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Olympia (1938 film)
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Olympia is a 1938 film by Leni Riefenstahl documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The movie was produced in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil — Fest der Völker (Festival of Peoples) and Olympia 2. Teil — Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty). Commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, it was the first documentary film on the Olympic Games ever made. Many advanced motion picture techniques, which later became industry standards but which were groundbreaking at the time, were employed, including unusual camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups, setting the railway tracks on the stadium to shoot the crowd and the like.
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Olympia is a 1938 film by Leni Riefenstahl documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The movie was produced in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil — Fest der Völker (Festival of Peoples) and Olympia 2. Teil — Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty). Commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, it was the first documentary film on the Olympic Games ever made. Many advanced motion picture techniques, which later became industry standards but which were groundbreaking at the time, were employed, including unusual camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups, setting the railway tracks on the stadium to shoot the crowd and the like. The techniques employed are almost universally admired, but the film is controversial due to its political content. Nevertheless, the film appears on many lists of the greatest films of all-time, including Time magazine's "All-Time 100 Movies."
There has been much discussion of whether this film should be classified as a Nazi propaganda film like her earlier Triumph of the Will. While the entire 1936 Olympics has been derided as the "Hitler Olympics" and was unquestionably designed primarily to showcase the alleged accomplishments of the Third Reich, and to this extent any film accurately documenting the proceedings would come off as something of a propaganda film, Riefenstahl's defenders have pointed to her close-up shot of the expression on Hitler's face when Jesse Owens, an African-American, won a gold medal, as showing a tacit dissent from Nazi racial supremacy doctrines. Other non-Aryan winners are featured as well. Noted American film critic Richard Corliss observed in Time that "The matter of Riefenstahl 'the Nazi director' is worth raising so it can be dismissed. [I]n the hallucinatory documentary Triumph of the Will... [she] painted Adolf Hitler as a Wagnerian deity... But that was in 1934–35. In [Olympia] Riefenstahl gave the same heroic treatment to Jesse Owens..."
Olympia set the precedent for future films documenting and glorifying the Olympic Games, particularly the Summer Games. The "Olympic Torch Run", now revered as a seemingly-ancient tradition, was devised by Riefenstahl for these games and this film in conjunction with the German sports official Dr. Carl Diem.
Riefenstahl herself, uncredited, appears briefly in the prologue of the film as the nude dancer.
Versions
Olympia was made in three versions: German, French and English. There are slight differences between each version, extending to which portions were included and their sequence within the entire film.
It appeared to be Riefenstahl's habit to re-edit the film upon re-release, so that there are multiple versions of each language version of the film. For example, as originally released, the famous diving sequence (the penultimate sequence of the entire film) ran about four minutes. Riefenstahl subsequently reduced it by about 50 seconds. (The entire sequence could be seen in prints of the film circulated by the collector Raymond Rohauer.)
Reception
The film had an immensely strong reaction in Germany and was bestowed with acclaim and accolades around the world. In 1960, her peers voted the film as one of the 10 best films of all time. The Daily Telegraph recognised the film as "even more technically dazzling" than Triumph of the Will. The Times described the film as "visually ravishing...A number of sequences in the supposedly documentary Olympia, notably that devoted to the high-diving competition, become less and less concerned with record and more and more abstract: some of the divers never hit the water, as the visual interest of patterns of movement takes over."
Awards
The film won several awards;
- National Film Prize (1937-1938)
- Venice International Film Festival (1938) — Coppa Mussolini (Best Film)
- Swedish Polar Prize (1938)
- Greek Sports Prize (1938)
- Olympic Gold Medal of the Comité International Olympique (1939)
- Lausanne International Film Festival (1948) — Olympic Diploma
Re-release
There had been few screenings of Olympia in English-speaking countries upon its original release. In 1955 Riefenstahl agreed to remove three minutes of Hilter footage for screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The same version was also screened on West German television and in theatres around the world.
See also
- List of German films 1933-1945
- Nazism and cinema
Other Official Films of the Olympic Games
External links
- reviews gathered by MRQE.
- reviews gathered by MRQE.
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