Olympia

Taylor Downing

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838717452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938) is one of the most controversial films ever made. Capitalising on the success of Triumph of the Will (1935), her propaganda film for the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl secured Hitler's approval for her grandiose plans to film the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The result was a work as notorious for its politics as celebrated for its aesthetic power. This revised edition includes new material on Riefenstahl's film-making career before Olympia and her close relationship with Hitler. Taylor Downing also discusses newly-available evidence on the background to the film's production that conclusively proves that the film was directly commissioned by Hitler and funded through Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and not, as Riefenstahl later claimed, commissioned independently from the Nazi state by the Olympic authorities. In writing this edition, Taylor Downing has been given access to a magnificent new restoration of the original version of the film by the International Olympic Committee.

1 The Olympics on Film 1896–1932

The cinema and the modern Olympic movement were born at the same moment of time. In June 1894, a young French aristocrat and intellectual, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, called a gathering of sports leaders from around Europe to a meeting in Paris. In the grand setting of the Palace of the Sorbonne it was resolved to establish the International Olympic Committee with the purpose of reviving the ancient Olympic Games. Two years later, in April 1896, 295 athletes gathered in a brand-new marble-lined stadium in the centre of Athens to celebrate the first Olympic Games of the modern era. Meanwhile, also in Paris, in December 1895 in the basement of the Grand Café, the Lumière brothers gave what is usually regarded as the first public performance of the ‘cinématographe’ to a paying audience.

It is curious that two phenomena which have become such powerful social and cultural forces in the twenty-first century should have had their genesis at the same moment towards the end of the nineteenth. Over a hundred years later the story of the moving image and that of the Olympic movement have become closely bound together. For television, the child of cinema, the Olympic Games now offer a huge spectacle. Today the Games are viewed live by an estimated five billion people in almost every nation around the globe. As one NBC executive put it, ‘The Olympic Games are simply the biggest show on television. There is nothing else like it.’⁷ The Olympics have offered the cinema and television one of the best opportunities to attract a vast audience, and repeatedly the Games have been used to showcase new techniques and advances in styles of television presentation.

But the connection between the moving image and the Olympic Games, so powerful by the twenty-first century, has not always been thus. Although the Lumière brothers sent out ‘opérateurs’ with their camera-cum-projectors to shoot actuality film all over Europe and even in Russia, they entirely missed the first modern Olympics held amid much razzmatazz before a crowd of 80,000 in Athens in the spring of 1896. There is no known film record of the first, historic modern Games. Although there is film shot many years later which purports to show the Games, it is not authentic.⁸ There is some footage of the Universal Paris Exposition of 1900, alongside which the next Games were held; and footage also exists of the St Louis World Fair of 1904, in which the Olympic Games nearly got lost amid the sideshows and fringe events. By the time of the London Games of 1908, the Olympics attracted the interest of the newsreel or ‘topical’ companies. Much footage was shot of this splendid event, held at the brand-new White City stadium in west London. The newsreels helped to make an international hero out of Dorando Pietri, the marathon runner, who staggered into the stadium ahead of the other runners but was helped across the finishing line by officials, a friendly gesture which led to his disqualification, all recorded on film.

The first Olympics to receive serious attention on film were the Stockholm Games of 1912. These Games were known for the efficiency of their organisation and for their friendliness of spirit. Hours of material were shot. However, this footage does not seem to have been released at the time as a complete film but rather as a series of newsreels or news features.⁹ The Olympic Games were now sufficiently strong to survive the trauma of war and the cancellation of the Berlin Games of 1916. When the war came to an end Antwerp, in the heart of devastated Belgium, was chosen to represent the rekindling of the human spirit by the Games. Despite the rhetoric of universality, the defeated powers were not invited to participate.

Up to this point, the film record of these early Games is of greater interest to the Olympic historian than to the historian of film. None of the footage lays any claim to cinematic achievement. The fixed camera angles, the lack of camera movement, the predominant use of wide-angle lenses were all characteristic of the newsreel cameraman and no lessons were learnt from the great classics of the silent cinema that by the 1920s was in its heyday. Nor is there any evidence that any of the great cinema pioneers of this time, like D.W. Griffith or Fritz Lang, showed any interest in filming the Games.

The 1924 Games were the first which were marked by the production of a full-length feature-type film. A two-reeler was made by Rapid Film of the first ever Winter Games, held in Chamonix, France. A much longer, ten-reel film of the Summer Games in Paris was made by the same company. This film delightfully captures the spirit of these Games, in which Harold Abrahams won gold in the 100 metres and Eric Liddell, the ‘flying Scot’, took a surprise gold in the 400 metres with a world record (events later memorialised in the film Chariots of Fire). Paavo Nurmi of Finland began his sensational Olympic career by winning four gold medals. All the principal events are recorded in the film, each followed by a portrait of the winner, still puffing, face-on to the camera. The film is also of interest in that it attempts to illustrate the range of Olympic events, including the swimming, gymnastics and equestrian sports, in addition to track and field events in the main stadium. The film runs over two and a half hours and was edited in two versions, one with French and one with English intertitles. This film, produced by Jean de Rovera, lays claim to being the first Olympic feature although we know little about its production or about the film-makers behind it. In the scale of its coverage of the Games, the 1924 epic is a hint of things to come.

Most film and sport historians usually claim, mistakenly, that the first Olympic feature film was made by Dr Arnold Fanck (of whom more later) about the 1928 St Moritz Winter Games. The film was called Das weisse Stadion (The White Stadium). It was slightly shorter than the average feature. It had the full official backing of the IOC but was a low-budget affair, funded by UFA, the German film production and distribution company. Only two cameramen worked on the film and Fanck was allowed seventeen days to edit the material. He was assisted in the cutting room by Walter Ruttmann. Although Fanck was a director best known in Germany for his mountain films, he seemed to have no heart for this opportunity to evoke the grace and agility of the world’s best winter sports competition. He is reported to have said that all that was necessary to produce a documentary was to be present at an event and to film it. Predictably, the resulting film was mediocre and uninspiring.

Despite the example of the 1924 Paris Olympics film, there was no official film made of the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. Even more surprising is the lack of any major film of the 1932 Games in Los Angeles. The dazzling new Coliseum Stadium was only a few miles from the heart of the worldwide cinema business in Hollywood, but the film industry once again largely ignored the event, despite the fact that competitors from thirty-eight nations and a million and a quarter spectators made the Los Angeles Olympics one of the greatest events ever staged in the city. During the competition sixteen world records were broken and thirty-three new Olympic records were set, and the United States emerged as the dominant force in the sprint events.

Although there were some attempts to put together an Olympic film, for one reason or another they all came to nothing. The only surviving evidence of interest shown by the movie moguls in the world’s greatest sporting event happening just up the road derives from a decision by an executive from Universal Studios to send a team to film what they could of the Games. The Universal cameramen set up their equipment at the back of the stadium and filmed events in long shot. Their one fascinating contribution to the history of film and the Olympics was that they carried out the first synch-sound interviews with Olympic winners. These were filmed trackside after an event, anticipating television by fifty years. Unfortunately, when the Games were over and the cameramen brought back their footage, no one at Universal seems to have had the slightest idea what to do with it. The film survived, some of it still not processed, in the Universal vaults until it was rediscovered in the 1970s. It then formed the basis of the production of a later Olympic film-maker, Bud Greenspan, in his reconstruction of the Los Angeles Games. As an interesting movie footnote to the Games, it was in 1932 that Johnny Weissmuller, who had won five gold medals in swimming events in the previous two Olympics, started to appear as Tarzan in the movies produced at MGM. Here, at least, the aura of Olympic gold spilled over into the world of the silver screen.

So, after forty years of Olympic history, by the time of the 1936 Berlin Games any film-maker interested in shaping the Olympic Games into a film of feature proportions had very little precedent to draw upon. It is at this point that the remarkable and ambitious Leni Riefenstahl enters the frame. Never would Olympic film-making be the same again.

2 Riefenstahl Before Olympia

Leni Riefenstahl was born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl on 22 August 1902 in Berlin. Her father owned an engineering firm and she grew up in a prosperous environment in which, unusually, she was not encouraged to view life as a journey through marriage to motherhood and the duties of a Hausfrau. Her father wanted her to train for business but her mother had great artistic ambitions for her, possibly out of a sense of her own unfulfilled creative talents. Her mother prevailed and Leni started dancing lessons from the age of eight. She later joined the famous classical Russian Ballet School in Berlin, where she began to excel. Attracted by the new school of dance associated with Isadora Duncan, Leni trained with one of Duncan’s pupils, Mary Wigman, in Berlin. She seemed to revel in the natural expression of her body through dance and she loved to perform her own choreographies in loose garments, barefoot on stage without scenery or props.

By 1920, Riefenstahl was dancing regularly in the major cities of Germany, and over the next few years she travelled throughout central Europe earning high fees and beginning to establish a reputation for herself as a gifted artist. But a complete change of direction came in 1924 when she was entranced by a film poster she saw on a railway station and became obsessed with the idea of becoming a movie star for the new genre of mountain films. She tracked down the director of the film, Dr Arnold Fanck, and convinced him to cast her in the leading role in his next film even though she had almost no film experience and no knowledge of mountain climbing. Fanck (who later produced the 1928 St Moritz Winter Games film) was a wealthy geologist who in the 1920s used his fortune to establish this genre of mountain adventure films, which was almost of equal importance to the German cinema of the time as the Western was to the American cinema. In each film a minor melodrama is acted out with great heroics against the awesome natural backdrop of the German, Austrian or Swiss Alps. In 1924 Fanck was looking for a leading lady to appear in his next film when Riefenstahl presented herself.

But it was not just Riefenstahl’s charm that appealed to Fanck. In the wings was an admirer of Riefenstahl’s by the name of Harry Sokal, a wealthy Austrian banker. Sokal, who was possibly also Riefenstahl’s lover, offered to fund Fanck’s film-making business and no doubt one of the terms was that Riefenstahl was given a starring role. Fanck signed her up to appear in his next film, Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain). Riefenstahl was immediately infatuated by the otherworldly appeal of the mountains, which seemed to release a great creative passion within her. She was also entranced by the medium of film. Fanck believed that no genuine mountain film could be produced in a studio and he made all the actors and technicians endure the rigours of working at altitudes above 12,000 feet. In this setting Riefenstahl was in her element. In the male worlds of mountaineering and film-making she clearly impressed Fanck and his team with her vigour and her determination. In later accounts she wrote Sokal out of the story of how she came to start her career in film. As a Jew, he left Germany when Hitler came to power and it clearly did not suit the greatest film-maker of the Third Reich to have had a wealthy Jewish benefactor behind her entry into the film business.¹⁰

In all, Riefenstahl starred in six of what became Fanck’s most famous films, including Der grosse Sprung (The Great Leap) in 1927, Stürme über dem Mont Blanc (Storms over Mont Blanc, also known as Avalanche) in 1930, Der weisse Rausch (The White Frenzy) in 1931 and SOS Eisberg (SOS Iceberg) in 1932. Today the best-known of these mountain films is the classic Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palu), co-directed by Fanck and G.W. Pabst in 1929.

In the mountain films Riefenstahl often played the part of a young girl representing the innocence, purity and harmony of the mountain people in contrast with the decadence and greed of late Weimar German society. Later critics, especially Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler, have seen in the heroic idealism and the Promethean grandeur of these films a ‘mentality kindred to the Nazi spirit’. Certainly an obsession with the healthy outdoors, with the titanic struggle against the supreme forces represented by rocks and glaciers, and the rejection of modernism has some parallels in Nazi thinking. But at this stage the mountain films probably represented to an audience more than anything else a sense of escape from a world dominated by economic distress, rising unemployment and falling living standards.

Riefenstahl has often asserted that she learnt a lot about film technique from Fanck, a highly imaginative and in many ways experimental film-maker. She used to question him repeatedly during filming. Of Fanck and his team she said, ‘I never stopped watching, observing, asking questions.’¹¹ She also worked with Fanck in the cutting room and eagerly picked up the skills of montage. It was not long before Riefenstahl’s pressing ambition led her to direct her first feature film, Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light), which she also produced, co-wrote and starred in. She put up her own money to help finance the film and, once again, Sokal came up trumps with an advance of one hundred thousand marks. In 1931 Riefenstahl set up an independent production company with Hans Schneeberger, the cameraman on many of Fanck’s films with whom Riefenstahl had had a long affair, and with Béla Balázs, the Hungarian writer. The film was made in the stunningly beautiful setting of the Saarn valley in the Dolomites. Schneeberger and Riefenstahl used every device to add to the natural beauty of the location, including soft focus, time-lapse photography and graded filters on shots of mist, dawn and sunshine. Light and shadow were used to powerful effect. In the film Riefenstahl played the part of Junta, a wild outcast girl who shepherded goats. The story was little more than a simple melodrama in which Junta falls in love with a visiting Viennese painter who tries to befriend her when all the other villagers spurn her. The raw mystical forces of nature are set up against the corrupting influence of conventional ‘civilisation’. But the film shows in Riefenstahl and the small team she built around her the potential of a film-maker of ambition and power.

The Blue Light was released in Germany in the spring of 1932, and one of those greatly impressed by the film was Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party. No doubt the anti-modernism of the film with its earthy Teutonic values appealed to the Nazi leader. The Nazi Party was well known for the thuggish behaviour of its supporters and its fervently anti-Jewish and anticommunist stance. But when the aspiring political leader first met the ambitious and glamorous young film star and director, Hitler was still keen to make the Party appear respectable since he saw the route to power as being through the ballot box.

Riefenstahl attended her first Hitler rally in February 1932. She was utterly spellbound by the imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the 2nd Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Olympics on Film 1896–1932
• 2. Riefenstahl Before Olympia
• 3. Production and Finance
• 4. Setting Up
• 5. The Prologue and Opening Ceremony
• 6. Track and Field
• 7. Festival of Beauty
• 8. Aftermath
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright