One Day in September · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There is a piece of footage in Kevin Macdonald's film that no one meant to shoot. A television camera, panning across the Olympic Village in the early hours, catches figures moving on a rooftop. At the time it was nothing — athletes, a maintenance crew, the ambient business of a stadium town. Watched now, knowing what we know, it curdles. Those are Black September men carrying the morning toward eleven deaths, and the camera that found them had no idea what it was looking at. That single shot tells you why this documentary works the way it does. Its most frightening images are the ones filmed by people who couldn't yet read them.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it; perception flows into action and action resolves the situation. The whole grammar of suspense and rescue runs on that circuit. The time-image begins where the circuit snaps — where someone perceives something they cannot act on, and is reduced to watching. Deleuze called these pure optical and sound situations (opsigns), and the person stranded in them the seer (voyant): not an agent but a watcher, an endurer. He found the figure in postwar fiction. One Day in September discovers that television had been manufacturing it live since 1972.

Consider the standoff. Macdonald hands the long middle of his film over to the actual ABC broadcast, letting it run close to real time. Everyone in it is a seer. The hostages cannot move. The crowd in the stands cannot help. The German officials, milling at the perimeter, perceive a catastrophe forming and have no adequate response to it — no trained unit, no plan, and a politics that won't let them accept the Israelis who do. Deleuze had a name for exactly this paralysis: the crisis of the action-image, the moment when characters can no longer react to what they see. The film stages it as historical fact. The men with the authority to act are, functionally, an audience. And so are we. Jim McKay sits in the studio narrating a hostage crisis he can do nothing about, and when the rescue fails his voice gives us the line the whole film bends toward — "they're all gone." That is found sound doing the work no score could. Macdonald keeps Alex Heffes's percussion out of its way.

The most radical decision is what the film refuses to show. The athletes die at Fürstenfeldbruck airbase, and Macdonald does not reconstruct it, because in 1972 no camera was there. We get diagrams, maps, the verbal testimony of men describing a tarmac in the dark. Deleuze would call that geography a lectosign — an image that has lost its self-evidence and has to be read, deciphered, assembled by the viewer rather than simply seen. The airbase becomes a stratigraphic space, an emptied landscape spoken over by an absent past; the diagram morphs as each witness adds a layer. The horror is out-of-field in Deleuze's strongest sense — not an adjacent room we could pan to, but a region that cannot be located in any frame at all. Forced to imagine it, you suffer it more than any restaging could make you suffer. The film's ethics and its dread turn out to be the same gesture.

Why does the rest of the footage frighten us at all, given that we know the ending before the lights dim? Because of dramatic irony — and because of the documentary contract Bazin first described, the trust that the photographic image did not lie, that the lens recorded what was actually in front of it. Deleuze locates this in the relation-image: meaning the viewer supplies as a knowing third party. We hold a relation the footage doesn't — the rooftop men are killers, the cheerful broadcast is a death watch — and that gap between innocent image and informed eye is the engine. The mixed grain makes it legible: jittery 16mm, Super 8, broadcast video against the still, sober interviews of the late nineties. Macdonald lets the formats clash on purpose, so the picture itself wears its distance from us.

The lineage is precise. The sustained interview with a participant in violence — here Jamal Al Gashey, the surviving terrorist, testifying without remorse — Macdonald inherits from Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line. The controlled escalation toward a catastrophe the audience already knows is the architecture of Costa-Gavras's Z and State of Siege, lifted from political fiction into nonfiction. The clash of degraded archive against clean contemporary footage is Night and Fog's formal invention, extended across three image generations. And the trick of letting institutional broadcast convict the institutions — the Olympic feed indicting the men who ran the Games — comes from Hearts and Minds.

What Macdonald did to the form: he proved that the theatrical documentary could run on the time-image — on the seer, on dead time, on the unshowable — and still grip like a thriller. Not by faking what the record lacked, but by trusting the audience to read the gap. The footage that didn't know what it saw becomes the most terrible thing in the film. So does the airbase we never see. Watch it again and notice how often you are not being shown an event but asked to assemble one. That is the documentary learning to think in time rather than in action — and learning that what it withholds can indict more fiercely than anything it could stage.