Visions of 8

Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude LeLouch, Yuri Ozerov, Arthur Penn, Michael Pfleghar, John Schlesinger, Mai Zetterling – 1973 – USA/West Germany

Visions of 8 is the last of three great documentaries made about the Olympic Games, the others being Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) and Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (1964).  It was American producer David L. Wolper’s idea to invite eight of the world’s leading filmmakers to each direct a segment about a particular aspect of the 1972 games in West Germany; with titles like The Strongest, The Fastest and The Losers.  My favorite of the anthology is Arthur Penn’s film The Highest, about the pole-vaulters, which makes striking use of the slow-motion technique that he had helped popularize in mainstream movies, to the extent that it became a sigh-inducing cliché in films by countless others.  This and Ichikawa's film The Fastest make full use of cinematic devices to freeze moments to contemplate rather than merely reporting on development of the competitions as you would see in television coverage of the same events.  The film is admirably dedicated to the Israeli athletes who were killed by terrorists during the games.