What does Rachid Bouchareb's London River (2009, UK/France/Algeria) – but also the director's earlier films – tell us about the intersection of globalisation, terrorism and cinema? Given the intimate relationship between recent forms of terrorism and the media, cinema, one of the most powerful distributors of popular stories, does not have a choice but to participate in a cultural struggle about how to understand and represent terrorism (Kellner 2003 and 2005; Pludowski 2007; Finnegan 2007). Many voices have suggested that the terrorist attacks against the twin towers in New York were instantly legible as a typical Hollywood movie (King 2005: 47–59). Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of a collection of essays on Film and Television after 9/11 cites film critic David Thompson and Lawrence Wright, author of the script of the 1998 film The Siege. The former is reported to have said ‘There was a horrible way in which the ghastly imagery of September 11 was stuff we had already made for ourselves as entertainment first’ (qtd in Dixon 2004: 10), while the latter stated that the events were ‘cinematic in a kind of super-real way. It was too Hollywood’ (qtd in Dixon 2004: 9).

Thus 9/11 is constructed as a turning point in the history of cinema and of the world. All future terrorist attacks are now supposed to have their original cinematographic script: some kind of generic Ground Zero is the standard for future stories. Conversely, all future media performances including movies now have to reckon with an implicit benchmark. The cinematographic spectacularisation of the attacks on US soil has had irreversible consequences for global cinema. First of all, two powerful myths about the globalisation of cinema and terrorism have backed each other up: ‘Hollywood’ aka CNN was the reference for international news coverage sending images of terrorism around the world. As a result, even more than before, Hollywood imagined itself as the mandatory global norm. All films about terrorism would now by default be compared to such performances. Secondly, terrorism as an object of representation became both taboo and inescapable: its absence in contemporary films is structuring and remarkable – they fall into the categories of about or not about terrorism.