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The Tokyo Olympic Games have been postponed until next year, but you can still celebrate a century of Olympic glory with this monumental collection. These documentaries cast a cinematic eye on some of the most iconic moments in the history of modern sports: Jesse Owens shattering world records on the track in 1936 Berlin, Jean-Claude Killy dominating the Grenoble slopes in 1968, Joan Benoit breaking away to win the Games’ first women’s marathon in Los Angeles in 1984. Traversing continents and decades, reflecting the social, cultural, and political changes that have shaped our recent history, this remarkable movie marathon showcases a hundred years of human endeavor.
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The last time the Olympic Games were held in Tokyo, Kon Ichikawa captured the spectacle in glorious widescreen images suffused with lyrical, idiosyncratic poetry in Tokyo Olympiad, one of the greatest films ever made about sports. For an eclectic sampler of directorial approaches, check out Visions of Eight, in which an octet of filmmakers—incluiding Miloš Forman, John Schlesinger, and Arthur Penn—offers a series of vignettes from the 1972 Munich Games. |
