Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Tim Fehlbaum
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem
For a long time I mistakenly believed that when American news anchors
in old footage promised the audience "film at 11," they were letting the
viewers know a late movie was due to be broadcast. At some point in my
teens I realised that of course it meant that the footage related to a
news story had yet to be developed, but that it would be ready for
screening by the next bulletin. Today we've become accustomed to seeing
major events break on social media rather than on our TV screens, with
cellphone footage of said incidents available within seconds while the
mainstream media scrambles for permission to air such images; the idea
of having to wait a couple of hours to see pictures of any newsworthy
event is now unthinkable.
Director Tim Fehlbaum's September 5 takes us back
to the analogue era of 1972, when network news broadcasts had sole
command of presenting us with visual depictions of major events when
families would crowd around the living room TV rather than scrolling
through social media in separate rooms. It's a reminder of how
mainstream media not only gave us the news, but often shaped it.
The film plays out during the hostage crisis of the '72 Munich
Olympics, when members of the Palestinian liberation group Black
September entered the Olympic Village and murdered two Israeli athletes
before taking a further nine hostage. Fehlbaum takes us inside the
makeshift studio set up in Munich by American TV network ABC to
broadcast their at the time revolutionary extensive coverage of the
Olympics. There we find a group of professionals well versed in covering
sports, but now presented with the stressful task of being the first TV
crew to ever cover a terrorism incident on live TV.
Thrust into the deep end is Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), a
young TV director with minimal experience of commandeering sports
coverage. Expecting to cover boxing and volleyball, Mason finds himself
tasked with an unexpected pivot to news broadcasting when ABC's
president of Sports, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), insists
that his department can handle the coverage rather than handing it over
to a news crew.
Despite being based a stone's throw from the Olympic Village, the ABC
crew are faced with limitations on what they can capture, due to the
nature of their equipment. Live TV cameras require a power source, and
so a giant camera is wheeled out of the studio as close as possible to
the scene of the unfolding incident, leaving a lengthy trail of cable
behind. 16mm film is smuggled to a camera inside the village by an ABC
crew member posing as an athlete; it then needs to be developed before
it can be broadcast. Arledge must haggle with rival networks for use of
the sole satellite available to American broadcasters.
Along with the technical issues, ethical questions arise. With their
live camera trained on the building housing the terrorists and their
hostages, what happens if it broadcasts the execution of one of the
latter to the 900 million viewers receiving the transmission? At a
certain point the ABC crew's self-congratulations on pulling off this
world first are soured by confusion over whether the terrorists have
access to their coverage, which could scupper any rescue attempts.
September 5 is a unique true life thriller in that it's
not focussed directly on the life and death scenario at hand, but on the
decisions that lead to how TV viewers experienced the event. We know how
all this ultimately plays out, but the thrill comes from seeing Mason,
Arledge and their crew comes up with technical solutions on the fly
while grappling with the morality of sticking a camera in the face of
tragedy. The latter aspect seems quaint today when average joes react to
a terrorist attack by immediately whipping out their phones and posting
footage of bloody corpses straight to the web. Similarly, the intense
discussions over wording remind us of how much integrity has been lost
in news reporting in recent times.
Fehlbaum's film will hold great appeal to fans of 1970s cinema, with
its cast of paunchy, sideburn-sporting men in sweaty shirts and
unflattering spectacles. Sarsgaard and Magaro are great as the two ABC
execs burdened with the biggest decisions, but it's an unrecognisable
Ben Chaplin as head of operations Marvin Bader who steals
every scene in which he appears. As a Jew, Bader has an emotional
connection with the ongoing crisis that he's forced to keep under wraps,
and Chaplin captures Bader's inner conflict with the script refreshingly
avoiding the sort of sermonising you might expect if it came from Aaron
Sorkin or one of his clones. The closest we get to any dreaded
Sorkinising comes via Leonie Benesch's Marianne, a fictional
German production assistant who becomes the American crew's translator.
Benesch, who broke out with the recent drama
The Teachers' Lounge, is very good, but her character transparently exists to provide a
counterbalance to the scenario's negative view of Germany while ensuring
the film has at least one major female character.
What compelled me most about September 5 is its
trainspotter attention to the mechanics of analogue TV broadcasting.
It's almost shocking to see how simple some of the techniques were, from
slo-mo replays literally controlled by a techie moving the reels of film
slowly by hand, to the ABC ident logo being physically stuck onto a
black background and overlaid on the live image. Not since Brian de
Palma devoted vast chunks of screen time to John Travolta editing audio
reels in Blowout have such analogue processes been
portrayed in such a thrilling manner.
September 5 is in UK/ROI
cinemas from February 3rd.
