Olympia

How would you film black athletes if you had Goebbels for a producer?

The great German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl must have asked herself that question when she made “Olympia”, an epic documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games hosted by Nazi Germany.

After the success of “Triumph of the Will”, Riefenstahl’s grand documentation of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, which portrayed Hitler as some kind of deity descending from heaven on an airplane, the Fuhrer commissioned her to make the film about Germany’s hosting of the Olympic Games.

Those were years when the world was already jittery about Germany’s rapid recovery and increasing rise into a military superpower under the Nazis. “Triumph of the Will” showcased that.

Now, Hitler wanted to soften the image of the Third Reich as he began planning for global conquest. He wanted a movie about the Olympics to portray Germany as a good friend and a good sport in the community of nations. “Olympia” was released the year before Blitzkrieg.

Riefenstahl couldn’t refuse the Fuhrer whose eloquence had earlier mesmerized her and whom she considered to be “pure”. She took the challenge and worked under Goebbels, the Third Reich’s chief of propaganda, who provided everything that she might need to produce the film.

With all the logistics she could have, Riefenstahl employed an unprecedented number of cameras to shoot the events in practically every angle: from boats, airplanes, underwater and up from the sky with cameras tied to balloons that carried a note offering reward to those who could return them (she recovered all of them).

It took two years after the Olympics for Riefenstahl to finish the film, editing kilometers of footage. The result is a two-part epic documentary, each structured with a prologue. The opening sequence of the first film features stunning shots of Greek landscapes, ruined temples, classic statues, and naked bodies of athletes.

Then a montage showing a globe links the scene of the original Olympiad to modern day Berlin, with an aerial shot of the huge stadium designed by Albert Speer according to the official Nazi style of neoclassicism.

The film then proceeds to cover the various sports events, edited with a sense of rhythm that recalls the earlier Soviet propaganda films that, like Riefenstahl’s work, were also wonderful pieces of art.

With multiple cameras, Riefenstahl shows a wide variety of shots, picking reaction shots from a multicultural audience in the grandstand after pans of athletes in the middle of action. In some parts, the camera catches Hitler applauding the winners or chatting with his lieutenants. It is disorienting to see shots of Hitler and black athletes in the same film.

In some parts, faces of winning athletes including those from former enemies, United States, England and France, were superimposed with the flags of their countries as snippets of their national anthems were played in the background. At one time, when the equestrians of England and France fell from their horses, watchers in Nazi uniforms rushed to help them.

The opening sequence of the second part of the film had a more romantic approach, showing shots of nature and naked athletes swimming and warming up in a lakeside cottage. Riefenstahl’s camera is keen on the beauty of the youthful body in motion, a rare kind of female gaze.

Up to her death, Riefenstahl insisted that it was “beauty and harmony” that interested her and not reality.  “Whatever is purely realistic, slice of life, which is average, quotidian, doesn’t interest me,” she said. “I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony.”

The most haunting part of the film is the diving sequence, with its striking shots of the body in flight edited in some kind of organic flow. Here Riefenstahl “transcends earth”, as one critic says, her own flight from reality finds a filmic metaphor.

In the end, Goebbels opposed the film perhaps offended by shots of triumphant blacks and finding it too poetic to have any political value. But it did not stop its screening in Germany and abroad. The film ends with a dramatic shot of the stadium being topped by a dome of light that ironically came from searchlights of antiaircraft guns.

Such beauty could not have come from an artist’s innocent gaze.