09/12/2026
THE UNRECOVERED
Dir. Roger Copeland, 2007.
United States. 130 min.
In English.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 7PM; w Q&A (This event will be $10.)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 7PM; w Q&A (This event will be $10.)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 10PM
“Were there two towers because there was too much meaning on September 11th to be contained in just one tower?”
So asks the Artist, one of three intertwined paranoiacs in Roger Copeland’s sprawling post-9/11, DIY, Brechtian fever dream. Proposing a twist on the axiom that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge, Copeland’s film suggests that all creativity is paranoid, and all paranoia is creative. It depicts a world that exists in “a state of semiotic arousal, a horniness for meaning.” Taking place in October of 2001, the film cuts between the story of a young girl who thinks the father that walked out on her family might be among the unrecovered dead at Ground Zero; the self-proclaimed BioEvangelist, who, in between compulsively consuming media coverage of the attacks’ aftermath in his basement chemistry lab, plans his own epistolary reckoning; and the aforementioned Artist, who monologues (livestreams?) from his studio about the ways the “death artists” have put art on the defensive.
To an audience in 2026, its diagnoses might seem rather obvious, its degree of sincerity inscrutable; but to an audience in 2007, The Unrecovered offered a proto-experience of a world that would not fully mature for nearly two more decades. Guided by an overtly didactic montage, it recalls the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Adam Curtis, while its Spalding Gray–like monologues of semiotic analysis-paralysis and its sometimes clunky, low-fidelity computer graphics presage more ironic, contemporary aesthetics as seen in media by personalities like Brad Troemel and Conner O’Malley (try to keep track of the number of times Fight Club is mentioned—you can’t). Truth be told, The Unrecovered might be well described as “What if Godard directed Loose Change?”
