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Shot using the German film stock Agfacolor, what stands out most about Theo Hormann’s official documentary of the 1964 IX Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria – given the utilitarian title of IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 – is the photographic brilliance of its images. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakian (!) jerseys in their ice hockey tilt pop off the screen like they just came out of the laundry in one of those vintage Tide commercials, bobsleighs come across like vibrant toboggans, and the snow looks the way you imagine a snowy day in your mind. Hormann’s movie must have been striking to contemporary viewers, what with the paucity of color television sets at the time, but it’s equally striking to a modern viewer given the omnipresent gunmetal grey of so much prestige TV. The color renders these Olympics as something like a living parade of nations.
IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964, alas, is not, itself, as striking as its images. Hormann recounts myriad events and athletes but tends to provide little context to put into perspective what all this agony and triumph means, citing results here and there like reading from a two-sentence Associated Press recap. The one time he does, with German Georg Thoma overcoming faulty skis to earn Bronze in the Nordic Combined, suggests what the whole film might have been. (I learned from Motoko Rich and Josephine de La Bruyère’s Athletic article about the residents of current Olympic host city Cortina that Gildo Siorpaes won Bronze for the Italian bobsled team at the 1964 Winter Olympics, but that he was an alpine skier at heart and was forced on to the bobsled team against his will and that all things considered, the medal was not that special to him. I mean, there is a story this movie could have told!) Nor is the visual poetry enough to sustain it. When the narrator mentions the rhythm slalom skiers must use to be successful, we are never made to understand just what that rhythm entails, or how it is accomplished.
Oddly enough, IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 works better away from the competition, like a brief interlude with athletes breaking bread by way of feasting on authentic Tyrolean Holzhackerschmarrn. There is also one heartening passage about Innsbruck itself, the narrator noting how “the mountains peek through the window of the house,” reinforcing what he says elsewhere, and that the images of Innsbruck homes, and businesses, and streets set down in the shadow of the Nordkette manifest, “that in this setting, the link between man and alpine sports seems to have come about on its own.”
