Olympic film set documents 100 years of change
Every Olympics brings about another Olympic film.
These films are not highlight reels. They’re not simple journalistic documents about who won in which competition. Instead, they use the Olympics as the pretext for an artistic expression, and they are made with the future in mind. They try to digest and encapsulate scores of disparate events into a cohesive narrative that says, “This is what happened. This is what was important.”
In 1996, the International Olympic Committee began an effort to recover and restore all the Olympic films, going back to the first, made in Stockholm in 1912. The project took more than 20 years to complete, and the result is the boxed set, “100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912-2012,” released by the Criterion Collection.
First the statistics: The set lists for $319.96 on both Blu-ray and DVD (get the Blu-ray), though I’ve seen it sell new for about $100 less than that. The set is made up of 32 discs and runs more than 104 hours. And it comes with its own book — not a booklet, but a 216-page hardcover — written by Peter Cowie, discussing each of the Olympic films and the circumstances surrounding their creation.
There are many ways to watch these films. You could, for example, decide that you were interested in ski jumps or women’s figure skating and then spend a night or two working your way through 100 years of them, watching the sport evolve. Or you can move randomly through time. Or you can start at the beginning.
For me, the great and profound surprise was the quality of the 1912 Stockholm film — actually a collection of individual newsreel films, arranged here chronologically. The clarity of image is astonishing, and the speed of the film is almost completely natural, despite the fact that in those days movie cameras weren’t motor driven but handcranked. You ever see a fake silent film, where the production values are so perfect that you know it can’t be real? That’s how the 1912 Olympic film looks, except it is real.
Sports aside, the 1912 Olympic disc is a chance to see human beings from 106 years ago behaving naturally, as themselves, outside the artificial conventions of early 20th century acting. It’s striking. In fact, it’s awe-inspiring, seeing people smiling or laughing or reacting to stress with such complete naturalness that more than a century falls away. We see people, and we know who they are. Sometimes it’s even possible to spot the Americans in a crowd, just by their facial expressions or the way they carry themselves.
So this is a sports document, but it’s a human document, too. Time is the factor that breathes down the neck of every Olympian, the struggle to perfect oneself ... if only for a little while. Katarina Witt is a figure skating sensation in 1984, a poised and unbeatable champion in 1988, and a beloved over-the-hill veteran in 1994. Ten years, in the blink of an eye. And this awareness of time takes on an added poignancy when we’re looking at Olympians, such as Florence Griffith Joyner, who are no longer alive; and others, from the distant past, that couldn’t possibly be alive. From the distance of time, these formidable Olympics seem as vulnerable as they must have seemed to themselves.
All the films are of interest, but as works of art, they vary. Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, “Olympia,” here in its restored entirety, remains one of the great Olympic films, perhaps the greatest, though the hovering presence of Adolf Hitler curdles the atmosphere. As Cowie says in the accompa-
But the films I find myself gravitating to most were those by Bud Greenspan, who pretty much cornered the market in Olympic films from 1984 until his death in 2010.
nying book, “Olympia endures as a monument of cinema — and of a malevolent ideology.”
There are other standouts, such as “Visions of Eight” (Munich 1972), with separate films by eight different filmmakers from all over the world. But the films I find myself gravitating to most were those by Bud Greenspan, who pretty much cornered the market in Olympic films from 1984 until his death in 2010. Greenspan augmented his depiction of the various competitions through interviews with the various participants, before and after the events, and through careful editing, which brought out the inherent drama. For example, his backstage glimpses of Witt (East Germany), Debi Thomas (USA) and Elizabeth Manley (Canada) in 1988 make it clear that, though Thomas came into the night with a slight lead, Witt and Manley were in the right mental space to win.
Of course, if there’s nothing else, this set is to be cherished for its record of more than 40 opening ceremonies. This quadrennial parade of humanity is always moving and, with each successive Olympics, more spectacular. And every year, there’s usually something else to think about in retrospect — countries that no longer exist, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, or cities on the edge of a precipice, such as Sarajevo in 1984.
To watch these films isn’t to become used to the Olympics but to appreciate them in a new and deeper way. It’s also the best possible mental preparation for the XXIII Olympic Winter Games, beginning Feb. 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea.