Tuesday Morning in September

What one camera held

James Kosior had his camcorder with him on the morning of September 11th. He was filming his friend Hussein — an Iranian man — cooking an omelet in his Jersey City apartment. A neighbor, Shiva, an Indian man, was also present. At some point before anything had happened, Kosior turned to Shiva and asked, apparently without reason: what’s today’s date? Shiva answered. September 11th. In minutes, Kosior would be on his fire escape balcony filming what came next. The opening of *Tuesday Morning in September* does not announce its significance (Kosior, 2010). It records two neighbors on an unremarkable Tuesday — men whose names and appearances would soon be entangled in the cultural aftermath of that morning — simply present, before any of it had begun.

Kosior moves to his fire escape balcony overlooking the Hudson River, two miles across the water from lower Manhattan. The North Tower is already burning. He begins filming at approximately 9:00 a.m. — fourteen minutes after the first impact, three minutes before the second plane arrives (Huiskes, n.d.). He holds this position for nearly two uninterrupted hours. This is what film theorists call the long take: where broadcast coverage operated through the cut, isolating and repeating the most significant images, Kosior’s camera holds duration. It does not select meaning. It witnesses sequence. What broadcast coverage could not provide by its nature was the morning as continuous, temporally ordered experience.

*Tuesday Morning in September is slow, and deliberately so. Michael White, whose work on narrative reconstruction informs this series, drew a distinction between two landscapes through which any story moves (White, 1995). The landscape of action is where events unfold — what happened, in what order, with what consequence. The landscape of consciousness is where those events are interpreted — the space in which we determine what they say about our values, our commitments, what we believe the world requires of us. The two are inseparable, but they are not the same. Broadcast coverage of September 11th, served the landscape of action. It documented what was happening as it happened. What it could not provide was the duration that the landscape of consciousness requires — the unhurried accumulation of a morning. [Tuesday Morning in September](https://youtu.be/a_urHxAmUW8?si=uzpWJkdcofNro9LI)* provides exactly that.

The documentary is filmed on a consumer-grade tape camcorder — grainy, low-fidelity, the image of a witness two miles across the water rather than a broadcast camera at the scene. This matters in ways that are not immediately obvious. Vivid, high-resolution imagery of traumatic events tends to encode in ways that favor involuntary re-experiencing over deliberate reflection — the image returns unbidden, with its full emotional force, before interpretation can take hold. Lower-resolution imagery, by contrast, asks the viewer to do more constructive work — to build the scene rather than be seized by it (Yeung et al., 2025). That slight effort is not a deficiency. It is the perceptual condition under which the landscape of consciousness can engage: not the image that overwhelms, but the image that situates.

The vantage point overlooks the Harsimus Cemetery in Jersey City, New Jersey — ground that absorbed the Battle of Paulus Hook in 1779, where General Lafayette and approximately four thousand soldiers held against the British, and that served as a military lookout and ammunition depot through the War of 1812 and beyond (Jersey City & Harsimus Cemetry, n.d.). For more than a century, Americans stood on this ground and chose to engage threats that came across the water — deliberately, at cost, because the republic required it of them. Kosior stood on the same ground and made the same choice in the only terms the present crisis allows: he watched, he recorded, he refused to look away, and he produced what television’s fragmentation could not — a continuous account of a morning that a self-governing people can actually reason from. The Harsimus ground does not romanticize this. It charges us. Narrative is the medium through which a self-governing people makes its decisions — the shared account from which conviction forms, deliberation proceeds, and power is checked (Johnson et al., 2023). Where narrative erodes, liberty follows. This is the watch our moment requires: not at the water’s edge, but at the boundary where coherent civic meaning either holds or gives way. *Tuesday Morning in September* is one citizen’s refusal to let it give way. The question is whether we will meet him there.

The founders assumed a minimum: a citizenry with access to a coherent shared account of its own experience, capable of reasoning from it. *Tuesday Morning in September* provides the formal conditions for that minimum — sequence, duration, human texture, historical placement. It does not tell viewers what to conclude about September 11th. It restores the conditions under which they can conclude anything at all. It returns that morning from emergency to event — from 9/11 to a Tuesday morning in September, among people, in a city, on ground with a history. The film is two hours long. Watch it from the beginning.

References

Huiskes, K. Timeline: The September 11 terrorist attacks. University of Virginia. Retrieved May 31st, 2026 from https://millercenter.org/remembering-september-11/september-11-terrorist-attacks

Jersey City & Harsimus Cemetery: Jersey City Harsimus Cemetery. (n.d.). Retrieved May 31st, 2026 from https://njcu.libguides.com/harsimuscemetery

Johnson, S. G. B., Bilovich, A., & Tuckett, D. (2023). Conviction narrative theory: A theory of choice under radical uncertainty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22001157

Kosior, J. (2010). Tuesday Morning in September

White, M. (1995). Re-authoring lives : Interviews & Essays. Dulwich Centre Publications.

Yeung, R. C., Sokolowski, H. M., Fan, C. L., Fernandes, M. A., & Levine, B. (2025). The curse of imagery: Trait object and spatial imagery differentially relate to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Clinical Psychological Science, 13(5), 903–916. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026251315118