Unusually, September 5 faced one main question before its release: why has it been made? Well, since the last presidential inauguration, we have our answer. September 5 is one of those biopic-style (but not a documentary) re-enactments of tragic real-world events. Here the disaster is at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic village and took a group of Israeli athletes hostage. It is told from the point of view of the team of American sports journalists (and one German translator) working for the American TV channel ABC. Thanks to newfangled satellite technology, they were able to broadcast events live as they happened. The plan was to use this tech so viewers from home could watch the sporting events as they happened, but then of course that was overtaken by events. While this unfiltered access to both make and view events belongs to everyone in the world now, back then this tech was brand new, and therefore so was the responsibility. How do you interpret raw footage out of context? How do you separate rumour and speculation from fact in the heat of the moment? Do you trust your gut and your journalistic experience, or do you spin the news to your own ends? Right now there is so much news happening so quickly there’s the very real risk it becomes a blur. September 5 is therefore alarmingly relevant to the present moment.
The central character is Geoffrey (an excellent John Magaro, who is swiftly becoming one of the actors whose air of calm decency does most of his work for him), the head of the control room – and whose real-life equivalent consulted on the film. The other main players are head of operations Marvin (a brilliantly weary Ben Chaplin), translator Marianne (the bright-eyed Leonie Benesch), and journalist Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker, bringing more gravitas than expected to the part) – yes, that Peter Jennings. Along with Geoffrey, they all report up to Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard, here radiating fatigue instead of his normal smarm), who has a gimlet eye on the ratings and is adamant the reportage is tailored to those interests.
ABC happens to be using the satellite dish all the American news channels are sharing when they realise the attack is underway, which means they control the live reporting of the incident as it unfolds. Peter has the courage to go into the Olympic village while it’s being evacuated so he can watch the hotel rooms where the drama is unfolding with his own eyes and calls into the studio for his live dispatches. Marianne, the only German speaker in the group, gets one of the engineers physically alter some of their equipment so they can listen to the police frequency. A fake lanyard is made for one of the runners to get into the Olympic village in order for him to carry the physical reels of film back and forth. Roone makes the backstage deals that allow the journalists to do their work, Marvin worries about the ethics of it all, and Geoffrey communicates directly into the earpiece of onscreen journalist Jim McKay – of whom the actual live footage from the time is used.
So September 5 is in that sweet spot of being an entirely period piece as well as utterly relevant for the current moment. As these issues are relevant for anyone with a cameraphone – so, all of us – it’s worthwhile to examine the choices made by the first people who had to consider them. And it’s so good that the inevitable unspooling of the ending still works, because it is not so much about what happens. Instead we are watching how these journalists were the first people who had to figure out how to do their behind-the-scenes jobs with millions of people watching.
Director Tim Fehlbaum is examining how the telling of a story shapes the story. It is a fact that the terrorists (a word choice which was heavily debated, by the way) were watching the news broadcasts themselves for eyes on the local police who were out of their depth. It is also a fact that the analogue tech of the time, to the modern eye, looks like children’s toys. Cameras weighed hundreds of pounds, onscreen titles were done by hand on restaurant-special type boards, and film footage was spliced together with scissors and scotch tape. People must hand each other walkie-talkies, hold phone handsets up to radios, flip switches, pin letters to signboards and search for phone booths in order to call the control room. They are all also smoking non-stop. Smoking! Smoking indoors! Smoking indoors at work!
The physicality and the slowness of the analogue tech also gave everyone involved time to consider what was happening, as well as time to reflect on the consequences of their actions before they pressed their buttons. This time is a luxury that no longer exists. As the news piles up relentlessly on every side, and as people’s attention splinter and fracture thanks to having the entire human history of the world in the palms of our hands at all times, it’s worth taking a beat to consider what the things we are looking at mean. And this is September 5’s most glorious achievement. Lives are not always on the line, but sometimes they are, and in both scenarios you still have to do your job right. It’s both what you do and the way that you do it that counts, and September 5 is a fresh reminder of the equal importance of both.
September 5 is now available on digital and on demand.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch, at the official website for the title.
You might also like…
