1972

Sarah Morris
1972
2008
35mm / HD Digital
38:12 mins

Sarah Morris’s seventh film is an intimate portrait of an individual in the city of Munich. Dr. Georg Sieber was the head psychologist of the Olympic Police. Sieber was present on Connolly Street on the tragic morning of September 5th, 1972 when members of the terror group Black September attacked and took hostage the members of the visiting Israeli Olympic Team. Later that morning, he resigned from his position. Sieber was hired by the International Olympic Committee and Munich Police to project possible scenarios that would jeopardize the safety of the Olympic Games and prepare the security training that they would require. One of the scenarios written by Sieber was an almost exact prognosis of what was to fatefully play out in reality. Continuing her investigation of the concept of the “peripheral” character, it becomes clear that Sieber had proposed an alternative method of navigating the situation that could have led to a different outcome.

In 1972, Morris mixes police surveillance footage of demonstrators and archival photos of the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, with shots of the Munich Olympia-park and a candid interview of Sieber who has a long-standing career as a psychologist and is an expert on international security matters. The film, shot on 35mm, investigates the issue of projection and planning and its potential failures through this specific instance in history. It exposes a subjective parallel view radically different than the widely received ideas surrounding the events of the 1972 Olympics.