Un jour en septembre

As someone who was glued to ABC in 1972 during the entire terrorist act this very well done documentary brought back horrible memories. But the memory of these murders must be kept alive because they obviously are not being taught to our children in school as the comments by someone who had never heard of the Olympic massacre point out.

The director pulls out all stops in presenting the story using archival footage, computer models, musical montages, film of the present day sites and interviews with the participants with the most noteworthy one being with the sole surviving murderer. The only criticism I have of the film is that the flashy editing sometimes works to trivialize the incidents.

It is very illuminating to read the prior comments made about this film. It is also very sad to see the morally bankrupt calls for putting the murders "in perspective" as if anything could justify the cold blooded massacre of innocents. But of course we hear those justifications today over the most recent massacres.

(Kevin MacDonald, 1999, 92 min.) Documentary about assassination of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at 1972 Olympic games. Noteworthy for exclusive interview with only surviving terrorist, who is in hiding "somewhere in Africa." Composed of interviews with German authorities involved in the episode, TV clips, etc, and narrated by Michael Douglas.

Interestingly, East Germans colluded with the terrorists, showing them around the Olympic village prior to the operation. Truth stranger than fiction. The ineptitude of the West Germans is astounding. Imagine paunchy German cops, clad in athletic sweats, trying to pass themselves off as Olympic athletes, their automatic weapons in plain sight, positioning themselves to launch a "surprise" attack on the apartment in which the hostages are being held while their every move is being televised worldwide; it's only at the very last minute, when they realize the terrorists too are watching them on TV, that they call the raid off. This is the only attempt they make to storm the apartment building.

Even after an Israeli's bullet-ridden naked body has been tossed out a window down to the sidewalk below, the games continue; the International Olympic Committee refuses to stop them; athletes are sunning themselves within sight of the hostage standoff; and, of course, the media has descended like a horde of flies ready to feast on a carcass. Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, offers to send a trained anti-terrorist unit, but the Germans, who have no such attack force of their own, who are in disarray, disorganized, and frankly at a loss as to what to do, refuse.

The terrorists are taken to a nearby airport in helicopters to a waiting jet. German cops, who are stationed in the jet and disguised as a flight crewm at the very last second, just as the helicopters are about to land, chicken out and abandon their posts. The head of Mossad, who by now has joined the Germans at the airport, is incredulous at the lack of professionalism of the whole ambush; also, he accuses the Germans of taking the hostages out of the Olympic village just so the games can continue. Sharp shooters positioned at the airport are not in radio communication with the outside or among themselves, have no idea of how many terrorists there are, and end up shooting each other and killing one of the helicopter pilots who has broken free. The coup de grace, the vilest insult to injury, comes in the aftermath of this debacle: Three Palestinian terrorists survive the gun battle at the airport and are taken into custody. Within days a nearly empty German airliner bound from Beirut to Frankfurt is hijacked by Arab terrorists who demand and obtain the release of the 3 terrorists in custody. One of these 3 later recounts how the whole thing was a setup: the German government colluded with the Arabs to stage the hijacking simply to rid themselves of the captured terrorists and to avoid the embarrassment of a trial.

In Britain at least, this film has been strongly criticised by hardly disinterested intellectual heavyweights like Edward Said and Tom Paulin. The main argument against the film is that it takes place in an historical vacuum, that it shows members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team being taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists, but it does not explain the political reasons why this happened. This is largely true - although there is brief mention at the beginning of the horrific camp conditions Palestinians suffered in their own homeland appropriated by Israel, it says nothing about this highly contentious appropriation, about the natural urge to struggle against it.

This is underscored by a blatantly manipulative structure - while the representative of the hostages is (necessarily) solitary, anonymous, in hiding, talking in shadows (the other surviving terrorists were murdered by Israeli assassination squads; this information is recorded in a coda that

seems like some kind of chilling reward for the audience); the dead men are shown as almost saintly - pictured getting married, with babies, smiling, honest, healthy, sporty, part of a community and tradition - one story talks about the high-minded ideals of one coach who fraternised with his political enemies from Lebanon.

Aside from the dubious shamelessness of this manipulation, I don't really have a problem with the film's focus. Coming from a country where political terrorists have, for thirty years, been slaughtering wholesale largely apolitical citizens in the name of justice, who have used bogus political ideology as a front for gangsterism, I am somewhat out of sympathy with anything that proclaims humanitarian motives and leaves innocent people dead. Critics complain that ONE DAY ignores the story of the Palestinians, their feelings of repression and injustice - and it is unlikely a film on this subject will have a voiceover from a powerful Hollywood player, and win an Oscar - but to do this would abstract the event, would turn it into a political chess game, and not a ghastly abomination where real people, far too young, with families, are unaccountably murdered. It is the stuff of paranoid modernist literature - you wake up one morning with all your friends, and by sheer random chance, you're held hostage and killed.

So if we agree that the film is fatally biased, we can see that it has many virtues. ONE DAY has been called a thriller - it was literally so for me because I'd never heard about this atrocity - and the techniques used (the pounding score, the edgy editing, the foregrounding of clocks and deadlines, the withholding of explanatory, hindsight information) all contribute to a sense of almost unbearable tension. I don't know how this is for people (the majority) who know the story.

About half way through, as you begin to realise how things will probably turn out, the film stops being a thriller, and becomes an exercise in dread: time contracts, and you hope the film goes on forever so that the intolerable denouement is postponed. It is unbearable. But after the film you begin to question the ethics of all this. One of the themes of the film is the media treatment of the crisis, the reprehensible desire of the Olympic Committee to get it out of the way as quickly as possible - one victim's wife accuses the media of turning the crisis into a 'show'. But this is precisely what Macdonald does, turning human tragedy into an entertainment by turns kinetic and visceral.

Other plusses are the revelations of shocking, farcical German incompetence, desperate to reveal deNazification by having no security whatsoever; the callous, indifferent face-saving here by representatives of the police is the film's true, sickening, achievement. The brief montages of the sporting events, the whole point of the Olympics, are exhilirating, soundtracked to an uplifting Moog Bach, making you wonder why people can't make better sports movies.

ONE DAY has been compared to Errol Morris's documentaries, and you can see, superficially, why - the Phillip Glass score, the distortion of footage and time, the letting authority hang itself. But Morris, in a film like THE THIN BLUE LINE, is concerned not so much with presenting a truth as destroying the official version, exposing its weaknesses, repressions, lies. His recreated scenes, heightened images, distancing effects, all point to the artificiality of the official 'truth'. Morris uses documenatary's claim to authenticity and truth, to expose the inauthenticity of 'truth'. His is a critical cinema.

MacDonald, however, IS offering official truth here - there is no real difference between what he says and the ABC news reporter. This is not a critical film, pandering to firmly entrenched ideologies. Further, the documentary as a genre is limited. It can tell us about facts, analyses. It can reveal witness. There is an astonishing frisson in being able to see these terrorists walking and talking on the big screen, that projection of fantasies, like people, not mythical constructs. But documentary can never get at people's inner lives, and as this is what real life really is, documentaries seem thin and superficial, a betrayal of life. And so, finally, ironically, the victims DO become abstract - simply that, victims. We know there is more to people than a handful of photographs and highly partial witness.

First I would like to point out that for me, a 21 year old, One Day was my first exposure to the events, therefore it was informative, for myself atleast. As for the complaint about dehumanizing and downplaying the Palestinians' plight, I believe that argument is garbage. You would have to be LIVING in a vacum not to know their plight, and it's hard to argue that terrorists are human. Besides, the surviving terrorist spoke about talking and joking with the prisoners, a momentary respite for the viewer as it must have been for those involved. As far as absolving the Israeli gov't, the point was obvious and well made, no Israeli and even Jew for that matter could feel safe if the demands were met. And none of criticisms state provide any evidence for their complaints I might add.

That being said, as a Historian, there are some rather speculative aspects to the documentary. For example, Douglas states that the East Germans helped the terrorists scope the place out before hand, but it is unclear whether they knew of their intentions or not (ala the americans helping them in), which is a major fault in the fact presenting. Also rather curious was how Douglas tells how the plane hijacking was a scam, and then states the surviving terrorist confirmed this, which to me indicates they set up this scenario for the interviewee and he merely said 'yes.'

The main point of this documentary is for the viewer to ask how, not why. How could everything fall apart as it did? I left wondering how in Cold War Europe, an extraction team from East Germany, England, France, Russia, ect., could not have been employed within hours and how much did Cold War politics played into that factor. Despite its flaws, One Day is an excellent documentary, as riveting as it is depressing.

"One Day in September" is a phenomenal documentary. Its focus is on the hostage situation during the 1972 Munich Olympics when Palestinian terrorists took Israeli athletes prisoner. The film does something which I think any great documentary should when it covers or explores historical events. It frames the entire hostage crisis in a larger context. Yes, the film covers 21 hours of September 5th on which the hostage situation commenced and (one could say) resolved itself. However, in order to understand the reactions of the German government, the Israeli government, the media and the Olympic Games' fans and participants, the film discusses the German desire to create the atmosphere of peace to erase the stigma of the 1936 Olympics, then full of Fascist propaganda. It touches on the ongoing Israel-Arab conflict. It touches on the meaning of the Olympics.

"One Day in September" never strays from its focus, however, which is to document the hostage crisis and what it meant. What makes the film great, aside from its intelligent approach to the subject, is how well the atmosphere of the hostage situation is carried across. By the end of the film you do feel like you've watched the news for a day, glued to the TV screen hoping that the people will make it out alive. Watching it, you are reminded of how ill-prepared states are for terrorist attacks (still rings true even recently) because of the ulterior motives of statesmen. A lot of what happens at the state, political level, happens because it has to look good. The Germans were unprepared for the terrorists because they thought that extreme police security would welcome images of pre-War Olympics in Germany. They wanted to appear a certain way. The same went for how they handled the crisis.

The film, like many terrorist crises, ends with a tragedy. What remains with the viewer is not only the deep sadness at how one of the most peaceful world events turns into one of the most hateful, but also how incredibly contemporary those events from over thirty years ago still seem.