Tokyo Olympiad [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Filmed during the 1964 Olympics, Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad was as revolutionary a sports documentary as Leni Riefenstahl's similar Olympia of 1936. Riefenstahl had forsaken the usual "reality" approach in favor of a rhapsodic celebration of the human form. Ichikawa does this as well, with the added dimension of emotional involvement. Tokyo Olympiad spends almost as much time concentrating on the spontaneous reactions of the spectators, and to the post-game outpouring of emotions of the athletes, as it does on the events themselves. Originally running 170 minutes, Tokyo Olympiad was literally butchered by its American distributor; all filmgoers in the US saw was a sliced-up 93-minute print, hampered by a gee-gosh narrator. In 1984, a restored print of Tokyo Olympiad was finally made available to stateside viewers, and it is this version that we recommend without qualification.