Leni Riefenstahl's films are controversial today because, while they are enormously powerful and groundbreaking accomplishments in the art of film, some of them were made more or less directly in the service of Nazi party propaganda. This is clearly true of her most notorious film, Triumph of the Will, a documentary of the 1934 National Socialist Party rally in Nuremberg, and only the most blinkered of Riefenstahl's apologists are not skeptical of her insistence that this film should be understood strictly as art and not as propaganda. Her documentary film of the Olympics is another matter; it is less clearly propagandistic and was made to document games in which Germany's athletes could not and did not always win. Indeed, although by the usual unofficial reckoning the Germans "won" the games, Riefenstahl's film does not exult in, or even directly communicate this victory. (The International Olympic Committee, and the "Olympic Ideal" of which it is the custodian, disallows the reckoning of overall winners and losers amongst the various competing national teams.)5 But the aesthetic of Olympia is closely related to that of Triumph of the Will, a fact that seems to demand our attention.6
Strictly speaking, Olympia is sports coverage, but it is as unlike any sports coverage we have otherwise seen as any film conceivably could be. It suppresses the details of the various competitions, in some instances even the final scores, in favor of highlighting the grace, poise, and strength of the athletes. Important, telling moments of the various competitions are shown, but just as often the interest seems to be more visual than documentary: striking compositions and camera angles, dramatic framing devices and backdrops of cloud formations behind the heads of athletes filmed from below predominate. Riefenstahl, over long months of editing some 1,300,000 feet of exposed film, structured the whole movie in its two parts not so much as the narrative chronology of the competitions, but much more as a montage of short segments that gathers momentum, building tension and excitement over the course of three and a half hours, propelled by the Wagnerian score of Herbert Windt to which rhythms the images are closely matched. The documentary did not even premiere until two years after the games were over, halfway to the next Olympics, which in any event were cancelled because of the war. But sixty-three years later, it is still far more gripping than any contemporary sports coverage, despite the fact that it concentrates almost exclusively on the athletic events themselves to the exclusion of any personal interest in or narrative of the athletes as individuals. It is riveting and engrossing because it is beautiful; or it is art; or it mobilizes some very effective visual rhetorics and poetics; or what have you. It is sports coverage intended even, or maybe especially for people who do not really care all that much about sports, and this fact will not be incidental to my argument.
The 1936 Olympic games have come to be commonly referred to as the "Nazi Olympics," beginning with Richard Mandell's groundbreaking book of that title.7 This insinuates that not only the German athletes, but also the American, British, and French, as well as, say, the Colombian, Indian, and even the Greek athletes had been duped into making propaganda for a National Socialist racial and political ideology of the strong Aryan body. We cannot dismiss this notion out of hand; activists in America at the time vehemently protested the exclusion of Jewish athletes from the German team, and the American Athletic Union threatened at one point to boycott the games (see NO, pp. 75-77). The paternalistic president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage (who emerged from this internal struggle as president of the American Athletic Union also) at first dismissed these concerns and then extracted a promise from the German Olympic Committee that all qualified athletes would be allowed to compete; in some instances this promise was kept, and in some it was broken (see NO, pp. 69-82).8 In any event, Riefenstahl's documentary, with its formal similarity to Triumph of the Will, has permanently shaped our impression of the 1936 Games, the so-called Nazi Olympics. Perhaps it is now impossible to determine to what extent our sense of her film as more or less ideologically tainted comes from the fact that it is a document of Games held under questionable circumstances, and to what extent it derives at least in part from the shape Riefenstahl gave them on film.
Olympia is, if nothing else, a document of the false grandeur of Nazi pageantry. Indeed, it partakes of that false grandeur. Mandell has written that the Berlin games in 1936 "were an important episode in the establishment of an evil political regime" and that "much of the success of the 1936 Olympics was due to the pursuit by the National Socialists of supremacy in mass pageantry" (NO, p. xxiii). Those sports historians and film theorists who have criticized the film have done so from the point of view that it "is an intensely political film. It was set up for political motives, it described an immensely political event."9 Revisiting the question on the occasion of the republication of The Nazi Olympics, Mandell said that "to portray the Berlin Olympics to the world in 1936 as a nonpolitical festival was not only deceptive but a political act as well as a lie" (NO, p. xvii). Indeed, Mandell, like others before him, claims to see a "fascist aesthetic" in Olympia: "the beautification of mindless, masculine physical power is, in fact, highly supportive and perhaps a part of totalitarian ideology" (NO, p. xvi f.).10 Other attempts at defining this putative fascist aesthetic have focused variously on the claims that Riefenstahl describes and glorifies symbolic acts of self-sacrifice11 or that her camera "clings to the aesthetic lines of athletic figures and the pulsating muscular forms of individual limbs, . . . deploys movement and dynamism in the film's visual aesthetic. . . [and] downplays the real effort and strain in the tense but smoothly photogenic bodies" of the athletes and, like fascism, it uses people as "mere models and extras for political, athletic and cultural display."12 "The 'unbeautiful' side of competitive sports," one critic has agreed, "agony, suffering, and physical pain, are simply edited out or are themselves aestheticized."13