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Tokyo Olympiad - Criterion Collection Director: Kon Ichikawa Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 170 minutes Studio: Criterion Collection Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2002-07-30 Buy from Amazon |
 "Memories of good ol' Tokyo"I was only 2 when the Olympics was held in Tokyo in 1964 but had various opportunities to view excerpts on TV. It was really nice to see what people wore, drove, etc during that time. It was especially exhilarating to see footage of Abebe Bikila running thru the streets of Tokyo and winning the Gold Medal two Olympics in a row. I think he is one of the greatest atheletes who ever lived and they don't make them like him no more.  "Perhaps more appeal for the cinephile than the sports fan."there is something about sport that seems to lend it to abstraction. Once you have removed the familiar 'narrative' elements (start/finish, victory/defeat, struggle/result etc.), what is left - movement, bodies - becomes formalised, ritualised. The 1964 Olympics were the first mass live TV Games, so when Kon Ichikawa came to assemble his film, he knew millions had watched the 'real time' experience of the events, and so could be freer in his own interpretation. And so he magics the most extraordinary visual architecture, constructed from a blueprint of pure lines - the gestures of the human body; its movement (or that of sporting implements) through space; the markings on tracks, pitches, courts, pools etc.; the structure of arenas and halls; the urban grid of Tokyo itself, its buildings and roads - all captured in exquisitely formal widescreen photography, in which the most banal element, be it the colour of a pair of shorts, or an official carrying a towel, becomes a vital part of its design. Ichikawa's most obvious predecessor for this aesthetic is Leni Riefenstahl's 'Olympia', a film under whose shadow he clearly operates: like Riefenstahl, he breaks up the narrative by disjoining the soundtracks and image, by freeze-frames or sudden jump-cuts; the amazing gymnastics sequence, a sport which can be most readily appropriated for abstraction, is a case in point, colour, form and movement turning athletics into a kind of live action painting. Of course, 'Olympia' was created to glorify the Third Reich; the Tokyo Olympics were specifically a celebration of Japanese pacificism and post-war economic recovery, as the opening shots of a blinding dawn sun and the ruined buildings of Hiroshima suggests. These Olympics were fraught with political significance - East and West Germany competing as one team, for example, or the debut of many newly independent African states - but Ichikawa films everything with relative, unportentous calm and detachment, especially compared to the over-determined, bludgeoning fascist aesthetic of Riefenstahl. Ichikawa had to negotiate similarly formidable logistics (over 100 cameramen etc.), but the resultant film seems effortless, whereas 'Olympia' flaunts its technical impossibility. for the non-sports afficanado, the marathon is always the most fascinating event - its gruelling length seems to expose and reveal human nature more starkly, the struggles, the waiting, the glimpses of agonising failure after superhuman effort. Ichikawa creates a supreme mini-epic out of the marathon here, with the refreshment stalls acting as a strange opportunity, like a hidden Candid Camera, to see how individual, unwitting athletes behave. The montage of bodily decay and exhaustion is somewhat at odds with the ennobling, 'official' sentiments of peace and brotherly harmony. By the end of the film, though, you're as exhausted as the athletes. "Athletics as powerful art"Having seen version dubbed in English (I believe David Wolper was involved in some way) I beg to differ with Leonard Maltin's assessment that the English text was "insipid." In fairness to his review, I haven't yet seen this version, but I will remember forever the power, the grace, the photographic artistry . . . and the beautifully-written English text for the film. I am not a sports "fan," but if any film made the case for organized athletics, this one did! |
