Richard Karz has the answers--sort of--following 9/11/03 (Photo: STV)

So The Reeler experienced its first on-the-job fire drill last night at The New School, which would prove to be oddly prescient of the discussion following the Wolfson Center's screening of Richard Karz's 9/11/03: A Day in the Life of New York. The program was not your typical film event; more policy-driven than critically minded, expert panelists Benjamin Barber and Clark Ervin engaged Karz and their audience in more than one heated exchange about the nature of terrorism and the magnitude of its threat in 2005.

Which is really too bad for Karz, who brought along an attenuated cut to accommodate the school's schedule and thus lost some of the perspective that helped anchor the film's resolutely apolitical point of view. "The whole intention of my film is to present a very balanced picture of the different perspectives--both liberal and conservative," Karz told me just before the fire drill sent his viewers shuffling onto West 13th Street. "The idea here is that in the post-9/11 world, it's important to have dialogue and it's important to really achieve moderation. The problem you kind of see is the rise of extremism and polarization that undermines the potential for compromise, consensus and moderation."

Karz tries a few different things to help achieve that moderation, most notably portraying the routines and philosophies of a cross-section of New York notables; novelist Salman Rushdie, district attorney Robert Morgenthau and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons all drop in to share their ideas of how American democracy and identity coexist two years after the 9/11 attacks. Karz's argument--if he has one (and I would not be too quick to insist either way)--is that the attacks crystallized each principle for most Americans, and his film simply aims to capture how that phenomenon had evolved into 2003.

I do not want to review the film because I did not see the complete version. However, what I did see, combined with my chat with Karz, introduced a thought-provoking parallel to that other recent, higher-profile attempt at post-9/11 dialogue, Marc Levin's Protocols of Zion. Where Levin actively duels with ideology, however, Karz avoids too much of an engagement with anything but portraying his subjects' points of view. But in framing what he refers to as purely "a time capsule," he introduces a different and perhaps even more difficult film--especially when viewed through the prism of all the peremptory, hyper-political releases that stormed the documentary scene after 2001.

"The personal point of view is much more popular," Karz said. "It has a real focus for people and I think it appeals to the niche market, which is the fragmentation of our society, so it's very practical. What I'm doing in just the opposite--what I'm trying to do is to minimize my role as a filmmaker. It's difficult. I wanted to document what New York City is like two years after 9/11, but have each of the participants tell their own stories themselves. ... That clarifies them and ultimately conveys these experiences to people who come from other experiences. That's what I think is necessary in a post-9/11 era. The problem is that the pre-9/11 trends that created 9/11 haven't disappeared. The fragmentation, the alienation. 9/11 didn't change that."

Which brings us to the fire drill. Sure, 9/11/03's pivotal dinner party sequences work as literal dialogues, but a climactic gathering of city insiders and media types with a combined net worth in the billions is still a way, way sexier context than the subject should have (Karz said he cut much of the film's race and class perspective for the screening, which is exactly what most of his viewers seemed to clamor for). That said, it is a context, and it is anything but the tremulous pronouncement of crippling cultural shifts that Barber dismissed after the screening. I mean, we can debate the film's value as a document, but for better or worse, Karz's objectivity eschews fear, dread and really any overheated emotion outside a few liberals jumping on assistant defense secretary Paul McHale, and a kind of exciting shouting match in the Tribeca Grill's kitchen. And when Barber actually invoked the disproportionate ratio of car accident victims to terrorism victims as a means of diminishing our fear of the latter, he set off another alarm among audience members who reminded him of Wednesday's terrorist bombings in Amman. His better argument was that the government's current anti-terror measures (e.g. airports claiming fingernail clippers) are useless in light of relatively open routes of passage through our harbors and borders.

Well, yeah--but Karz's film is not about that. It quite literally frames a day in the life of a changed New York. His subjects' point of view is not the film's point of view. Love it or hate it or walk out and forget about it (I had Gena Rowlands waiting for me over in Brooklyn, you know, so I admit leaving the chat a little early), but when you see it, just remember: Dogma is so September 10.