This essay forwards a politico-aesthetics of groundlessness as a means of framing the relationship among performance practices, urban planning, and economic marginalization in the 1970s. His body defies the possible, tracing with each careful step across the wire, a space caught somewhere between ground and air. His body, in some photos barely discernable as such, instead merely a smudge of black suspended in open air, is juxtaposed to the monumental façades of the newly completed towers. Only a handful of photographs attest to his early morning walk. On August seventh, 1974 Philippe Petit spent forty-five minutes a quarter mile above New York City, walking on a wire suspended between the two towers of the newly erected World Trade Center (WTC). This movement – from a photograph recording a fraction of a second to a conventional narrative of longer duration, and from still photograph to moving image – enables both films to seek different forms of redemption via what Thomas Stubblefield describes as ‘the cathartic power of the fall’. A particular focus will be how this photograph is placed to different ends within classically constructed narratives that seek some semblance of order and resolution and also made subject to the full animating resources of the moving image. In what follows, this debate is used to describe how ‘The Falling Man’ photograph gives structure to two mainstream Hollywood films: Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close (Stephen Daldry, US, 2011) and The Walk (Robert Zemeckis, US, 2015).

This photograph has been the subject of consider- able debate, especially in relation to trauma, national identity and aesthetics. It describes how the initial extremely restricted but varied experience of seeing people falling from the Twin Towers gave way to a single image: a photograph by veteran Associated Press photographer Robert Drew which has become known as ‘The Falling Man’.

This article begins by providing context for the iconic photograph ‘The Falling Man’, which shows a single figure falling from the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

Let the big world spin