The Sky Is Clear and Blue Today

As in D’Ambrose’s feature Notes on an Appearance, reality arrives heavily filtered: it’s endlessly narrated, pictured, re-enacted, translated, metaphorised. It can never be approached or understood directly, only alluded to. And never more so than when that reality is a momentous historic event like the catastrophe of 11 September 2001 in New York. Covering items as disparate but interconnected as the children’s book George W. Bush read aloud while the attack took place, and an advertising photo taken at the exact same moment, the film gazes into the dizzy vertigo of history’s simulacra. (Viennale)