If documentaries are your thing and you're looking for an alternative to David Attenborough being winched 100 metres up into the canopy or crawling through the undergrowth ready to startle an unsuspecting animal with his taste in khaki clothing or thrill his adoring audience with a stage-whispered "HERE! ... In the taiga of Northern Siberia …", you could do a lot worse than watch two very different documentaries by Scottish film maker Kevin Macdonald.
The grandson of actress Wendy Orme and script-writer Emeric Pressburger, the cinema is clearly in Macdonald's genes, and he snapped up the Oscar for Best Documentary with his compelling 1999 work One Day in September about the murder of 11 members of the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
One Day in September has quite a bit in common with the Brazilian 2002 documentaryBus 174 , as both films rely heavily on contemporary television film footage. That they should be able to do this is in many ways the most salient aspect of both films for the modern viewer. Today, if such events were unfolding (unless it be in the Philippines), the authorities would have cordoned off the entire area and imposed no-fly zones so that such an intimate portrayal of the goings-on would simply not be possible.
But these events took place in West Germany a little more than a quarter of a century after the end of a conflict in which an estimated five million Jews had been murdered by a German regime. In a country that was not permitted to train or operate its own equivalent of the SAS or the Mossad to deal with such situations, the hapless attempts of the state and federal governments at management of the crisis, as matters spiral out of control, are almost comic in their ineptitude.
The scene in which armed policemen in tracksuits manoeuvre on the rooftops of the Olympic Village watched by hundreds of athletes and scores of television cameras, which beam the pictures simultaneously into the room occupied by the terrorists, vies for the title of ultimate absurdity with the scene in which police vehicles attempt to reach the airport where the terrorists have taken their hostages, only to be prevented from doing so by the thousands of gawkers who have taken to their cars on this balmy late summer evening to get a ringside view of the aerodromic action.
Macdonald's greatest coup was to obtain the involvement of the last known surviving terrorist, Jamal Al-Gashey – the Israelis saw to the others – who not only provides the Palestinian point of view but also offers some pithy anecdotes. Thus, when he and his seven colleagues, were clambering over the fence surrounding the village at quarter to four in the morning they bumped into drunk members of the American team returning from a night on the town and even stopped to give them a hand. Tellingly, Jamal makes the point that it was this terrorist action, however botched it may have been, that finally brought the plight of the Palestinians to a worldwide audience.
By contrast, Macdonald's 2003 picture, Touching the Void, is a paean to the majesty of the Peruvian Andes and testimony, if any were needed, to the nuttiness of mountaineers. Two English fellows decide to try and scale a 21,000-foot mountain by a route that no one has managed successfully before and end up very grateful to a compatriot they bumped into in Lima, who waits around for them at their desolate base-camp for days after they've passed their due-by date.
In an everyday story of blokes with seemingly endless supplies of narrow-gauge rope and lots of metaphorical bottle, but not enough literal bottles of the water and cooking gas variety, one of the climbers breaks his leg, the other one slices one of the ropes – rather an important one too, being the one supporting his mate dangling 80 feet above ice and rocks – but somehow they both make it back to civilisation, or in the case of one of the climbers, Leicester.
Touching the Void won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 2003–04 BAFTAs.
The grandson of actress Wendy Orme and script-writer Emeric Pressburger, the cinema is clearly in Macdonald's genes, and he snapped up the Oscar for Best Documentary with his compelling 1999 work One Day in September about the murder of 11 members of the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
One Day in September has quite a bit in common with the Brazilian 2002 documentary
But these events took place in West Germany a little more than a quarter of a century after the end of a conflict in which an estimated five million Jews had been murdered by a German regime. In a country that was not permitted to train or operate its own equivalent of the SAS or the Mossad to deal with such situations, the hapless attempts of the state and federal governments at management of the crisis, as matters spiral out of control, are almost comic in their ineptitude.
The scene in which armed policemen in tracksuits manoeuvre on the rooftops of the Olympic Village watched by hundreds of athletes and scores of television cameras, which beam the pictures simultaneously into the room occupied by the terrorists, vies for the title of ultimate absurdity with the scene in which police vehicles attempt to reach the airport where the terrorists have taken their hostages, only to be prevented from doing so by the thousands of gawkers who have taken to their cars on this balmy late summer evening to get a ringside view of the aerodromic action.
Macdonald's greatest coup was to obtain the involvement of the last known surviving terrorist, Jamal Al-Gashey – the Israelis saw to the others – who not only provides the Palestinian point of view but also offers some pithy anecdotes. Thus, when he and his seven colleagues, were clambering over the fence surrounding the village at quarter to four in the morning they bumped into drunk members of the American team returning from a night on the town and even stopped to give them a hand. Tellingly, Jamal makes the point that it was this terrorist action, however botched it may have been, that finally brought the plight of the Palestinians to a worldwide audience.
By contrast, Macdonald's 2003 picture, Touching the Void, is a paean to the majesty of the Peruvian Andes and testimony, if any were needed, to the nuttiness of mountaineers. Two English fellows decide to try and scale a 21,000-foot mountain by a route that no one has managed successfully before and end up very grateful to a compatriot they bumped into in Lima, who waits around for them at their desolate base-camp for days after they've passed their due-by date.
In an everyday story of blokes with seemingly endless supplies of narrow-gauge rope and lots of metaphorical bottle, but not enough literal bottles of the water and cooking gas variety, one of the climbers breaks his leg, the other one slices one of the ropes – rather an important one too, being the one supporting his mate dangling 80 feet above ice and rocks – but somehow they both make it back to civilisation, or in the case of one of the climbers, Leicester.
Touching the Void won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 2003–04 BAFTAs.
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