Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty

The second part of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Morning training, diving, gymnastics, cycling, the decathlon and the closing. At the centre is not the result of a race but the body. Leni Riefenstahl directed. The production was made under the Nazi government and with state support. Its technique permanently changed sports filming: cameras sunk into the ground, tracking rails, underwater work and cameras attached to athletes were used systematically here for the first time. The best-known passage is the diving sequence. As the editing proceeds the ground and the water disappear and the divers hang in the sky; that section stops being documentary and becomes abstract movement. The film's inseparable problem is its context: it was produced as a state's instrument of self-display and its aesthetics carry that purpose directly. Riefenstahl denied this after the war; the argument was never closed. Who it is for: viewers interested in the history of film technique and sports photography. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot separate the work from its political function; the objection is legitimate.