Tokyo Olympiad [Widescreen]

Ichikawa’s compression of the many hours of footage shot by 164 cameramen using 1031 cameras at the 1964 Olympics is the only sporting documentary to rival Riefenstahl’s Olympia. In contrast to Riefenstahl’s heroic paean to the human body, Ichikawa seeks out and pays tribute to human fallibility using the telephoto lens, slow motion and freeze frame, to probe and generate empathy. In place of a mundane and prosaic record of national teams competing in a succession of events, Ichikawa takes the occasion to stay in close with selected individuals, winners and losers, striving to overcome their limitations. As in Riefenstahl’s film the climax is the marathon, here presented as a tribute to, rather than a celebration of individual effort. A phenomenally successful film upon its theatrical release, Ichikawa illustrates that a search for human understanding sometimes presents insurmountable difficulties, sometimes there is room for optimism, but more often the ironic truth is that a gold medal provides no answer to the problems of living.