Why some sports films are more about propaganda than athletic prowess

“Faster, higher, stronger” was the title of the Paris-based Centre Pompidou’s showcase of sports films last autumn. Comprising 64 movies produced throughout the 20th century and the past two decades, the programme was designed to highlight how filmmakers documented what curator Julien Farenc described as the “cinematic spectacle of bodies in motion”.

It is important to acknowledge, after all, that the precursor of the cinema was chro­no­photography, a technique that physio­logists such as Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demenÿ used to analyse the move­ments of athletes. But some sports films are about more than the individual: depictions of personal achievement could be seen as allegories of a nation succeeding against the odds.

Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), which featured in the Centre Pompidou’s programme, is a case in point. With its highly stylised celebration of athletic prowess at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the film is more nuanced than the propaganda that drove Riefenstahl’s previous movie, Triumph of the Will (1935), a bombastic account of Nazi parades.

On the surface, Olympia celebrates Germany as the host of an international, multicultural affair. The voice-over, how­ever, lets slip the racial overtones, as the men’s 800-metre final is described as “two black runners against the strongest of the white race”. The “two black runners”, American John Woodruff and Canada’s Phil Edwards, finished first and third, respectively; Adolf Hitler’s reaction did not appear on screen.

A world war and almost three decades later, the Japanese government financed a film that would chronicle the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, as proof of the country’s emer­gence as a modern, prosperous indus­trial powerhouse. But filmmaker Kon Ichikawa, who stepped in after Akira Kurosawa exited the project after falling out with his paymasters, veered away from the original brief.