My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 16): Olympic Dreams

Fight without Hate (1948)

Directed by Andre Michel

The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912

Directed by Adrian Wood

Olympia (1938)

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl

The excellent Criterion Channel, my go-to source for excellent films during this endless marooning plague, now has posted a fascinating set of over 100 years of films about the Olympic games, ranging from predictable teary-eyed personal triumph stories to very artsy, idiosyncratic studies. What I have found fascinating about them is how one can evaluate the societal mores of an era by both watching the panorama and listening to the commentary. Sportscasters tend to speak with far more improvisation than do most actors or other newscasters. So they let slip all sorts of interesting things. During commentary on the London games of 1948 we here lots of talk from the British commentators about the “American negro team” (perhaps as distinct from the actual American team). The racial remarks about “burly negros”, “titanic negros”” who “are a credit to their race”, etc. are even more marked by the Finnish commentators at Helsinki in 1952. What is striking is how the only black athletes present in these films from 1932-48 are from the US, and these are portrayed as curiosities, almost freaks by the European commentators. Given the current dominance in distance running by African runners, it is also very strange to see nearly all-white Marathons up until about 1956. Given that sports often moved ahead of society in racial integration, it just shows how few were the opportunities for black people until the 1960s.

Equally interesting are the comments about women in the marvelously quirky French film Fight without Hate about the 1948 Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Only three years after WWII, with Europe still mostly in ruins, the Swiss put on a low key affair with virtually no pomp, and most nationalism banned---all this would return soon enough when the USSR rejoined in 1952, stimulating a US-USSR Olympics-as-Cold War battle that continued up until the demise of the USSR. This very-French film features a hyper-excitable male commentator partnered by his bored wife who comments on cute male athletes (she likes Americans) and a colleague who makes lascivious remarks about her, then sneaks off with her to go drinking. The poor commentator gets jealous and interrupts his call of cross-country skiing with dark predictions of how his wife may be cheating on him. He comments liberally about the physique and beauty of the female athletes, but not so much about their talent, oo-la-lah.

As a sports fan, I enjoyed seeing how some events (discus, shot put, marathon) appeared nearly identical in form/technique in 1912 as today, while others (diving, swimming, figure skating) appear entirely evolved. Of course the performance of all the modern athletes is immeasurably better, but with some of the sports you would only know that by the timing or distance, not by just watching the athletes. As an ex-competitive swimmer I was fascinated to watch how the breaststroke underwent innovation under the rules of the 1950s, with first a few swimmers, then more not leaving their arms moving in parallel under the water (as is the case now) but instead bringing them up and out of the water in parallel—what we now call the butterfly. You go much faster that way. When all the men started doing this, they finally changed the rules and made the butterfly its own event, so the poor traditional breaststrokers could have a chance. But this did not happen until 1960.

The 1912 film, restored from fragments found all over Europe, is a technical marvel. We see horse-drawn carriages in Stockholm, men in boater hats, male discus throwers in sailors caps as they compete, women in floor-length dresses and corsets receiving their medals (after racing in shorts or swimming in poorly elasticized suits). There is even a tug-of-war competition (sadly that ended in 1920). Before WWII, the equestrian events were essentially military contests, featuring real cavalry soldiers from the various armed forces, dressed in military garb. Now they seem like an anachronism to me—the only events where it is not just a human competing. Why not allow auto racing? Anyway, this film is perhaps the best window into the era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson that I have ever seen.

However, the prize effort is Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Olympia, depicting the Berlin games of 1936, the last games for 12 years. There is no vocal narration or commentary, just filmed athletes. She invented amazing camera angles for this film, following up on her 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. She pretty much invented the modern way to film crowds, spectacles, and athletes, tracking them up close as they run, watching them jump into her camera as they long jump (she dug a pit right next to the long jump event so her camera could be at ground level), and using ultra slow close ups of divers and male athletes’ muscular exertions. She was quite a fan of the male body, getting athletes to strip down whenever possible, and even beginning part 2 of the 4-hour film with German athletes emerging from nature and cavorting nude in a sauna and rubbing each other down. Her camera seems in love with the great US sprinter Jesse Owens, king of those Olympics, and defier of Hitler’s racial theories of Aryan superiority. Hitler appears a number of times, but she seems more interested in the beauty of athletes’ bodies than she does in filming politicians in the stands, as she was expected to. It reminds me of how, in Triumph of the Will, she used every excuse not to film the Nazi politicians’ speeches, but instead to show masses of people in movement, wild aerial shots, etc. She was the ultimate opportunist, using a connection to Hitler to make movies, and never was able to transcend that moral sell-out. Sadly, we lost a superbly innovative film stylist when she made that decision to affix herself to the Nazis, as WWII effectively ended her career. It would have been fascinating to see what kind of movies she would have made in a different time.

It's often said that sports are a true reflection of society. I am not so sure of that, but I will say that watching these fascinating old films gave me a better view into what people were like in those bygone days than reading more crafted novels or watching more arty movies from the same times. There is an honesty here that provides a refreshingly true lens into past eras.