September 5 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

September 5 is built on a Hitchcockian logic that Deleuze called the relation-image: what drives the drama is never the hostage crisis itself — which the film keeps at one remove, visible only through monitors — but the web of relations between the ABC Sports booth and the event it is transmitting. Every professional micro-decision (go live or hold, confirm before airing, show the body or cut away) sends ripples through an invisible network — between broadcaster and audience, between coverage and complicity — and Fehlbaum, like Hitchcock, makes us acutely conscious of occupying that web as spectators. Markus Förderer's mise-en-scène externalizes the trap: a low-ceilinged room lit almost entirely by diegetic monitor glow, the camera threading through crowded console rows and pressing close to faces, so that the wall of screens is the only window onto Munich for the crew and for us alike. The geometry is deliberate — we are inside the booth, watching people watch, locked into the same mediated view. The film's deepest craft debt is to All the President's Men (1976): Pakula's thriller located its suspense not in action but in the procedural labor of verification — phone calls, source-checking, deadline pressure — and September 5 transplants that exact grammar to the broadcast desk, making each choice about what to air as viscerally urgent as any chase. What complicates everything is Fehlbaum's persistent focus on the ethics of the gaze: the crew never chose to witness history; they simply had a satellite uplink already trained on the Games when it arrived — and the film insists that possession of the apparatus is itself a form of commitment.