79 years ago...
Olympia (1938)
Director: Leni Riefenstahl
Country: Germany
Length: 228 minutes (3 3/4 hours)
Type: Documentary
I got
'Olympia' on DVD a couple of years ago (a copy from the Baltimore Public Library that had found it's way on to eBay?) in what my research led me to believe was the best available source. It turned out to be unwatchably bad, so it sat on the shelf. Fortunately, just in time for me reaching this point in the book,
Criterion and the
Olympic Committee have scanned the film in 4K and it looks fantastic. Director
Leni Riefenstahl is again given full reign and limitless resources to document a major event for the
Third Reich, the
1936 Berlin Olympics. Every type of camera is placed in every conceivable position to capture the events in incredibly dramatic detail. She spent two years sculpting the 1.2 million feet of film shot, reportedly just screening the dailies took 2.5 months! I'm not really a sports fan but if sports footage was presented at this level of film-making, I'm sure I would be.
'Olympia' is divided into two films,
'Part 1: Festival of Nations' and
'Part 2: Festival of Beauty'. The opening 18-minutes of Pt1 is a wordless and elegant continuous montage set to triumphant music, taking us from the ruins of ancient Greece, then it's statues, then the statue-like naked bodies of male and female athletes in super slow-mo and finally a fantastical flight across the map of Europe from Greece to Germany, incorporating many effects, animations and paintings. Pt2 begins with Riefenstahl creating a 20-minute ballet in the edit using gravity-defying gymnastics footage. Pt1 focuses almost exclusively on the 'track and field' competition within the amphitheater, then Pt2 ventures out to follow the various other events, equestrian trials, sailing, swimming, cycling and distance running. The star of Pt1 is famously the black US quadruple Gold medalist
Jesse Owens and the star of Pt2 is the steely-eyed
Glenn Morris (also from the US team). I found myself really cheering him on as he competes in the grueling Decathlon. He went on to take the lead role in
1938's 'Tarzan's Revenge'... so maybe Tarzan-fan @"BionicBob" is familiar with him?
The bulk of the movie is a relatively straight-forward sports Documentary highlights-package, very much like we get today, although edited to a high artistic standard. Some sequences and moments really set this apart as a unique piece of film art. Riefenstahl is often less interested in who is competing and winning and is more focused on how the human body works. The pole vaulting is a super slow-motion exploration of the specific rapid and dexterous moves required to actually perform a vault. The diving sequence is perhaps the most famous part of the film, featuring a beautiful montage of divers, at various speeds, running the film forward and back to create an aerial ballet in the edit. The sequence includes a clever match-cut that makes it appear that a diver disappears into the surface of the water and out the other side into the sky. It ends with cruciform bodies floating in air silhouetted against the clouds like angels ascending to heaven. A more general technique of interest is the occasional cutting to very long/wide shots, to show the athletes racing ant-like in the vast stadium. Effort was clearly put in to shoot, edit and present each event in a unique way.
Apart from the German commentator using the word "Negros" a couple of times (not in a negative way, just mentioning them in the vernacular of the day), the odd Nazi flag and many enthusiastic Nazi salutes, the film is generally free from propaganda. It's oddly an almost anti-Nazi celebration of the human body and spirit, in all it's races, shapes and genders. There is no attempt that I could detect to favour the white German athletes, over the black or Asian competitors from other nations in the way it's shot, or edited. Watching 'Olympia' is a much more pleasant experience than horrifically racist Hollywood films like
'Jezebel' (from the same year) or
John Ford's 1934 'Judge Priest'. Apparently Owens received a congratulatory wave, handshake and signed-photo from
Hitler. Owens stayed in unsegregated hotels in Germany and received the first ever sponsorship for a male African American athlete from German shoe maker
Adidas. In contrast, on his return to the USA he was made to use the servant's entrance to his own New York celebration and received no congratulation from the President, or invitation to the White House. Things were clearly pretty bad in America in the '30s, when they make the Nazi state look less racist.
Next is a French Comedy.