Why some sports films are more about propaganda than athletic prowess
- Movies about sporting events and sports stars have frequently been used to stir national pride
- But certain filmmakers have ignored the brief to present a true picture of the personal angle
“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.
Rather than trumpeting Japan’s recovery after World War II, Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965) turned the cameras on the competitors – or, in the director’s words, “the solemnity of the moment when man defies his limits, and to express the solitude of the athlete who, in order to win, struggles against himself”.
The authorities demanded that Ichikawa re-edit the film, but the director’s cut was eventually released in cinemas to widespread acclaim.
More a humanist than a patriot, Ichikawa’s take on the Tokyo Olympics – playing up the personal angle to shape an on-screen national narrative – has provided a template for filmmakersand governments around the world. See, for instance, films such as Rocky (1976), Lagaan (a 2001 Indian blockbuster about a cricket match between impoverished villagers and British colonials), The Miracle of Bern (a 2003 drama about the West German football team’s miraculous triumph in the 1954 World Cup final)and Kano (a 2014 movie inspired by a multiracial Taiwanese high-school baseball team’s struggle to compete in a championship in Japan in 1931).
