Max Hattler’s multi-award winning abstract political short film. Islamic patterns and American quilts collide with colors and the geometry of flags as an abstract field of reflection. Sounds of artillery fire, fireworks and the muezzin’s call to prayer play under this beautiful and unsettling kaleidoscope of images. It has been described as an abstract commentary on the War on Terror. 

This work stands out from the other films in this program through its reliance on geometric imagery, offering a markedly different format of engagement. Rather than depicting the event directly, it functions as a commentary on the cultural tensions that clashed in the aftermath of the 9/11 “collision.” It translates conflict into pattern, rhythm, and symbol. By immersing viewers in these tensions through abstract forms and sound, the piece departs from the literal strategies of news media and raises important questions about representation: to what extent must events be portrayed literally, and might abstraction at times convey a more resonant or “truthful” account? The work invites viewers to reflect on how media imagery has already abstracted the War on Terror into a set of repeatable, consumable tropes. In this way, the film echoes Grusin’s notion of premediation: a visual field saturated with anticipatory tension, where cultural signs collide before any specific narrative unfolds.

The film also resonates with Jiang Zhi’s Please give me 50 cents I know where Bin Laden is examination of cross-cultural symbolism. Here, it becomes a means of addressing the larger geopolitical scripts that followed 9/11, scripts filtered through nationalism, orientalism, and the aesthetics of propaganda. Much like the following video in this program, Mike Nourse’s Terror, Iraq, Weapons, this work exposes how state power manipulates language and imagery, suggesting that even “truthful” representation is always already embedded within visual systems that shape perception. In this sense, Hattler compels us to ask whether abstraction can reveal what mediated realism obscures.