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Olympiad Part 2 - Festival of Beauty
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Directed by Leni Riefenstahl Germany 1938 / Documentary / B&W / 90 min / Monaural / 1.33:1 / PAL / In German without any Subtitles
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| Having proven her mettle with her
still-astonishing propaganda epic Triumph of the Will, German filmmaker
Leni Riefenstahl furthered her reputation with the two-part Olympia,
an all-inclusive filmed record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In its
original 220-minute form, the film was designed as a paean to Aryan
superiority, likening the strong-limbed young German athletes with
the godlike participants of the ancient Olympic games. By accident
or design, however, the film transends politics, resulting in an across-the-board
tribute to all the Olympic partcipants -- even those whose racial
makeup did not come up to the "pure" standards established
by the Third Reich. This is especially true in the first portion of
the film, in which black American runner Jessie Owens emerges as the
star (Owens' subsequent snub by Hitler and staff is ignored). The
second half of the film is the more impressive technically, with Riefenstahl
utilizing an astonishing variety of camera speeds and angles to record
the diving competition. Working 16 hours a day, seven days a week,
Riefenstahl and her staff were often denied desirable camera angles,
forcing them to improvise with telephoto lenses; the results are often
far more dramatically impressive than the up-close-and-personal approach
taken by contemporary TV cameramen. After an editing process that
took nearly 18 months, Riefenstahl added icing to the cake with a
richly evocative soundtrack -- an added touch which, so far as the
filmmaker was concerned, "made" the picture. Inasmuch as
the German government was still trying to curry favor with the outside
world in early 1938, Olympia was shipped out in various reedited versions,
each favoring the athletes of the release country. Many English-language
versions avoided any references to Hitler or Nazism -- quite a feat,
considering the preponderence of swastikas at the Olympic site.
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