Images of Munich
By far the most interesting thing about Steven Spielberg’s film “Munich” is his use of image.
Despite being well-written, the script was largely unimaginative. The visuals more than made up for this – using repeated patterns, especially in the use of arches, throughout the film and backdrops of Europe that are breathtaking.
What the script failed to convey in words and actions, the visuals more than made up for, particularly in the closing sequence showing the Manhattan skyline as seen from Brooklyn, depicting the still standing World Trade Center Twin Towers – clearing drawing a connection between the aftermath of Munich and what happened almost two decades later when terrorists flew two planes into their sides.
Having seen Munich only twice, I won’t pretend to have figured out all of the patterns of imagery Spielberg used – although here are some preliminary observations:
While the opening scenes of the invasion of the Israeli compound were dramatized, nearly all of the other images came straight out of news coverage at the time, hitting us with one conflicting report after another to convey some of the confusion of events. Although I would have preferred a presentation of a combined narrative of events to convey the gritty details of the situation, the use of the media fits in with Spielberg’s usual pattern of using media to convey certain aspects of his plots. In this case, not knowing what happens when the explosions occur and the reports are brought out about chaos on the airfield, we get a kind of intense horrific feeling that briefly overrides every other consideration. Spielberg later gives us glimpses of what happened in the athlete’s compound and on the airfield in flash backs.
We get reaction shots in Israel and elsewhere, great jubilation at the false report of the safe rescue of the athletes made worse by the fact that the news had been distorted and that the athletes had died. Although Spielberg avoided harping on the irresponsibility of the media in this regard, current events in the United States concerning similar false reports dealing with the victims of a coal mining disaster proved that media had become no more responsibly in the three decades since Munich.
The images from TV of the early reports, then reaction both of Jewish and Arab relations watching TV provides a huge emotional charge and a significant visual launching point: the early reports of the slaughtered Jewish athletes inspired jubilance among the Jews and great anguish among the Arabs.
TV images play a critical role in advancing the subtext of the story that the script does not cover – such as the images after the terrorist hijacked a plane to get the remaining Munich terrorists freed from German jails.
But Spielberg is playing a bigger image game, presenting us with visuals create a mood so powerful that it takes over where the script leaves off, giving us a sense of time and place that few of his other films have successfully accomplished. While we pretend to go back into 1955 in the Spielberg-produced series Back to the Future, in Munich in many ways, we manage to make the transition, each image building that time and place brick by brick, arch by arch, cobblestone by cobblestone.
But, of course, the film’s imagery paints portraits of a life where terrorists can do book signings in the street, where conspirators can meet in public places and hatch their plots, where café, plazas and other places serve as the hatchery for debauchery while life spins around them in laughing colorful moving paintings.
The images are so powerful and so pervasive that often, you get lost in the reflections or in the dark corridors, caught up in the mood rather than the dialogue, the effect of murder in the dark corridor much more effective than anything said. In fact, the first killing is stunning because it occurs in the middle of the absolute ordinary, from book reading to grocery and finally to the nervous shooting in the foyer to the terrorist’s apartment.
(In some ways, the material from which this movie is made presents us with one of the classic questions of art: Does like imitate art. Because as we are brought through this film, scene by scene, image by image, we cannot help think of the original TV spy series Mission Impossible that the events so seem to portray as the team of killers – each with his own expertise – learns their craft, bomb makers, muscleman, brains, accountant etc.— contributing to the final death of their victim in more and more clever ways. And like any one of the series of Mission Impossible, something always goes wrong. This leads us to wonder if the author of Vengeance from which the movie was based had stayed up late to watch Mission Impossible reruns before putting together his book.)
Each scene is so distinct in texture that we are constantly shifting in mood. No two sets even remotely draw the same reaction. In the images, we get irony and we get tragedy neither script nor performance of the actors can give. The visuals in the safe house of the confrontation between terrorists and the isolation of the characters during the critical conversation there make a much more powerful impression that the mouthed-phased we get from the script. We can feel the intensity of the emotions from the use of light and angles and the barriers Spielberg’s camera builds between each. This is culminated in the shooting later in the street in which we see the sprawled body in the street.
While I can’t begin to tell you completely what images mean until I can do a shot by shot study of the film, I know that the repetition of arches throughout the film will mean something as will the repeated use of other elements I have not yet had time to spot. Of course, driving to work through Jersey City this morning, I saw a similar set of arches on one of the largest Jewish temples on Kennedy Boulevard, giving me the idea that the arched symbolism throughout the film made indeed represent Jewish people, their temples and their ideals – perhaps even a reference to the arched Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
I’ll know more the video comes out and I can do a little more research.