+ interview with Kevin Macdonald, director of One Day in September
Obscenities
Kevin Macdonald's One Day in September recalls the
events of one day -- or rather, almost one day,
twenty-one hours to be exact -- during the 1972
Olympic Games in Munich. Many viewers will remember
that on 5 September, a small group of Palestinian
guerillas who called themselves Black September took
eleven Israeli athletes and coaches hostage in the
Olympic Village. It was an extraordinary incident in
any number of ways, not least being the fact that no
one knew how to respond. With multiple television
cameras trained on the balcony from which the
terrorists occasionally peered, the hostage-taking was
worldwide, all-the-time news, long before CNN was a
twinkle in Ted Turner's eye.
The film conveys the urgency and anxiety of these
events with an aggressive, non-traditional approach.
Most documentaries have relied on the illusion of
objectivity to pronounce their seriousness.
Macdonald's film never pretends to be objective, but
instead presents a raft of subjective viewpoints and
asks you to make your own judgments . This isn't to
say that the film does not judge events or people
involved, but it does so with the kind of incredulity
and assessment tools that you might bring to the data.
One Day in September, in other words, takes cues
from unconventional documentary models. These include,
most obviously, the work of Errol Morris (like most of
his films, Macdonald's film uses a Philip Glass
soundtrack, creating a kind of hypnotic, eerie
compulsiveness -- the rhythms are inescapable, yet not
quite leading you to a clear emotional or intellectual
destination), and also, even more rebelliously,
techniques that are familiar from reality-tv, like
melodramatic slow motion shots, a digital clock that
"ticks" like the 60 Minutes stopwatch, diagrams and
maps, gritty-seeming switches from video to film, and
a grim narrative voice-over (provided by Michael
Douglas, whose flat-nasal tone has never seemed so
ideal).
The story is told through two basic narrative lines --
one provided by Ankie Spitzer, the Dutch widow of one
of the murdered Israelis, fencing coach Arnie Spitzer,
the other by Amal Al Gashey, the sole surviving
Palestinian guerilla (the others were either killed at
the airport in Munich in 1972, or have died at the
hands of the Israeli Mossad in the years since). These
two people tell their stories -- Ankie in full light,
poised, articulate, and noble, Amal scruffy by
comparison, in camouflaging cap, eyeglasses, and
shadows, understandably in fear for his life. Already,
the conventionally "sympathetic" figure is clear, but
as the film goes on, it becomes more difficult to make
this judgment without reconsidering it, if only
because you come to understand Amal's absolute faith
in the rightness of his mission. The film doesn't ask
you to adopt this faith, but it does present it as a
point of view that is comprehensible in the context of
his 18-year-old ambitions and devotion to his homeland
and persecuted fellows. The collision of his story
with Ankie's is inevitable, but the film builds
tension by piling up comments from a variety of
eyewitness and other sources -- an athlete who escaped
at the very beginning of the ordeal, the ex-head of
the Israeli Secret Service, the Chief of Munich Police
at the time, and others who recall what happened from
various vantage points. These talking heads appear
alongside 1972 ABC News footage (in which Jim McKay
and Peter Jennings appear increasingly fatigued and
distressed), such that the history unfolds with a
pulsing, eerie immediacy.
The film pulls together previously undisclosed and
well-known information, arguing that East Germans
helped the terrorists gain access to the Village
(where security was not nearly at the level of today's
Games, in large part because West Germany wanted the
Games to showcase its peaceful sophistication, some
thirty years after Hitler). The group demanded that
200 Palestinians be released from Israeli jails in
exchange for the release of the athletes. But Black
September came up against Prime Minister Golda Meir,
who refused to negotiate in any way, and by the end of
the day, they were reduced to demanding a plane to
take them and their hostages out of Germany, a
decision that, coupled with the consistently bad moves
by German authorities, led to the deaths of all the
hostages, 5 of the 8 guerillas, and one police
officer. In looking back on events, the film locates
all kinds of reasons why everything went so wrong, but
the majority of the blame seems to land on German
authorities who were unprepared and Olympics officials
who were determined to maintain a veneer of good will
and successful competition.
In the end, the film paints a picture of astonishing
incompetence and arrogance, exhibited by the Olympic
Committee (who only halted the Games when pressured by
international outcry) and police (who attempted a
SWAT-style invasion of the Olympic Village room where
the hostages were held, only to call it off when they
realized that their movements were visible on tv in
that very room). The film shows athletes preparing for
events and lounging in the sun, in apparent view of
the Israeli quarters, while one commentator observes
that their seeming nonchalance is "obscene." By
tracing these failures, One Day in September
represents compelling links between sports (in general
and specifically Olympian) and violence, as a basis
for cultural exchange. Most effectively, the film
shows that the Games are by definition political and
commercial, despite and because of repeated claims to
the contrary: As Mark Spitz and Olga Korbut became
media stars in 1972, the film contends, the hostages
and their captors were caught in a horrific and
unforgettable real-time drama.
