Visions of Eight: Time and Motion

Kon Ichikawa, the legendary director of Tokyo Olympiad (1965), proffers an odd but mesmerizing meditation on the men’s 100 meters, the winner of which is traditionally deemed the fastest man alive. Here we return to astonishing levels of slo-mo cheek fluttering, and a narrator intones my favorite snatch of voice-over in the entire movie as the runners barrel toward the camera, some heaving openmouthed: “Breathing. Are they or are they not breathing while running? It’s something medical science has yet to establish. It’s something they can’t even answer themselves.” Are we still waiting on studies for this one? Because to me it really looks like they’re breathing. 

Claude Lelouch tackles a topic after my own heart in The Losers. As Warren Oates memorably puts it in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, “Nobody loses all the time.” But the poignancy of botching it at the Olympic Games, after four years of sacrifice, is something many of us have probably imagined, with a shudder. In Lelouch’s film, one boxer cannot accept the result of his match and seems to be making an impassioned appeal to another reality to reverse life’s course. After that, it’s a cavalcade of disappointment, as a cyclist wipes out, swimmers bob forlornly in their lanes (how did you expect to win with that Viking beard dragging in the pool?), and contenders in the women’s javelin mourn their dreams after bad tosses. It’s the best half of the famous line in the intro for ABC’s Wide World of Sports—no “thrill of victory,” just “agony of defeat.” But eventually we move beyond mere sadness and self-flagellation as we watch an Iranian wrestler try to finish a match on a leg that is clearly torn to shreds, if not broken. Though he can’t even stand, he won’t surrender, and by the end everyone present appears profoundly moved by his stubborn spirit, especially his victorious opponent, who helps him stagger off the mat. Here, at last, is the brotherhood the Games were meant to engender.

But it can’t last, of course, and John Schlesinger’s The Longest, ostensibly a study of a British marathoner, is the only film that tries to absorb that darkest of incursions on the Olympic ideal, the attack in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and one West German police officer were killed. Schlesinger filmed Ronald Hill before the Games back in England as well as in Munich, and you can sense the witty and nuanced portrait he was after in tracking this monomaniacal chemist–cum–world-class marathon man. (Schlesinger would actually go on to direct Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman.) Without the tragedy, the film would have neatly captured the loneliness (and obtuse self-sufficiency) of this long-distance runner. But what becomes truly intriguing are the ways the final cut can and cannot handle the terrifying burdens of the moment. It makes for a strange, disturbing close to Visions of Eight, precisely as it should be.

If we are left with questions afterward, some of them might include mysteries about the legacy of this film. Why isn’t it more celebrated, or at least more known? Also, a lot of these directors were heavy hitters with reputations that still stand fifty years later. Don’t their experiments, their essays into the form and meaning of sport, deserve another look? It’s a shame the format was never repeated. Thinking up your own favorite roster of directors for a future Olympic Games would be a fun party game. Steven Soderbergh, Lucrecia Martel, Béla Tarr, Steve McQueen . . . The list would go on and on. For now, we have this intriguing document—eight memorable windows into the trials and tribulations of sports history’s grooviest cohort during a complex and painful twentieth-century inflection point.