Olympia (1938)

Saw Olympia (1938), a documentary of the 1936 Olympics shot by noted Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl.  It opens on Greek ruins and fades to shots of nude torsos of men and women flexing, throwing, lifting, pulling.  This film is interested in artistically tying the tradition of the Olympics back to its Greek roots.  As with Triumph of the Will, the Nazis wish to portray themselves as both vital and new and also as steeped in history and noble tradition.  This film walks that tightrope by evoking the body-worship of the ancient Greeks and by putting many strong German bodies on prominent display: both vital and traditional, you see.

Attractive humans are on great display here.  We get many shots of muscular men and lithe women jumping and diving and breaking world records.  Many of the film's most mesmerizing moments are shots of bodies.  The climactic end of the film shows men and women divers eternally jumping through the air, launching off of the diving board, their bodies taught, seeming to take flight into the sky reflected in the pool.  It's a magical sequence.

But this is also propaganda of course.  Along with sexy bodies we get to see several shots of a grinning Hitler convulsing with delight as Germany takes gold.  We have a shot of an army of outstretched Nazi salutes backing the sheepish face of an American who came in third.  We dig deep into the specialties of Germany and Italy: polo and field soccer and shooting and so on.  In fairness, we also get to see Jesse Owens break a world record, which is nice.

The film is quite long (220 minutes - nearly 4 hours!) but reasonably interesting in the way reality television is: you get caught up in the competition in spite of yourself.  The story of the competition is told from the German point of view (the commentary mourns a German loss and celebrates a German win) but I was able to grimly cheer when an Allied power won anyway.  The film is apparently one of those films that made great technical advances including point-of-view shots of the competition and a nice shot that follows some divers under-water.  This isn't quite enough to save the film for me however and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a film and/or history enthusiast.  The opening and the closing might be worth a wider audience's time, but not much beyond that.