Olympia (1938 film)

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Olympia

VHS cover for Olympia 2. Teil - Fest der Schönheit
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
Produced by Leni Riefenstahl
Written by Leni Riefenstahl
Music by Herbert Windt
Release date(s) April 20, 1938 (Germany)
Running time 111 min. (part I)
90 min. (part II)
Language German
Allmovie profile

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). 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-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."[1]

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 Magazine 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. . . ."[2]

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. In 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best films of the last 80 years.

Contents

[edit] 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 4 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.)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Complete List -- All-Time 100 Greatest Movies
  2. ^ http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete_list.html

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Films directed by Leni Riefenstahl
Das Blaue Licht (1932) • Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933) • Triumph of the Will (1934) • Tag der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmacht (1935) • Olympia (1938) • Tiefland (1954) • Impressionen unter Wasser (2002)