The late summer crickets chirp through the window of Roger Copeland's dining room as he recalls that bright summer day, five years ago. It started with a call he got from a friend in Manhattan who had seen an explosion on the upper floors of one of the Twin Towers. He turned on the TV.
Roger Copeland: And my first impulse was to pop in a video tape. And I wasn't sure why I was taping, I just had an impulse to tape as much as I could.
As is often the case in live, breaking news stories, the networks showed some of the stark sequences over and over again. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, psychiatrist David Liebling warned that this recycled imagery could have long-lasting impacts on viewers.
David Liebling: This is a very different kind of trauma, a very different kind of stress than our country has had to face.
Roger Copeland says what he saw was hard to shake.
Roger Copeland: Boy, I had a bad case of insomnia for about six weeks, and would often be taping stuff during the day and watching it in the evenings.
Copeland started seeing the threads of a story. In some cases, he heard it in the words of family members who had lost loved ones.
TV Clip: It's very difficult for me right now, because I don't have any remains, and I was hoping I would get something back, even if it was just bone fragments, just to know that he didn't go "poof" one day.
And then, there was the sheer spectacle of the Trade Center buildings collapsing.
Roger Copeland: The unbelievably disciplined way in which those towers seemed to fall, floor by floor. And the conventional, but inescapable response was, "It looks just like a movie."
Copeland took the ideas of loss and media saturation of violent imagery and created three intersecting stories: there's a young girl who wonders if her missing father could have been a victim, lost in the collapsed towers; a homegrown terrorist, who sees it all as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy; and a cynical artist, who proposes to reconstruct the events of 9-11 using footage from classic disaster films.
Unrecovered clip: Americans are virgins when it comes to the terror business. Our only context for disaster is Hollywood.
Copeland spent the better part of the last five years working on The Unrecovered, cobbling together a budget of $55,000 from grant money and from his own pocket. The film's title comes from something else he spotted while reviewing those countless hours of videotapes.
Roger Copeland: I was watching CNN and I remember seeing a little crawl across the bottom of the screen, talking about "thousands of bodies remain unrecovered at Ground Zero."
He says, the concept of "unrecovered" works in two ways. First to convey a sense of irreparable loss.
Roger Copeland: But then there's the sense that it begins to work metaphorically as a commentary on the culture at large. We have not yet recovered.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is showing Roger Copeland's The Unrecovered this Wednesday at Case Western Reserve University's Strosacker Auditorium. It will then have a screening in New York City, this Saturday. David C. Barnett, 90.3.