Spielberg: Munich (2005)

Spielberg’s first historical drama since Saving Private Ryan, Munich is a dramatisation of the Israeli reprisal attacks in the aftermath of the Palestinian massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, told from the perspective of Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), a loose version of Yuval Aviv, the supposed co-ordinator. Like most of Spielberg’s films, the moments of overt soul-searching and reflection are largely confined to what it means to be a good father – or a good son – while Israel’s more or less literalised as the mother country, just another player in a pretty familiar family drama. What sets the film apart, then, are its extraordinary procedural segments, as Kaufman and his team track the Palestinian perpetrators across a bewildering array of European cities. That might seem to suggest a film that also functions as a historical travelogue – except that there are virtually no depictions of travel, or of the team’s movement from city to city. Instead, new cities just appear, semi-distinct, shot through with the anonymity that the team is so anxious to preserve. On the one hand, that means that they come to embody the most precarious cusp of Jewish diaspora even or especially as they’re fighting for their homeland, but it also gestures towards a world in which all citizenship is on the verge of becoming diasporic, since their search for the Palestinians overlaps quite naturally with the more general information economy of the late Cold War, “a world of intersecting secrecies.” In other words, the Israeli team are yearning for a nation state in a world in which the nation state is on the verge of dissolution, giving their mission a peculiar poignancy and timeliness. That may also be why their ideological mission continually collapses into a kind of spectacular mission – as Kaufman present it to them, they’re not simply avenging the Israeli Olympic team, but trying to reclaim terrorist spectacle back from the first internationally televised terrorist attack, as well as the way in which it was immunised by the spectacular infrastructure of the Olympic event itself. As a result, Spielberg’s depictions of the various reprisal attacks – which take up the majority of the film – are shot through with a mesmerising, stylised glassiness that’s light years away from the hand-held grittiness of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Suffused with fluid, elastic sightlines, these poetic sequences make it feel like the terrorists are faced with the impossible task of mounting their attacks behind glass, for all the world to see, while managing to elude their crystalline reflection.