Olympic Documentaries - Olympia, Tokyo Olympiad, Salute, the Grand Olympics, Olympia 52, 16 Days of Glory (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Olympia is a 1938 film by Leni Riefenstahl documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The movie was produced in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil Fest der Vlker (Festival of Nations) and Olympia 2. Teil Fest der Schnheit (Festival of Beauty). It was the first documentary feature film on the Olympic Games ever made. Many advanced motion picture techniques, which later became industry standards but which were groundbreaking at the time, were employed, including unusual camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups, setting the railway tracks on the stadium to shoot the crowd and the like. The techniques employed are almost universally admired, but the film is controversial due to its political content. Nevertheless, the film appears on many lists of the greatest films of all-time, including Time magazine's "All-Time 100 Movies." There has been much discussion of whether this film should be classified as a Nazi propaganda film like her earlier Triumph of the Will. While the entire 1936 Olympics has been derided as the "Hitler Olympics" and was unquestionably designed primarily to showcase the accomplishments of the Third Reich, and to this extent any film accurately documenting the proceedings would come off as something of a propaganda film, Riefenstahl's defenders have pointed to her close-up shot of the expression on Hitler's face when Jesse Owens, an African-American, won a gold medal, as showing a tacit dissent from Nazi racial supremacy doctrines. Other non-Aryan winners are featured as well. Noted American film critic Richard Corliss observed in Time that "The matter of Riefenstahl 'the Nazi director' is worth raising so it can be dismissed. n the hallucinatory documentary Triumph of the Will..... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=797363