Review: Olympia (Part One)

Leni Riefenstahl's International Olympic Committee documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games, Olympia, stands out in several respects. The games were used as a showcase for a murderous regime, the filmmaker was associated with that regime to a degree, and the film's blurring of fact and thematic montage is distinctive. But it's also a timeless lesson in documentary filmmaking.

Part One of the film, which I saw last week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is first of all a marvel of concision. It covers several track and field events in less than two hours, minus a long thematic introduction. And though there is a dated, by-Jove British narration in the English-language cut of the movie, the story comes through mostly in the extraordinary shooting and editing. We see the facial expressions of the athletes and audience, frequently in close-up. The action sequences show the athletes from preparation to follow-through, sometimes focusing in on a stance or a movement, showing rather than telling how the sport is played. Most amazing is the variety and quality of the footage. As each competitor performs and as races go through several heats, there's a different angle seemingly every time. One heat of a sprint is shot from behind and above so we can see both the start and the finish in a single shot. The next heat starts with a wide-angle shot from the ground, just on the inside of the track. This variety, along with judicious use of slow motion at various speeds, gives a heightened sense of drama to an already dramatic event. Even making allowances for out-of-sequence edits of action and audience reaction, and what must have been a large crew with small handheld cameras, the craft is amazing.

And that's saying nothing of the movie's sheer beauty. I stopped following the competition after a while just to take in the images. The incredibly long cross-dissolves of Greek ruins and statuary at the beginning are gorgeous, and the closing sequence of the Olympic flag superimposed on the stadium is breathtaking. There's something about the way she shoots the stadium from a distance, centers it, and isolates it that simultaneously exalts the event and makes it seem part of something even larger. As creepy as that sounds, I wasn't even thinking about meanings at that point. (The shots of Hitler are surprisingly candid but straightforward, making one's skin crawl even more.)

But it's the pole-vaulting that's most amazing. It starts in daylight and ends at night, and the coal blackness behind makes the brightly lit action more dramatic. The scene starts to look very intimate as the background disappears. Athletes waiting their turn watch together on the grass nearby. One image sticks in my mind: Two male athletes sitting on the field, sharing a blanket to keep warm as their eyes follow a vaulter going over. It's delightfully and chastely homoerotic. (Homoerotic images of women far outnumber those of men, here. Intentionally or not, Olympia must be a lesbian landmark of some kind.) The shot of the waiting pole vaulters is just a cutaway, but I see reflections of its style all over the fashion photography of the last 30 years. In addition to making Nazi propaganda in Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl may have invented Abercrombie. But Olympia, Part One is a great film and, I believe, one that uplifts humanity.