![]() Let me stick to the topic and comment on the making of the calendar for 2009. Maybe people just sat through these and got on with their lives. But that goes without saying.Looking through IMDb for the several other years this documentary has also been filmed, it surprises me not to see any other viewer comments. Riefenstahl's footage is also more beautiful and better edited, and the athletes in general look LESS like fascist monuments and more like human beings than they do today. but then, Australia is a democracy the real shock is finding out that even HITLER'S regime could produce more even-handed, tasteful and intelligent Olympics coverage than we'll ever see from a modern commercial network. Australian sports coverage, of course, was much better when it was in the hands of the state (or rather, the state-owned ABC network). Only other Australians can fully appreciate the horror of this. Riefenstahl shows races won by people other than Germans (and yes, some of them are non-Aryan) - she even shows us enough of the presentation ceremonies afterwards for us to be able to hear other national anthems! During the local coverage of the Sydney games I heard NOTHING but "Advance Australia Fair". It's amazing how much more crass and brazenly nationalistic modern coverage is when compared with Nazi propaganda. (Surely if the film were to wave the swastika offensively, it would do so around the beginning, and the introductory sequence is just marvellous - it no more deserves to be associated with Nazism than Orff's "Carmina Burana".) In any case, if they edited all the jingoism out of a modern, two-hundred-hour Olympic telecast, it would last about ten minutes. I mention this because it's quite possible that "Olympia" is the version with the jingoism edited out. ![]() Split into two parts for German release, it was edited somewhat and released simply as "Olympia" elsewhere, and it's "Olympia" that I've seen. The most striking thing about Riefenstahl's documentary, viewed today, is its good taste. Does it worry you that most of the stuff we most fondly associate with the Olympics originated with the Nazis? It doesn't worry me: the Nazis' moral sense may have been deplorable, but their aesthetic sense was not nearly so bad as people like to pretend. In a way these are the first modern games. It was the 1936 Berlin Games that introduced the opening ceremony, the torch relay, the three-tiered presentation ceremony, and the overall sense of lavish, religious spectacle. ![]()
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