Olympic Films and Public Memory

Abstract

How is our memory of mega-events structured? This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the Olympic Games. To this end, it first unravels the historical origins of the strong link between the two, as both are symbolic products of the 20th century. The Olympics reaffirm the image of the modern nation-state; the cinematic medium visually represents the Games as spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia (1938), recorded at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, supplies the most enduring imagery of this type. In addition to Riefenstahl's thoughts and methods, this study delves into Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which was influenced by Olympia. Ichikawa's film, which reflects his artistry and showcases his various skills, won critical acclaim and, intriguingly, precipitated the “document or art” controversy that involved the Japanese state and the mass media. Whether document or work of art, this film has supplied the public with imagery for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—various images that most of us recognize—and thereby played a key role in constituting our memory of them. Therefore, our experience of the Games is a mediated experience through the construction of our public memory. Our memory culture is composed of “prosthetic memories” that are technologically assembled through cinema and act as Freudian “screen memories.”