Sarah Morris's film, Capital, was shot on location in Washington, D.C. on September 11 - 14, 2000. It shows fast-paced sequences of political icons: the Mall, the White House Press Office, the World Bank, uniformed members of the Secret Service, the Presidential motorcade, the Watergate Complex, the Kennedy Center, the Department of Energy, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, among many others. Capital continues Morris's investigation of the way we decode and therefore begin to understand the built world around us. She is interested in our intuitive relationship to architectural statements. In Capital, an intangible craving for power and money, mingled with a hint of widespread paranoia exemplified by the political process, becomes a metaphor for the architecture that structures our daily lives.
Capital is an ironic example of life mimicking art. Filmed exactly one year before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the film has the quality of a premonition and warning of imminent danger. Today, heightened national security forbids outsiders access to many of the places and types of meetings recorded in Capital. As a result, the film is one of the last documents of a political structure that directly affected our lives forever, a realization that is more poignant in the wake of September 11, 2001 than Sarah Morris could have imagined when she filmed Capital.