In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
With the Winter Olympics just around the corner, it seems like a good time to reflect on the tradition of releasing documentaries films to celebrate each edition of the Olympic Games. There’s a whole Criterion box set with 100 years’ worth of Olympic films, which no library near me seems to have, but I can at least offer my thoughts on what’s commonly considered one of the greatest sports documentaries of all time: Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, which offers a unique perspective on 1964 Summer Games.
The first image in Tokyo Olympiad is that of a wrecking ball, underlining the fact that these Games were used as a tool to show how Japan had recovered from the second World War and become a modern and peaceful nation. The torch relay serves both as a symbol of the unity of nations and as a showcase for Japan’s varied landscape and architecture, and the brotherhood theme continues through the parade of nations featured in the opening ceremony: everyone loves the Olympics, it seems, and there’s not a whiff of inconvenient recent history or unpleasant current realities to sour the mood. Not that I’m complaining: documentarians need to pick a lane, and Ichikawa stays consistent to his own vision.
Tokyo Olympiad is anything but a conventional sports documentary. Ichikawa cuts abruptly from one event to another, cuts performances into small sequences, focuses on details like hands and feet as often as he shows you the complete action, and spends as much time observing audience members and officials as he does the competitors in a given sport. He also uses all manner of distancing techniques to make the viewer see the various actions that make up sporting events as human activity rather than as simply a way to find out who was the best on a given day. For instance, he cuts abruptly from the opening ceremony to the men’s 100 meters (track and field), which is shown in slow motion. Why this contrarian approach to showing the fastest track event? Presumably to emphasize the grace and power of the athletes, because watched in real time,you miss the details and the main interest becomes who won (for the record, Bob Hayes of the United States).
Only a few sports get much screen time in Tokyo Olympiad, with track and field (and primarily male competitors) taking the lion’s share. I’m not sure if that was due to ease of filming outdoor events or if there was some other motivation behind this choice, but track also gets the greatest variety of approaches, with some events presented more as straightforward competitions and others turned into abstractions for the sake of cinematic art.
Ichikawa takes the latter approach to an extreme in his gymnastics coverage, in which routines are chopped up into individual movements, performances by different athletes are spliced together, and it’s all supplied with a soundtrack that sometimes emphasizes the beauty of movement and sometimes the comedy. In contrast, swimming gets mostly straightforward race coverage, while weightlifting (which at the time included three lifts) gets a didactic introduction followed by a series of closeups of competitors and a ponderous soundtrack that continues into a segment on wrestling. Women’s volleyball gets mostly game action, perhaps because it was a sport of emphasis for Japan (who beat the USSR for the gold medal), while cycling gets the abstract treatment with a jazzy soundtrack. And so on—Ichikawa never seems to tire of thinking of new ways to make cinema from sports action.
Tokyo Olympiad is like a mosaic created from mostly small moments and details, rather than a straightforward attempt to present the various competitions in a journalistic manner. The breakthrough victory of the American runner Billy Mills in the 10,000 meters is no more important in Ichikawa’s vision than is the closing efforts of Ranatunge Karunananda of Ceylon, who came in last, and the preparations of the many officials required to make the Games run is as worthy of attention as is the action by the competitors. This approach has since been used in other sports films (Visions of Eight comes immediately to mind), but Tokyo Olympiad is the OG of the alternative sports movie and deserves to be celebrated as the groundbreaking film it is. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 155
Technical details: 168 min.; color; screen ratio: 2.35:1; Japanese.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (1 disc)
Extras: audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie; introduction by Peter Cowie; 3 video interviews with director Kon Ichikawa; additional footage with an introduction by Peter Cowie; documentary featuring editor Chizuko Osada, cameraman Masuo Yamaguchi, and Tatsumi Ichikawa, son of director Ken Ichikawa; interview with restoration producer Adrian Wood; booklet with interview by film scholar James Quandt.
Fun Fact: The Olympic torch relay, in which a flame is carried from Olympia, Greece (site of the ancient Olympic Games) to the current host city, is a modern tradition introduced for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It provides the opening action in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, another brilliant Olympic film if you can overlook the fact that it was created as political propaganda for the Nazi regime.
Parting Thought: Watching Tokyo Olympiad today, its status as a masterpiece secure, it’s disconcerting to realize that the uncut film included in the Criterion Collection (running almost three hours) did not reflect the wishes of the Japanese government (who financed it) wanted. While Ichikawa made cinematic art, the Committee wanted a more straightforward historical document of the competitions (and according to some sources, more emphasis on Japanese competitors). How often has this happened in cinematic history—the money guys don’t get what they want, but the film they do get succeeds beyond their wildest dreams?
