Rating: /5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 20/52 | 100 Years of Olympic Films
The camera pans over the Grecian ruins as triumphant music. It lingers at statues of heads and bodies in dramatic light as smoke billows around them.
One statue transitions to a nude man tossing a discus. The dramatic clouds and vibrant lighting cut the light along the muscular form. Nude women stretch and flow in gymnastic rhythms. Muscles tense and release, black monoliths carving shadow into the bright skies.
In the Aryan myth, this is their heritage — the ideal they wish to return to.
A solitary figure carries a torch through fields and beaches, along mountainsides, and into a town. As he passes the torch onto the next, townspeople line the street. We fly across the world, the flags of participating countries fluttering as we pass their homeland.
As we enter Germany, the Nazi flag overwhelms the screen. A bell with the Nazi eagle perched on the Olympic rings tolls. Swaths of the crowd heil Hitler.
As other countries make their entrance, some smile nonchalantly — others gaze in fascination at the heiling crowd and Hitler. The other countries of the Third Reich also heil the crowd. Hitler declares the opening of the ceremonies.
The torchbearer enters the coliseum. The crowd goes silent. Only the bell tolls as he lights the Olympic flame.
What follows is an epic portrait of German and Nazi inadequacy. Leni Riefenstahl captures the games in stylistic flourishes that contemporary Olympic game footage echoes. Most prominently, she captures Jesse Owens — an obvious and embarrassing refutation to the Aryan claim to genetic superiority.
Look, I can appreciate sports, but I don’t like them. The Olympic games are the most boring sports in the world. So, once we move beyond the opening ceremonies, I have difficulty focusing. I like glistening muscular bodies and thinking about how much fucking went on behind the scenes — maybe they should have filmed that?
Much of the initial acclaim this movie received came before the world knew about Kristallnacht. Still, if film history has taught us anything, it’s that shitty people can make beautiful movies about shitty things.
Watch this with historical context and healthy skepticism. You can appreciate it without endorsing its propaganda, especially when it’s such a remarkable failure at being propaganda.
I have no idea how to assign a star rating to this.