Tokyo Olympiad

The official film of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It follows the games from the opening to the closing and takes no interest in results. The camera looks mostly at athletes waiting, at breathing, at the ones who lose, and at faces in the stands. Kon Ichikawa directs, using hundreds of cameras and a very large crew. When it was finished the organising committee objected. What was expected was a record of the games; what Ichikawa made was an art film, and officials argued it did not sufficiently display Japan's achievement. A second, more informative version organised around results was prepared, and the two circulated side by side for a period. Ichikawa's method is the telephoto lens. Faces are shot very close with the background wholly dissolved; in the running sequences what you see is not a body but effort. The most remembered passage is Ahamed Issa, the marathon runner from Chad. Ichikawa follows him not in the pack but alone on the road; nobody knows who he is and he keeps running. The film is treated as a threshold in the Olympic film, and most subsequent official productions are positioned in relation to it. Who it is for: viewers who like sports documentary, Japanese cinema and documentary with formal ambition. Who it is not for: it runs close to three hours, results are not reported, and anyone wanting a record of the games will not find one.