OLYMPIA

(1938) Director: Leni Riefenstahl

DVD
NETFLIX

SUMMARY:

(Olympia) 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-cut editing techniques, 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."

Produced at the behest of the International Olympics Committee (IOC), Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 11th Olympic Games which took place in Berlin from August 1st to August 16th, 1936, has won numerous awards and is widely considered by film critics to be the greatest sports documentary ever made, also often included in critics' lists of the top 100 films (of any genre) of the 20th century. Although usually referred to alongside Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) as a "Nazi propaganda" film made for Hitler, it was in fact commissioned by the International Olympics Committee, and with its multi-national themes and its celebrations of the athletic successes of peoples from all nations and all races, it could easily be argued that this is, indeed, perhaps the greatest anti-Nazi propaganda film ever made.

VIDEO: FULL FEATURE



REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

• 1948 Time Magazine review
• Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Movies
• Leni Riefenstahl: Documentary Film-Maker Or Propagandist? from kamera.co.uk
• Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia": Brilliant Cinematography or Nazi Propaganda? from the Sports Journal
• NY Times bio of Leni Riefenstahl

NOTES:

• Riefenstahl's prominence in the Third Reich along with her personal friendships with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels thwarted her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but never convicted of war crimes.
• The propaganda value of her films made during the 1930s repels most commentators but many film histories cite the aesthetics as outstanding. After her death the Associated Press described Riefenstahl as an "acclaimed pioneer of film and photographic techniques."Der Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin noted, "Leni Riefenstahl conquered new ground in the cinema." The BBC said her documentaries "were hailed as groundbreaking film-making, pioneering techniques involving cranes, tracking rails, and many cameras working at the same time." Reviewer Gary Morris called Riefenstahl "an artist of unparalleled gifts, a woman in an industry dominated by men, one of the great formalists of the cinema on a par with Eisenstein or Welles."
• The torch relay of modern times which transports the flame from Greece to the various designated sites of the games had no ancient precedent and was introduced by Carl Diem, with the support of Joseph Goebbels, at the controversial Berlin Olympics as a means to promote Nazi ideology.