Every word seems loaded. The subject begs to be beaten around. Is it because we have heard the words said too often? Have they become catch phrases and slogans in our country, perverted by those who seek to gain from the raw emotional impact?

The World Trade Center. The September 11th attacks. 9/11.

With the challenge of creating a work of art about a topic that evokes such complications, Theatre and Dance professor Roger Copeland has created a feature-length film that addresses the attacks and the state of a nation in the aftermath of destruction. On March 12 and 13, Oberlin College will have the unique opportunity to view this film, titled The Unrecovered, for the first time in its entirety.

The film, parts of which have been screened at universities across the country, makes its official debut at the Shunzo Sakamati Extraordinary Lecture Series in Honolulu this July. This upcoming screening will be the first showing of the film in its completed form.

Focusing on the psychological atmosphere of the nation post-9/11, the film offers a unique perspective on the effects of disaster on national consciousness. Recalling the inescapable flow of imagery broadcasted after the attacks, the film questions what effects a culture of mass media will have on the public mind.

In his director’s notes for the film, Copeland says “the film’s title, The Unrecovered, refers not only to the ‘unrecovered’ bodies at ground zero, but also to the state of the nation-at-large. Set in that virtually hallucinatory period of time between Sept. 11 and Halloween of 2001, The Unrecovered sets out to examine the effect of terror on the average mind — the way a state of heightened anxiety and/or alertness can cause the average person to make the sort of ‘imaginative connections’ that are normally made only by two distinct (and rather marginal) categories of human beings: artists and conspiracy theorists — both of whom are figured prominently in The Unrecovered.”

Copeland, in a previous interview with the Review, said he first got the idea for the film when hearing German composer Karlhein Stockhausen call the Sept. 11 attacks “the greatest work of art in Western history.” In a reponse to this, Copeland said that “many artists, even if they didn’t dare admit it, found themselves envying the sheer power, sensory impact and global reach of what the terrorists accomplished on Sept. 11. One of the most extraordinary things about the attacks is that they were not just unexpected, but unimagined. Perhaps unimaginable. A true leap of human imagination, no matter how perverse. So I began to conceive of a character, a young American composer, who’s anguishing over Stockhausen’s comments, and the film developed from there.”

The film follows three characters in the aftermath of the attacks: a young girl, previously bereft of her father and in search of explanations, a fundamentalist conspiracy theorist, and the aforementioned composer. None of the characters are linked directly to the attacks or to one another, but the film begins to draw connections from the individuals to the world at large. The film weaves together the lives of these characters with the power of metaphor and coincidence, examining the impact of this shattering event.

The Unrecovered will be Roger Copeland’s third film. His film Camera Obscura won the Festival Award at the Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Arts Festival in 1985 and Recorder, a film adapted from his stage work The Private Sector, was televised on PBS stations in 1989. In addition to his contributions in numerous periodicals on theater, dance and film, Copeland is the author of the recent book Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance.

The film will be shown Saturday, March 12 and again on Sunday, March 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the Craig Lecture Hall in the Science Center. Admission is free. Previews, film clips and more information can be accessed through Oberlin Online.