TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1965)

Kon Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo...

by Lance Li 28th March 202529th March 2025 Leave a reply

Most documentaries are so trite and run-of-the-mill that you wouldn’t lose a thing had they been texts and images, as the only element that a motion picture often supplements is sensation. You put one on as you wash and hang your sheets to dry, and most of it can be taken in with half an ear. So few of them are really worth the effort, and still fewer warrant your interest, that it’s easy to dismiss them as unaesthetic or “uncinematic”.

Of course, why wouldn’t you forget that some of the best, most striking works of cinema art have been documentaries—from Robert Flaherty’s seminal Nanook of the North (1922) and Pare Lorentz’s records of the Great Depression, to the propaganda of Leni Riefenstahl in 1930s Germany and of those commissioned or coordinated in the 1940s by the US Office of War Information, that includes John Huston’s San Pietro (1945)—when your idea of them is based on the routine mediocrities that get churned out to be consumed and tossed away?

The only one in recent years that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the Frederick Wiseman films, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), The Battle of Chile trilogy (1975-79), and so on, is Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude (2022), and yet practically no one has seen it. A fate not uncommon for its kind.

Tokyo Olympiad / 東京オリンピック had the blessing of eluding that fate. It was the highest-grossing film in Japan until Spirited Away (2001), and it has Kon Ichikawa (Fires on the Plain, The Burmese Harp) to thank for that, even though it’s the Japanese government who commissioned it, and the national industries who funded, helped distribute, and rallied behind it. In a way, the film represents the newsreels’ lyricism of the ’30s and ’40s carried to a new height, rising to the challenge of cinéma vérité that Jean Rouch helped popularise.

Ichikawa, who deeply admired Riefenstahl’s two-part film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, evokes that same irresistible fervour of Olympia (1938), but not as a means to an ulterior end. You’d be hard-pressed to notice the nationalist agenda that the government and the “business community” had wanted in it for international prestige and foreign investment (they were said to have been displeased with the results, and ordered cuts and demanded reshoots). To say that it ‘documents’ the 1964 Tokyo Olympics would not only be underselling it: that’d be something akin to false advertising. A cinematic orgy is more like it. “Citius, Altius, Fortius” / “Faster, Higher, Stronger” seems to be the only ethos at work, and it’s the same spirit of the games that’s guiding the film’s aesthetics and energy.

Great vérité films like High School (1968) and Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) undress the artifice of “form” and eliminate whatever distance there was between us and the subjects. Almost nothing was prearranged or framed, and nothing seems to be transformed by any vision or technique. If you should work with their images, you become involved with your whole awareness and intellect, and be likewise rewarded on those terms.

The effects are sometimes more harrowing and enlightening than any fiction film you have and will ever see. The subject of Tokyo Olympiad is that very artifice which cinéma vérité strips away. Ichikawa approaches filmic truth and emotional reality of a very different kind; it’s probably closer to a ballet or an opera. The chief technique—a heightening of the senses, through everything from freeze frames and slow-motion to forced perspectives and rack focuses—is so simple and primal that it seems almost innocent. One could tell where and when the film wanted you to hold down your breath, and would still gladly fall for it every time. Art is its own truth in this symphonic pageantry of motions, atmospheres, and forms, feverishly stylised and choreographed, with a devilish attention to detail.

As its deponents, we assume the perspective of the heavens, from which we gaze down on these athletes, and it’s not their humanity we see, but their movements, shapes, colours, and patterns, from which a common humanity of struggles and aspirations is illuminated. Their forms are free and spontaneous, yet they carry the idealised abstraction of Myron’s sculptures. They’re the sole focus in many scenes. The background in the traditional sense ceases to exist: shots begin at the roof of the frame where their body will be, and end at the floor of the screen where their body has been, and the focus tracks their busts to everywhere and stays on their faces ‘til the bitter end. It’s an obsessive exaltation. There is this sense that, in the heat of the contest, everything else seems to have melted away, sometimes even the peripheries of the bodies of these sportsmen and women; their ethereal torsos occupy and become the vista. They had the whole world to themselves, and the game at hand is all that’s on their minds.

When we see their expressions, whether of pain or triumph, their power compels us. And with the action being framed so close, that compulsion has an immediate, almost subconscious, charge. We only grow aware of our tight fists in hindsight. And when the camera points back at the audience, it’s our tenseness and admiration that we see in their faces. Has there ever been a more successful usage of form to ferment the human elements of an experience? Our febrile identification with the people on screen depended so much on how they’re framed and presented that it’s become its own kind of characterisation. Surely, I’d have died from boredom had it been as conventional as the playback sports footage we see on TV. We just don’t come to grips with their sense of will as viscerally.

Whenever the film stylises, I develop asthma. The narration needed to be Japanese: the deliveries lacerate, and you feel like being cooked on the flaming cauldron. With cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who oversaw over 164 camera setups, composer Toshiro Mayuzumi, who was called the “modern Beethoven” by John Huston (for whom he scored The Bible: In the Beginning… and Reflections in a Golden Eye), and editor Yoshio Ebara, Ichikawa gave Tokyo Olympiad a wonderful excitement that only the best of D.W Griffith had.

In the yearlong course of planning his shots, he pushed the viewfinder and exposure meter technology to the limit. Even by today’s standards, the runners in this film were tracked with extraordinary focus and precision considering their speed and distance. Yet technical advance is just about the least one could say for its accomplishment. An infinitesimal minority of horror films can disturb you intensely, but great documentaries, such as Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949), may terrorise you. Partly that’s what gives when a work has a claim to truth and reality, as most documentaries do, and partly when it substantiates that claim with taste and temperament, as this one does.

The complete film is nearly three hours, but it’s still way too short, and by the last third of the movie the focus and intensity it had was lost. The fencing and boxing sequences were just erratic and unexciting, and some sports like football and hockey are only there as curiosities. Yet it’s a film of romantic sensibility that, when taken together, can make you feel wonderful to be alive. You want to live your life more intensely. When the rising smoke of the Olympic torch gradually crosses through the vast bottom of Mount Fuji, or when streams of colours wash their ways down the streets in a bicycle race through the astounded faces of children on the sidewalks, or when thousands of umbrellas fill up the stadium in the morning rain, you’re seeing the movie’s conception—a dumbfounding formal grandeur that is to be our intoxication.