Both in terms of practical dealings with ground zero (the 'stuff' on the boots of the workers becoming human ashes) and in terms of the production of memory (detritus being blessed by a chaplain then scooped into silver urns by gloved hands), we see what Yaeger calls a "transition from rubbish to transcendence" (188) where pollution becomes sacred.
The beautiful opening sections of Hiroshima Mon Amour -glistening bodies, passionately intertwined, dust falling, silver detritus on the skin - has something to do with this transcendence, though I'm not sure if the relationship here, between body and matter, is the same or just the opposite.
Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be described as catastrophes of vaporization, much of the social coping and cultural documentation after the events bring focus to the intact body (and relationships between bodies). Deformed perhaps, but enduring still, these are the survivors --e.g. Ken Domon's "The Marriage of A-Bomb Victims", 1957, In Living Hiroshima, an image that shows domestic happiness born of daily existence.
Hiroshima Mon Amour begins the same, bodies against the oblivion, two bodies closed against the dust and insisting on their fleshiness.
On the other hand, wIth 9/11, all distinction between body and dust is gone. "He became part of that building when it came down" a loved one says of her husband (190). The dust is at once sickening and sacred.
No matter the form transcendence takes, the first abstract images of this film seem to make explicit this uneasy relationship between body and dust, thrust out of normal meaning in the event of catastrophe.
Patricia Yaeger. "Rubble as Archive, or 9/11 as Dust, Debris and Bodily Vanishing". Trauma at Home: 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 2003.
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