Diving, Bored

Yesterday I watched Olympia for the first time: well, I say watched, but as the great unspoken fact about Riefenstahl is less that one viewing will turn you into a Fascist and more that it is so very boring, I had my finger on the fastforward a fair bit. One, perhaps crass point that occurred to me: when she's filming anything horizontal, a hurdle, a 400 metres, etc, she can't quite bring her stylistic obsessions to bear on it, and settles for a fairly straightforward record, bar the constant intercutting of Hitler. On the other hand, anything vaulting, anything that involves a leap or some sort of transport into the air (like diving) is given the full appartus of slo-mo, chiaroscuro and astoundingly fluid camera movements at outrageous angles. The latter is always of an individual act of physical extremis, and the other athletes are irrelevant to this supreme act of awed objectification. Yet, oddly for her reputation as marshaller-of-crowds, anything involving a group is rather less interesting.



The obvious point here about Nazi Narcissism could be supplemented with one derived from Lewis Mumford, top 'radical conservative' town planning and technology theorist, in his blasts against 'sun-worshipping' societies obsessed with flight, the stars, the clouds - always looming, misty, overwhelming and ever-present in Riefenstahl - and so forth. Hers is a heliocentric aesthetic, in which she has much in common with her alleged leftist antecedents. The other astonishing montage in amongst the tedium (and the 'yay, Jesse Owens!' moments) would seem to bear this out, in the only really memorable crowd scene in the film. That is: the sportswomen flinging their arms around in rhythmic supplication, linked in a series of dissolves until you see a huge crowd all making the same beseeching motion, swaying like crops in a summer wind.