This is a retelling of the terrible events which occurred over two days in 1972 when the entire Israeli team of athletes and coaches at the Munich summer Olympics was taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. A botched rescue attempt resulted in the deaths of 17 people – eleven Israelis, five Palestinians and one German police officer.
The story has been told and retold many times, most memorably perhaps in the 2005 movie Munich, Steven Spielberg’s dramatized version of the vengeance mission ordered by Golda Meir in the aftermath of the outrage and starring our own Eric Bana as one of the Israeli assassins sent to hunt down and kill the Palestinians responsible.
The timeline of this movie is much shorter. It traverses just the few days over which the American TV network ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) covered the Games, and it’s told from their point of view.
When the subject of the massacre comes up in print or visual media these days it tends to be represented by that still shot of the hooded Palestinian kidnapper looking out from the balcony of the Israeli team quarters. But the 1972 Munich games were the first to be covered by satellite broadcasting, and you might be surprised, as I was, by how much raw footage exists of the hostage drama.
In September 5 the filmmakers make abundant use of that footage, interweaving it skilfully with a simulated re-enactment of how events played out for the American TV producers and journos inside their broadcast centre. Cursory googling tells me it’s as true as can be expected to what the ABC crew experienced.
These fictionalised bits are largely conveyed by means of hand-held camera. I don’t know whether that’s real or simulated – you can do anything with tech these days – but I find it a bit hard on the eyes. (I’m like David Stratton that way.)
Apart from that minor quibble it’s a terrific story with a lot to hold viewer interest, and a lot of engrossing detail, such as that there’s only one person on the production team – a local woman – who speaks German. She goes from being a lowly answerer of telephones and occasional tea lady (this was the seventies after all) to being a crucial player: what are they saying on local TV? Have they got the drop on us? What are the local cops saying? Only she can tell them.
When the hostages are taken off in a helicopter to a nearby small airport, she is one of two chosen to go and stake out the territory, because only she can make sense of the chaos and relay it back to HQ. It turns out they can’t get close to the action because nobody can – the authorities have blocked all access.
At one stage they block off media access to the Olympic village and the ABC team resorts to disguising one of their fitter-looking members as an athlete and sending him in to take sneaky footage and send it back to the studio for broadcast. There’s one tense scene where the TV crew are watching police officers creeping across roofs towards the hostage room, and someone says hang on, are the terrorists watching this too? A closer look reveals the telltale flickering lights of a TV inside. My God, are we sabotaging the rescue operation? At that moment a squad of German cops – or soldiers or whatever – bursts into the studio and demands that they stop broadcasting. The Americans stand on their rights and refuse. It’s one of the few occasions where the Germans went in hard, and I thought they had a good point.
Otherwise they were so reluctant to appear heavy-handed in a crisis involving Jews in Germany that they famously mucked up the whole response, with disastrous and tragic results.
A less distressing point of historical interest is seeing all the old technology: those big clunky videotape machines with their big clunky switches, the big heavy shoulder-borne cameras, the boxy desk telephones. Although this was the dawn of satellite communications, the broadcasters at times had to revert to the most basic techniques to get the story across, such as holding a telephone receiver up to a microphone to relay what the on-the-spot reporter is saying.
I started at the ABC (Aussie version) in 1983. The technology in play then was not much changed from 1972, by the looks. By the time I left in 2012 the digital revolution had radically transformed the telecommunications landscape. But that’s another story, and you don’t have to be a media tech-head to be absorbed by this well-told, suspenseful and thought-provoking film.
Four out of five from me. I’m taking off a point for the dizzy-making wobble-cam.