
On September 5, 1972, Black September, a terrorist Palestinian faction, took the Israeli Olympic team hostage, and the entire world witnessed the incident live on ABC. Dan Halperin’s September 5 depicts the chaos under which the crew members of a US television network try to cover what most Americans would easily describe as an unforgettable historic event. In this case, for better or for worse (we can, however, settle for ambivalence) such decisions were also determinative since the event lived on the media and we can safely claim that the act of terrorism was broadcast live on television by ABC first time in the world.
Mr. Spielberg himself is partly responsible for the fact that even people born after the events can picture what took place and went along in the first place: the film Munich by Steven Spielberg provides an opening scene in which roughly the same massacre is depicted. In the aforementioned first eight minutes of the film, Spielberg set up one of the reasons why there is a more grounded emphasis here on the media, perhaps epitomized by Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum: The important factor here is ABC made television so accessible and transparent, that both the terrorists and the relatives of the captured people were informed what the authorities were doing in the videos.
The control room ‘conundrum’ mentioned above leads to difficult at least in hindsight adjudications, in journalistic ethics that are complex and still resonate today. Since then, several crises have posed such challenges to journalists willing to improvise. None, however, has resulted in such a windfall of accolades as the 29 Emmys awarded (combined for both sports and news) to ABC for its reporting on various happenings. There is a direct acknowledgment of the accomplishment in the awards, but other important, messier, philosophical questions about the winning strategy of rushing to the control room are completely glossed over. This is explained in reasonable detail by Fehlbaum through his succinct 94-minute documentary. Adding to the relevance of the movie is the ongoing rift between Israel and Palestine with the effect of last year’s 7th October attack still being felt widely.
Fehlbaum who has had his share of working with BBC’s “Around the World in 80 Faiths,” adopts the same brash, no-nonsense approach in his work on the film who co-wrote along with Moritz Binder who hails from Munich. He does not have anything to do with the MacMillan politics of the tragedy that took place. On the same note, Ako’s Pictured supporters who were oval individuals trying to gather more details of the events that transpired earlier in the Matt Craven and Murray Walker lead stories may be greatly consternated by the reenactment on screen. The reenactment pours over most of the actions of the ABC Sports team and not really the actions of the figures of the black September. So Feilbaum and Roberts’ story is best represented in the images of “The Post” which is prominent in the action of responsible journalism in the conditions of breaking news tension.
The central and knowledgeable “director” is Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) who is heard over the chaos. He is adamant, stating, “We’re not giving this story to News. Sports is keeping it.” Thirty years on, The New York Times, while writing an obituary for Arledge, stated that he was ‘the pre-eminent television producer of major events on American television such as the Olympics and boxing in the 1960s and the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80.’
In ‘September 5’, viewers are taken to the making of television history as they witness the series of events culminating into what took place 17 hours later. The day started with the terrorist attacks and followed through important events up until Jim Mckay, host of ‘Wide World of Sports’ sadly informed America about the devastating events saying “They’re all gone.” Contrary to what the title might suggest, the film is more an account of the network’s production team and their planning stages, particularly focusing on a young producer, with flashbacks recounting ABC sports broadcaster Geoffrey Mason’s experience.
Largely male and with the single exception of a German-speaking actress, Marianne Rusch, of “The Teacher’s Lounge” with Leonie Benesch performing a pivotal part owing to the fact that she’s a German-speaking cook, the ABC Sports team is very small indeed. Her gender is not only irrelevant to the performance of her tasks but also seems to be the reason why she provokes both underestimation and negative treatment this situation adds a very interesting layer of critique toward the multilayered power structure of the movie, reaching even those more timid corporate actors, like operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin).
ABC Sports purportedly retrieved the narrative but got it wrong since they had to be informed that there was still no confirmation that the hostages had been rescued. Scripting out Realpolitik is not Moritz and Fehlbaum’s forte; their script does not have the competitive wit, the peaks of intensity during shouts and direct conversations of the baseball workplace dramas like “The Morning Show” or “Sports Night” by Aaron Sorkin. This feeling that the real event does transpire somewhere else is validated because it is indeed the case that news teams are hardly able to extract too much from the view of a vagueness of a picture that has been taken from a distance using a zoom lens pointed at a high building.
Extreme reflections tend to go hand in hand with geographical isolation, so when we are brought back in time, during tragic events such as the one in question, we cannot help but wonder how things appeared behind the camera. But even half a century later, knowing what happened and how devastating it was, does not prevent the audience from wishing to have clarity on how things transpired. This film does contain some insights into the events during the newsroom but does not go further than such trivialities as ‘as we’re hearing’ uttered on television by the host in the climax, and what really happened at the climax of the Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base as it collapsed.
Those wishing to know what actually happened during the Munich massacre are not at a loss either. There are numerous accounts, including that of Kevin Macdonald’s doc “One Day in September” which won an Oscar for its remarkable portrayal of events. From this perspective, the film’s glaring omissions are easy to overlook. This makes the movie stylistically interesting, as Fehlbaum uses hand-held camera work and digital post-processing to make the film appear to be shot on high-contrast 16 mm film, which contributes to the documentary style of the film. Not every one of the special effect performers received that memo. There’s something a bit stiff about many of the performances around Sarsgaard and Magaro, who have characters quite literally caught between the wish to know what’s going on next and the anxiety that comes with that. They are now in unfamiliar surroundings where they are constantly faced with difficult questions like ‘Is it possible to broadcast a shooting live?’
“This isn’t a competition” is the general mantra of the higher-up bosses, however, this is very hard to convince the people from the Sports Division. After all, these are the Olympics which means everyone is prepared to win and the playing conditions are continuously evolving.
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