September 5 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The thing you keep is a face lit from below by glass. Someone in the ABC Sports control room leans toward a monitor, the screen's cool light pooling under the eyes, and you understand all at once that this person is seeing exactly what you are seeing: an image. Not the event. The image of the event, carried on a bank of low-resolution screens that will be the only window anyone in that room ever gets.

The crew came to Munich to cover swimming heats and the 400 meters. Then Black September takes the Israeli apartment a few hundred yards away, and everything that matters now happens in a place the film will never go. That refusal is Tim Fehlbaum's real invention: a hostage film in which the hostages never appear. The atrocity stays off-screen, present the whole time, never shown.

Deleuze has a precise name for what is just outside the frame. He splits it in two. There is a relative out-of-field — the next room, the adjacent street, a space you could cut to and the camera simply hasn't yet. And there is an absolute out-of-field — a sense of something beyond the frame that cannot be located as a place at all, a larger whole that won't resolve into geography. The Munich apartment is, technically, relative; it has an address, it's down the road. September 5 treats it as absolute. It becomes unreachable, ungraspable, available only as feeds, telexes, and Jim McKay's voice. The room addresses a global audience and cannot see across the parking lot.

This is also, exactly, what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image. In the older cinema of movement, a person perceives a situation and acts to change it; the act resolves the situation, and the cutting serves that chain. Here the chain snaps. The producers, the operators, Marvin Bader weighing what may be aired, the interpreter Marianne Gebhardt straining to hear German radio — they perceive everything and can do nothing to what they perceive. They cannot free a single athlete. Deleuze's term for people stranded like this is the seer, the voyant: no longer an agent, only a watcher and an endurer. What they are caught in are pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns — where looking and listening have become the only acts left.

A film built entirely on that paralysis would stop dead. Fehlbaum's move is to notice the one action the room actually has, and that it feels like the wrong one. They can broadcast. The single thing this room can do to the catastrophe is show it. So the snapped circuit gets rerouted into a second, vocational one. Every decision — go live or hold, confirm or report, air the violence or withhold it — discloses one more sliver of the hidden situation. This is what Deleuze calls the small form, and more finely the index of lack: an elliptical gesture that implies a situation you never see. Each switch thrown in the room points at an event outside it. That is why the patient procedural grammar of All the President's Men — verification staged as suspense, phone calls and corrections as thriller beats — fits a story with no detectives. The labor of confirming is the only available action.

And what are they all doing, hour after hour, but reading? Deleuze's late concept for this is the lectosign, the readable image: when a picture loses its plain sensory-motor obviousness, it stops being something you simply see and becomes something you must decipher. Is that smoke or muzzle flash. Is that figure on the balcony a hostage or a policeman. Förderer keeps composing so a human face and a broadcast image share the frame, one reflected in or lit by the other, until the people are reduced to readers of glass — faces held in a single suspended quality, the affection-image as professional concentration. We watch them read; we read them reading.

Which is where the film's deepest charge lives. Live television makes a promise — what you see is true because it is happening now. September 5 honors that promise and then detonates it: with the full authority of the word LIVE, the broadcast reports the hostages safe. It is the worst possible falsehood, delivered in real time, before McKay has to come back and say they are all gone. The medium built to guarantee truth transmitted a lie at the speed of truth. In Deleuze's terms the broadcast is a relation-image — meaning assembled from relations a knowing audience holds — and that single word becomes its symbol, the object in which the whole film's wager is condensed. The false report is the demark: the anomaly that shatters habit and forces everyone to re-read every feed they trusted a minute ago. The old documentary contract, the powers of the false turned inside out.

The lineage is exact. Network dramatized the slide of broadcasting catastrophe for ratings; The China Syndrome and Broadcast News built the control room into a pressure vessel and the booth into an orchestra; Good Night, and Good Luck proved staged drama could cut invisibly against real archival footage, the technique that lets McKay's actual transmission live inside this fiction. The most direct parent is United 93: a real-time reconstruction of an atrocity nobody in the room can stop. September 5 confines all of it to one day and one set, and seeds something the older films only glimpsed. In 2026, when every disaster reaches us first as a contested feed, the film reads less like history than like a manual.

Its achievement is to make a movement-image genre — the thriller — out of time-image material, out of people who can only watch. The suspense is never whether they can stop it. It is what they will choose to show, and whether the image can be believed. Watch the glass next time. Notice how often a face is only half in the frame and the other half is a monitor, and ask which half the film thinks is real.