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.
Directed by: Tim Fehlbaum
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem
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