Olympia

Leni Riefenstahl's two-part, nearly four-hour film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics is one of the most important documentaries ever made, as well as one of the more controversial, as it is often linked with the director's Triumph of the Will as Nazi propaganda. But unlike that earlier overtly political film about the 1934 Nuremberg rallies, Olympia—although it does contain plenty of shots of decorative swastikas and of Hitler as spectator-in-chief—is a sort of huge sports newsreel, a glorification of athletic prowess and the human form, marked by camerawork so swooning and hyperbolic that even in today's sports-crazy culture it comes across as nearly idolatrous. Olympia remains a technically extraordinary record of a historically significant event—and for U.S. viewers both halves feature a homegrown hero: track legend Jesse Owens in Part I (“Fest der Volker”) and decathlon victor Glenn Morris in Part II (“Fest der Schonheit”). The strength of Pathfinder's new release lies not with the transfer—which is only so-so—but rather with the fact that this is the complete film, and it's presented with a large collection of extras, including a deleted scene of the competitors taking the Olympic oath, a contemporary documentary on the 1936 winter games (unfortunately in a fuzzy, blurred transfer), several sequences absent in the German prints but found in the Italian version, an interesting behind-the-scenes documentary (showing, among other things, the remarkable camera techniques), a biographical note on the director, a printed essay on the film, and a stills gallery. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)