ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Sony Pictures Classics Director: Kevin Macdonald Producers: Arthur Cohn, John Battsek Cast: Michael Douglas as Narrator
Substitute 2000 for the date 1972 and The West Bank for The Munich Olympics and the thrilling non-fiction film "One Day in September" can be ripped out of today's headlines. Kevin Macdonald's doc is about the massacre of Israeli athletes by extremists during the Munich, Germany Olympics in 1972, an incident whose background could be traced back at least until 1917 but, for practical purposes might be said to originate in 1948. In that year, the United Nations granted a sliver of land that amounted to just one-fifth of one percent of the total land area of the Middle East to a new, Jewish state, the remainder of what was held under a British mandate since the end of World War I to form an Arab state. The Jewish leadership, happy to get anything at all, immediately accepted. But the little state was immediate invaded by (what was it..seven, eight, nine?) of its hostile neighbors. Partly because leaders in the Arab states urged Palestinian Muslims to depart from Israel "temporarily until the people of that new country are driven into the sea" and partly because the Israeli army "encouraged" some departures, thousands of Palestinians abandoned their homes quickly only to be housed in refugee camps under squalid conditions.
Anti-Israel extremists pursued a policy of sporadic terrorism, or hit-and-run-guerrilla warfare against Israel. The massacre of eleven Israeli athletes in 1972 is perhaps the most theatrical example of attempts by these extremists to call attention to the issue of the displacement of these thousands of Palestinian people and the refusal of Israel to re-admit them to its borders. The British documentarian, Kevin Macdonald, made "One Day in September" to call attention of an audience in the 21st Century to this devastating event. Macdonald, who had previously directed "A Brief History of Errol Morris," knows how to make a nonfiction film. He avoids the error of Mark Jonathan Harris, whose "Into the Arms of Strangers" took the heartwarming event of the adoption of 10,000 European Jewish children by British families during the 1940s and made it into the deadening "talking heads" style that turns off so many of today's moviegoers. Macdonald treats the 1972 massacre with all the dramatic techniques which a modern film maker uses to add excitement to fictional tales. His story is anchored by an interview with the story of a single person, Israeli fencer Andre Spitzer, a particularly heroic fellow who taught fencing to youth as a way to get the youngsters to respect one another. From time to time his widow commands screen attention amid footage of their happier days but at no point does Macdonald give in to the documentarian's usual compulsion to hand the movie over to talking heads.
Not that the interviews are banal. From from it. Almost miraculously producer John Battsek, associate producer Andrew Ruhemann, and Macdonald were able to round up people who would otherwise be most reluctant to particiate in the project including one of the world's public enemies, Jamal al Gashey--the only surviving member of the eight terrorists, now hiding somewhere in Africa and fearful of meeting the fate of compatriots who were successfully "hit" by an Israeli assassination squad some time after the Munich event. While the interview with al Gashey, shown here in segments culled from an eight-hour talk between him and the film makers, was the most difficult to obtain, others who were reluctant to talk showed their faces as well. They included German Federal Minister Hans Deitrich Gensher and Zvi Zamir, ex-head of the Israeli secret police, or Mossad.
Amid an stirring soundtrack which includes scores by Philip Glass, Macdonald unfolds the tale with film clips from the Olympic games (effectively contrasting the '72 event with the infamous 1936 German Olympics used by Hitler to glorify National Socialism), with the relatively restrained use of personal interviews, with computer graphics and still photos and various accoutrements designed to give "One Day in September" the feel of a fictionalized event. With occasional voiceovers by Michael Douglas, "One Day in September" takes us into key facets of the games including a segment from multiple gold-medal winner Mark Spitz's strokes in the pool and a taut basketball game pitting the Americans against the Russians. When eight Palestinian terrorists dressed as athletes and toting machine guns in their bags invade the quarters of the male Israeli athletes (ironically helped over a fence by naive Americans), the world's attention became centered on Munich thanks to the TV cameras--whose intrusion gave the terrorists information of the whereabouts of the German security forces.
While we are meant to abhor the craven actions of the terrorists, director Macdonald is eager to give the audience a look at the cowardly ways that the German government treated the incident, and in one particularly effective bit of probing shows how German leaders later set up a phony hijack of a Sabena Airlines jet to quickly free the three perpetrators being incarcerated on their land, hoping that this sop would discourage future terrorist actions on their soil.
Macdonald brings history to life as few other documentarians have done, using the techniques of fictional helmers such as irony, an effectively used soundtrack, and interviews with people whose mere presence on the screen demonstrates the ingenuity of producers and director in even obtaining the exchanges. In doing that they are echoing Claude Lanzmann, whose "Shoah" similarly amassed numbers of subjects who would be expectedly averse to appearing in a documentary. The background of the Munich disaster, specifically the motivations are the terrorists, is given short shrift, a circumstance that could vex some critics. But "One Day in September" appropriately centers on the event itself, performing a service to today's moviegoers who may well know nothing of yet another sad day in recent German history.
Not Rated. Running time: 92 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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