplinary approach that connects the disciplines of cultural studies and translation studies. Elaine Espindola and Maria Lúcia Vasconcellos argue in their article “Two facets in the subtitling process: Foreignisation and/or domestication procedures in unequal cultural encounters” that, “Subtitling is … seen as a point of contact and as a culture procedure, where which different social practices meet in the shaping of oral and written exchange and by means of which ‘the other’ is represented” (45). The role of subtitlers  is seen as “culture mediators insofar as they are able to interfere in the representation of the other by means of abusing, foreignising and/or domesticating source cultural elements” (45).

The use of subtitles plays a rather deceptive role. It is not as innocent as a translation of the dialogue of a foreign language. It is much more than that. The theories on the study of subtitles mainly focus on Philip Lewis’s view of culture-bound terms as “knots of signification”, that is, those particular items in the source text that constitute a translation problem when it comes to decision making as regards their representation in the target environment (Lewis 271). Elaine Espindola and Maria Vasconcellos argue that “Translating culture-bound terms in or out of subtitles is here seen a political act of cultural representation” (46). Translation in films, that is subtitles, can be influential in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures (Espindola 46).

Zizek gives the example of the subtitle of the movie Dances with Wolves (1991) to substantiate the argument that subtitles play an ominous role in projecting the dominant ideology. The subtitles of the film subvert the attempt to portray racism against Native Americans though the film assumes a racist subjective position. Translation of a foreign language, usually, transforms not only a foreign language to the local but also a foreign culture is appropriated to the local. This will attempt to incorporate local expressions, slang, figures of speech, etc, so as the complete meaning is transferred across the audience. Direct translations are often of  no help. Subtitles also face the constraints of time and space as the space on screen is limited and the pace of the dialogues also cause hindrance in proper translations. It has to keep  pace with the dialogue and the space can be very limited. Here, a detailed translation does not serve any role. But there should be an ethical consideration in the selection, editing, and choice of words.  In this way, subtitles are used to convey meaning rather than language. In Dances with Wolves, direct translation is employed thus making the translation appear as broken sentences in English. The subtitles of the movie Dances with Wolves projects the racist subjective position of the movie. The direct translation of the language of the Native Americans to English makes it sound awkward. The syntax of the English is quite different from the language of the Native Americans and this difference is highlighted and covertly mocked by the usage of broken English.

The subtitling strategy adopted in the film United 93 needs a thorough study. It has to be admitted that subtitles later added to the movie may differ considerably from the original text by muting or by distorting the language. The film takes a step further by not giving subtitles for some of the exchanges between the terrorists after the hijack. When the hijackers are presented as passengers they converse in fluent and accented English.  But after the hijack, they talk in a language that is unknown to the passengers as well as  most viewers, thus alienating both from the scene of narration. Subtitles are omitted in most of the scenes. However, some conversations between the hijackers are given as subtitles and it is clear that a sort of prioritizing has been done in the case of subtitling/ translating. For instance, subtitle has been given to the dialogue when a message comes saying that “TWO AIRCRAFT HIT WTC”

ZIAD: The brothers have hit both targets.

SAEED: Shall I go and tell them?

ZIAD: Tell them our time has come. (1:08:00 – 1:08:14)

The possible reason behind such a strategy of omission might be to evoke a sense of estrangement and distancing from the hijackers. This enables them to be treated as people from an alien world, another civilization. The ideology behind such an estrangement is quite obvious.  It reveals the American racist core and subjective position. Both the film and its subtitles represent a xenophobic, extremist intolerance contrasted well with the tolerant, liberal ideology which accepts otherness and difference. Norween  Mingnant’s chapter “Beyond Muezzins and Mujahideen: Middle – Eastern Voices in Post-9/11 Hollywood movies” in Muslims and Americans Pop Culture notes that Hollywood films adopt several tactics for presenting Middle Eastern voices: speaking in English, speaking in subtitled indigenous languages, speaking in unsubtitled indigenous languages or not speaking at all (Henson 11). Mingnant even notices, rather cynically, a new trend after 9/11 to introduce Hollywood characters speaking in Middle Eastern languages “showing a linguistic and cultural openness” (11).   But the politics of subtitling is revealed when no translation has been given through onscreen subtitles or when only portions have been translated.

Stuart Hall argues in Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices how meaning or meanings of an image get privileged. In the chapter Spectacle of the Other, Hall analyses the practices in which the ‘other’ is represented. Hall establishes his argument by analysing the cover image of Olympics special Sunday Times Magazine of 9 October 1988 (226). The cover page displays the image of the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, winning in record time beating Carl Lewis and three other athletes in action. The caption of the issue was “Heroes and Villains” which tells about the growing menace of drug among international players and Hall analyses the image with respect to the caption given to it. He says that instead of a right or wrong meaning of an image, “we need to ask, “which of the many meanings in this image does the magazine mean to privilege”?” (226). He comes up with the concept of “preferred meaning”. Among many meanings that can be inferred from the image, one meaning becomes the privileged or preferred one. Hall says that “The meaning of the photograph, then, does not lie exclusively in the image, but in the conjunction of image and text. Two discourses – the discourse of written language and the discourse of photography– are required to produce and fix the meaning” (228). Similarly, image and motion of the movies along with the subtitles create multiple meanings where some meaning becomes the preferred one. The omission of subtitles and the very subtitling process itself has  a clear-cut political agenda.

United 93 is an attempt to visually narrate the real incident that could have happened inside the flight that was hijacked on 9/11 with a specific target like the other three planes that hit World Trade Centre twin towers and Pentagon. Of the four aircrafts hijacked that day, United 93 was the only one that did not reach the target. It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 am and no one survived. According to Paul Greengrass, the film’s narrative was backed up by the interviews with more than 100 family members and friends of the passengers and crew; the other main source being the 9/11Commission Report submitted by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in 2004 (Young  128). So, there is every reason to argue that how the terrorists hijacked the flight, how they got into the cockpit, how the terrorists behaved and communicated to each other are only assumptions and imaginations and the records in 9/11 Commission report. That may be a valid reason for the creation of hijacker characters. But that does not validate the absence of translation. The argument that the authenticity and originality of the language of the terrorist is maintained through the ‘absent presence’ of the missing translation is rather an outrageous one. The language of the “other” is further “othered” by this strategy. At first, the film created an impression that ‘terrorists are everywhere’, among ourselves, recalling the words of Jean Baudrillard that “Terrorism, like, viruses is everywhere” (10). But after the initial step of taking control of the cockpit, they change their language, their attitude, their behavior and their body language. They become aggressive and the real-life characters turn into typical filmic terrorist villains. As Zizek says, “…the terrorists are turned into an abstract agency—abstract in the Hegelian sense of subtracted from the concrete socio-ideological network which gave birth to it” (Welcome 33).

The film exemplifies the established ideologies of Islam and Christianity in the use of prayers by the terrorists who are in a suicide mission and by the passengers of the aircraft. The Quran verses in Arabic are not translated and the terrorists engage in a wild chanting from the very beginning of the movie itself, whereas the Christian prayers said by the victims are in English. It gives out the dominant mainstream ideology of the all-forgiving Lord’s prayer: “Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven, And forgive those who trespass against us” (1:33:56). Interesting point is that the shots of Lord’s Prayer are spliced with the prayer uttered by the hijackers in their language which does not find a translation.

The sequence at 1:33:49 – 1:34:17 is a series of close-ups of the passengers and the hijackers chanting their prayers. The hijacker is filmed as praying in Arabic which is not subtitled but the Lord’s Prayer uttered by passengers are fore grounded in the shot which begins: “Our Father, who art in heaven” followed by “Hallowed be Thy name”, “Thy kingdom come”, “And Forgive us those who trespass against us”. The remaining scene shows the close-ups of the other two hijackers reciting prayer but not subtitled or translated. The politics of othering is very well established. Differences in culture and the ‘clash of civilization’ are emphasized.

Lawrence Venuti’s major work on translation The Translator’s Invisibility elaborates the two main practices that are followed in the process of translation which can be applied to the translation of subtitles in films. He talks about domestication and foreignisation as two categories and he equates domesticating and foreignising practices with two types of translation, namely transparent or resistant translation. In the former, “transparent discourse is perceived as mirroring the author, it values the foreign text as original, authentic, true and devalues the translated text as derivative, simulacral, false, forcing on translation the project of effacing its second-order status with a fluent strategy” (Venuti 289-290). The latter, resistant translation is “based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, it can best preserve that difference, that otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures” (306). The illusion of transparency in translation is severed by resistant translation, thus promoting the representation of other realities so as to recognize linguistic and cultural differences of foreign texts. The choice of how to represent the other is a deliberate process. It moreover depends on the target audience. When two unbalanced cultures are involved, power differentials play a major role in the representation of the Other. The strategy of translating/subtitling purely is target oriented, and in the case of United 93, it is obviously the wounded American audience who is targeted. Omission can be regarded as the perfect strategy to domesticate a text for the target audience by complete deletion which may appear foreign to them.

Dionysis Kapsaskis in the article “Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles” says that “… the resistance to subtitling can be interpreted in geopolitical terms, in the sense that dominant languages and cultures refuse to come to terms with the heteronomy of aesthetic representation in general” (48). The imbalance of culture is better reflected in the imbalance of language used in subtitling, especially when the target language is a dominant language.

The sequence of prayers foregrounds Christianity as the dominant religious principle and Islam as the ‘other’. This can be explicated against the background of Roland Barthes’ analysis of his seminal example of the ‘French Negro’ in Mythologies. He examines the denotation and connotation of the picture on a magazine cover which shows a black man in French uniform saluting the flag. Barthes analyses how the presence of the black man in that single visual erases the French colonial history, “whitewashing presence of racism within the French identity” (115). In the sequence analyzed, the foregrounding of Christianity strategically place Islam as the ‘other’ and even makes an attempt for complete erasure. The hijackers remain as muted beings when their language is muted. In United 93, no audience wants to listen to the ‘other’. The film is multilingual with a clear domination of English and Arabic and German languages are muted, thus, muting an entire culture. No measures to suture the cultural and linguistic differences are attempted in the movie.

Another tendentious casting included the German citizen Christian Adams (Erich Redman). He was the only European traveling that flight. Adams is portrayed as a man of appeasement but there is no historical evidence regarding the character of Adams in the flight. The presence of a Japanese citizen Toshiya Kuge (Masato Kamo) was also inconspicuously absorbed into the American collective by being in the background. Adams’ characterization has become controversial in treating him as the ‘fall guy’, “the token cowardly German amid a band of brave Americans” as The Guardian calls him (Brooks “United 93”). His physical appearance can easily fit into the American collective by being white, middle class, young and athletic. Still he is presented as an obstacle to American collective which emulated as a myth of American innocence and heroism. When the aircraft is hijacked, he advises the fellow passengers to comply with the hijackers. He recalls similar hijacking incidents that happened in the past when they asked for ransom and freed the passengers.  But when the film moves to the final phase, exactly at 01:33:39, when the passengers plan to revolt realizing that it is a suicide mission, Adams is put in bad light, shown as an ‘other’ who jumps from the seat shouting “Ich bin Deutscher, ich bin kein Amerikaner, ich bin Deutscher” (I am a German, I am not an American, I am a German) (Lehnguth 70). The interesting part is that the translation of these lines is not given in the movie. It is only after the German Americans’ protest on the release of the movie that the ‘treacherous and cowardly act’ of Adams was known to the public. The diegetic sound used in these scenes makes it very hard to even hear what the German is saying, thus making the subtitling a difficult act.  9/11 Commission Report does not make any mention about such a character who acted so cowardly on board, and it was hard to imagine the genesis of a racist thought like this. Since there is no evidence to Adams’ act, obviously the film makers were playing with the deep-rooted cultural prejudice among the Americans, placing them as brave heroes and Europeans as cowardly appeasers.

Ross Lynchehuam in her PhD thesis on American Cinema After 9/11 argues in terms of Colin MacCabe’s concept of “classic realist text” that films like United 93 and World Trade Centre cannot and do not mount any challenge to the dominant ideology of the historical period in which they are produced. Moreover, a close analysis of United 93 and its subtitles clearly show how the dominant ideology is projected and emphasized. However, post 9/11 movies like Syriana (2005) and Babel (2006) do allow such a challenge to take place. These films’ strategies of subversion and the way they organize their discourses that refuse a dominant discourse are well established (122).  Both United 93 and World Trade Centre correspond to and support the dominant ideology of the 9/11 context.

The dominant ideological content of United 93 is revealed in the exposition shots of the movie itself. The sequence starts with a shot of a person who is praying, and his friend comes to inform him that “It’s time”.  The shots that follow show the illumined space of the urban skyscrapers of a city in America. The significance of the shot is that it is a bird’s eye-view with the background of prayer from Quran. The warning is clear and the relation between the hijackers, the cityscape and their religion is brought out and it is further established in the shots that follow.

The shot that follows is a panning point of view shot from a moving vehicle, where a bus carries the hijackers going to the airport and it passes a freight container near the airport with a huge inscription on it that read, “GOD BLESS AMERICA”. Nigel Morris argues that this frame that comprises this slogan along with the US flag and the  twin towers implicates “religion in patriotism, politics, and commerce” that is very much prevailing in the U.S. (153). This moving shot is placed before the hijacking as a foreboding. In the shot, an image of the twin towers can also be seen, (if fleetingly), which is a deliberate choice and remaking of it. The mise en scène of each shot and frame are deliberate and monitored to achieve the desired effects. The flag of the US, the inscription along with the towers, the prayer, the ritualistic ablutions of Muslims are all mediated images that reveal the political content and relates the act of terrorism to a religion, not to an act of fanaticism or fundamentalism. All assemble to form the contrived mise-en-scène that denotes patriotic content. Every  shot and all aspects of mise-en-scène  have design and intenton.controlled.

Hollywood, just like any other nation’s film productions, has a well-known history of responding to crises and challenges that America has faced: like the way allegories of the communist threat during the cold war can be traced in many science-fiction films. Post 9/11 American social context and cultural productions portray and respond to the issues of the Iraq War on Terrorism, controversies of domestic surveillance, forcible rendition, Abu Ghraib and torture sequences in the backdrop of the legacy of 9/11.

Stuart Hall in his chapter “The spectacle of the other” examines how power operates, keeping “the dominant and the dominated within its circuits” (261). He borrows the ideas of Gramsci and Foucault in arguing that “power is to be found everywhere”; “power circulates”. Hall elaborates,

The circularity of power is especially important in the context of representation. The argument is that everyone – the powerful and the powerless – is caught up, though not on equal terms, in power's circulation. No one – neither its apparent victims nor its agents – can stand wholly outside its field of operation. (261)

This (explains?) justifies  the representation of all the ‘others’. Thus, representation has its own politics. Post-September movies become a category of their own which disseminates the current dominant ideology. Thus, any product of reproducing ideology ends up  succumbing to it, while maintaining the potential to subvert it. Although ultimately an action film, United 93 leaves out the totality of the geopolitical context which culminated in 9/11. The absence of political content and context deliberately interprets and recreates history. The deceptive role played by the use/abuse/absence of language by way of subtitles emphasizes the prejudiced dominant ideology.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers, The Noonday Press, 1972.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 2002.

Brooks, Xan. “United 93 Surrender Monkey Defends Role in Film.”The Guardian, 7 June 2006, www.theguardian.com/film/2006/jun/07/news.xanbrooks, accessed on 14 Nov. 2016.

Espindola, Elaine, and Maria  Lucia Vasconcellos. “Two Facets in the Subtitling Process: Foreignisation and/or Domestication Procedures in Unequal Cultural Encounters.” Fragmentos, vol. 30, 2006, pp. 43–66.

Hall, Stuart, editor. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage, 2013.

Hayward, Susan. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. Routledge, 2004.

Henson, Jason. “The Long War Onscreen: A Genre Study of the War on Terror in American Cinema.” University of Boston, Praeger, 2014. Proquest, Number 10602038.

Kapsaskis, Dionysis. “Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles.” New Voices in Translation Studies Special Conference Issue, Apr. 2008, pp. 42–52.

Lee, Nathaniel. “How One Trilogy Ruined Action Movies Forever.” Business Insider, 8 May 2018, www.businessinsider.in/How-one-trilogy-ruined-action-movies-forever/articleshow/64085407.cms, accessed on 12 Sep. 2019.

Lehnguth, Henrike. “Into the Dark Chamber of Terror: the ‘War on Terror’ in Visual Culture.” University of Maryland, 2011.

Lewis, Philip E. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, Routledge, 2000, pp. 264–283.

Lynchehaun, Ross. “American Cinema after 9/11.” University of Glasgow, 2013.

Meier, Inga. “Deconstructing ‘The Abyss of the Future:’ Theatre, Performance, and Holes in the Discourse of 9/11.” University of Pittsburgh, 4 Nov. 2014,  https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/DECONSTRUCTING-%22THE-ABYSS-OF-THE-FUTURE%3A%22-THEATRE%2C-Meier/ee85a52cb8ff333270e691421ce6356967960253?p2df

Mingnant, Norween. “Beyond Muezzins and Mujahideen: Middle – Eastern Voices in Post -9/11 Hollywood Movies.” Muslims and American Popular Culture, edited by Anne R. Richards and Iraj Omidvar, Praeger, 2014, pp. 167–193.

   Morris, Nigel. “Movies and Crisis.” American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations, edited by Timothy Corrigan, Rutgers University Press, 2012, pp. 147–171.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema .” Movies and Methods, Volume 2: an Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 303–315.

Prince, Stephen. Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. Columbia University Press, 2009.

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: a History of Translation. Routledge, 2005.

Young, Alison. The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect. Routledge, 2013.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. Verso, 2013.

Zizek, Slavoj. “On 9/11, New Yorkers Faced the Fire in the Minds of Men.” The Guardian, 11 Sept. 2001, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/sep/11/comment.september11, accessed on 9 Dec. 2016.

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 Essays   911   cinema   political ideology   representation   subtitle