Most of us experience the Olympics as a TV event that lasts several weeks and — depending on your level of investment in, say, figure skating — can ruin your sleep schedule for a while. But since 1912 — long before the Olympics were televised — the International Olympic Committee has commissioned a more bite-size version of nearly every edition of the Games: an official documentary that captures the highlights and celebrates the athletic achievements.
These films provide a kind of archive — especially important in a time before TV coverage. And it’s fun to watch some of those older films and see how the sports have evolved. In celebration of the Milan Cortina Winter Games, you can stream all the documentaries on the free Olympics website, or watch them on the Criterion Channel.
There are occasional gaps in the record. The I.O.C. didn’t commission a film for the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, for instance, because the Nazi regime commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to direct. The result was “Olympia,” a stunning film for both its revolutionary techniques and for its overtly, disturbingly propagandistic images promoting the Third Reich’s racist ideals.
But most of the time, there’s an official film for the Games. Watching them, you may notice two things. Some of them are startlingly cinematic, far beyond the workmanlike coverage we expect from seeing the same action on television. And almost without fail, they tell the unflaggingly positive story promoted by the I.O.C.: that the Games are a symbol of the power of sports to bring people together and promote world peace. Excellent examples of these characteristics show up in two of the documentaries, both from the previous Winter Olympics held in Italy.
“White Vertigo,” directed by Giorgio Ferroni, chronicles the 1956 winter Games, which were also held in Cortina, one of the two cities hosting this year. Perhaps because the film had to compete with the burgeoning medium of TV, it’s uncommonly lovely, looking almost like a Technicolor extravaganza. The first few minutes meander around the mountains while a narrator comments on the beauty of nature and the village, before the athletes descend.
As the action gets going, the music is sometimes orchestral, sometimes jazzy, sometimes bordering on the avant-garde. It’s a fun movie in its own right, apart from all the sports. The reason probably has to do with the creative team: the cinematographer Aldo Scavarda would go on to shoot Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece, “L’Avventura,” only a few years later. The composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino scored, among many other movies, two by Orson Welles: “Othello” and “Chimes at Midnight.”
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