In June of 1964, Chadian runner Ahmed Issa arrived in Tokyo as one of his country’s two representatives at the Olympic Games. This was Chad’s initiation to the international sporting stage — the country having gained its independence from France just four years earlier — and in the flux of a new system of governance taking hold, the debutante nation was unable to send more than two athletes. Nonetheless, they marched in the Parade of Nations with pride, Issa in his jet-black sunglasses like Marcello Mastroianni, the blue-gold-red tricolor waving ceremoniously before him. Issa spoke a dialect of Arabic unfamiliar to most other athletes, so he spent much of his time alone: alone practicing his sprints on the outdoor track at Oda Field, alone in the dining halls of the Olympic Village amongst chattering gymnasts and swimmers, and alone standing between strangers at the starting line of the men’s 800-meter. Issa ultimately finished sixth in the semifinal and did not qualify for the next round; he and the rest of the small team packed up and left Tokyo with no medals, an unceremonious end for a burgeoning nation-state at its first Olympic appearance.
Ahmed Issa’s story is one of many chronicled in Kon Ichikawa’s sprawling 1965 documentary Tokyo Olympiad, which follows the highs and lows of the Games as they make their first journey to Asia. His Olympic tale, however, is uncommon in sports narrative: there is no triumph, no nail-biting finish, no crash-and-burn defeat. Instead, Issa’s story is one of loneliness in the midst of joyous international spectacle, a study in solitude for the man on whose shoulders rests his country’s Olympic debut.
This Friday, the Olympics return to Tokyo, marking the long-awaited resumption of our athletic tradition and the not uncontroversial beginning of the so-called post-COVID era (the pandemic state of emergency in Tokyo and the positive COVID tests of several American athletes, for example, would beg to differ). Despite their various phantoms — unethical labor practices, hegemony of the Global North in organizational leadership, the ungodly fiscal and often social cost — the Games are represented as a beacon of global community to which the world looks with wide-eyed optimism every other year. It’s with this warm and fuzzy notion in mind that I honor Tokyo Olympiad, which is not only my favorite sports documentary of all time, but the one that best represents the emotional heart of the Games. With its sentimental and egalitarian approach, Tokyo Olympiad emphasizes intimacy over grandiosity to celebrate not the glory of victory, but the gift of a shared humanity.
If there ever was a sports documentary for people who don’t follow sports, this is it; Ichikawa treats the athletes and their events with a tender hand, focusing less on the more technical logistics of competition — like scores, times, and standings — to stress the personal interest of each event. Filmed candidly, the athletes’ emotions read through their eyes: close-ups on sweaty faces broadcast fear while stills capture their contorted bodies and expressions pushed to their extremes. In one sequence, a Soviet shot-putter’s pre-throw jitters manifest in a series of ticks, the camera focused on the cast iron ball as he tosses it around, licks his fingers, and wipes his hand on his shorts. Through commentary, we learn about the athletes as individuals: Great Britain’s Ann Packer in Lane 8 is a 22-year-old high school gym teacher, Kraan of the Netherlands in Lane 4 is a police officer, and the French Dupureur in Lane 2 has a two-year-old son. When American Bob Hayes wins gold in the men’s 100-meter dash, the camera trails on him in slow-motion as he trods off the track accompanied by a haunting score, arousing an unexpected feeling of dismay. In each of these sequences — many of which take place not during, but before and after the associated events — the athletes are viewed with a rather touching intimacy. Focusing on their nerves and backstories and sweaty bodies instead of the competition writ large, the camera renders them less superhuman, allowing for a more natural emotional connection on the part of the viewer.
Of course, this is a documentary about the Games themselves, we’ve got to see the competition. And we do — for the most part. While we do get to see the participants show off their athletic prowess, the actual events themselves are often portrayed without context, eschewing scores and standings to highlight the physical action itself. Often you never find out who won; even more surprisingly, you sometimes don’t even know who’s competing. What matters here is visual poetry, and Ichikawa uses a wide variety of filming techniques to emphasize the texture of the image: runners shot in black and white or — in perhaps the film’s most memorable image — Czechoslovak gymnast Věra Čáslavská filmed in long-exposure performing a front handspring vault, several of her ghostly doppelgängers trailing closely behind. The most staggering example of this approach to sports filming occurs at the climax of the seven-hour pole vault competition when, following shot after shot of disqualifications, one of the finalists’ attempts is filmed from the other side of the field. The eye drifts from the vaulter in miniature, an ant scurrying across the screen, to the vast expanse of grass in its blurred texture. Stripped of their context, sequences like these elevate each event to visual art, rich and wordless like a museum piece in motion.
But enough about the athletes, what about us regular people? A spectacle, after all, needs an audience! Ichikawa delivers on this front: spectators cheer and wave miniature flags of their home countries while journalists hurriedly pluck away at their multi-lingual typewriters in the press room. Ichikawa uses this opportunity to flex his humor: one mocking sequence pairs an image of cheering Japanese spectators after the victory of one of their athletes with another of stone-faced supporters of the defeated American. Another focuses exclusively on the drooping turkey necks of besuited older gentlemen in the crowd, flapping away as they chat.
Cheering crowds are, of course, expected in a film about sporting events, dewlaps notwithstanding. Where Ichikawa shines is in the more extreme moments, where the Games’ audience is portrayed either in chaos or in calm. At the beginning of the film, as the torch races to the stadium through the streets of Tokyo, the camera jolts from within the throng as eager spectators push and shove one another to get a good look at the torch-bearer, one woman with a full set of gold teeth grimacing and crying out, “It hurts!” In between events, a quiet moment sees a woman tying a child’s shoe under the concrete of the stadium; during the pomp of the opening ceremony, a young girl sleeps peacefully in a man’s arms. Portraying the Games so candidly, from their most turbulent to their most serene, challenges the expected tone of enthusiastic but upright sportsmanly celebration while reminding the viewer of the mass of human experiences in every moment.
Now I’d be remiss not to mention the enormous, fascist elephant in the room — the film that arguably wrote the book not only on Olympic filmmaking, but sports filmmaking in general: Leni Riefenstahl’s two-part epic Olympia (1938). Conceived as a propaganda project for the nascent Nazi state, Olympia depicts the drama of the 1936 Berlin Games, not unlike Ichikawa does in Tokyo. Despite her ideology, Riefenstahl — who becomes the de facto official documentarian of the Reich and goes to her grave denying allegations of her Nazism at the unjust age of 101 — is credited with staggering innovations in cinematography, using poetic imagery and inventive engineering like underwater cameras to depict athletics in an entirely new fashion. Her influence crops up rather frequently in Tokyo Olympiad, with her oblique angles, ballet-like slow motion, and a sequence seemingly ripped from her film in which javelins land on the field with a decisive blast of the tuba. Camera techniques like this successfully heighten the drama and artistry of the Games, but in contrast to Tokyo Olympiad, Olympia focuses on grandeur, the triumph of the human spirit through strength and victory. Much of the film is dedicated to more practical coverage of the events; with a glut of figures and decimal points tracking every hammer throw and a keen fixation on the winners of each event, Olympia celebrates accomplishment in a very technical sense. Its dedication to the physical beauty of the athletes — as opposed to the often ugly but always humanizing images of Ichikawa — elevates them to valkyric glory. The context, of course, is the Nazi political project, celebrating the Aryan form to justify a racialized might-makes-right hierarchy for governance. But with Olympia in mind, Ichikawa’s viewers can appreciate a more sympathetic approach to competition and athleticism, the human body and spirit lauded not for their classical beauty but for their depth of resilience and experience.
In this respect, Tokyo Olympiad is like — and I mean this as a compliment — the much-maligned participation trophy, honoring the athletes for their spirit and not their world records. But it’s the beauty of this complex humanity that Tokyo Olympiad feeds on, crafting a collective experience by weaving together moments of the Games from across the emotional spectrum: nervous runners, sleepy children, jostled spectators, the victorious and the defeated, the lonely. This is the Games as affective gestalt, a reminder to the viewer of the vast array of human experiences possible when you get people from all around the world together for one purpose. When the film rounds out with the closing ceremony, bidding the crowd “till we meet again” in Mexico City, a bit of poetry declares, “When night falls, the sacred fire returns to the sun. Humans dream only once every four years.” The dream, of course, is of an everlasting peace, fortified by our recognition of a shared humanity. The Olympic flame dies out and the stadium is plunged into darkness, but Ichikawa retorts with a final shot of the rising sun; the dreamer within us all turns its face toward the light.
Here comes the movie boy! Hello movie boy!