' ' Cinema Romantico: Friday's Old Fashioned: The Olympic Games in Paris 1924 (1925)

Friday, July 26, 2024

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Olympic Games in Paris 1924 (1925)

Industrial smoke & feats of strength.

Motion pictures and the modern version of the Olympics are, give or take, the same age. That means 100 years ago at the time of the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, they were both in their relative infancy. And that might go a long way toward explaining the approach of the official documentary of the eighth modern Olympiad. Rather than tell any kind of overarching story, either about the Olympic games themselves or specific events, and limited to the most basic of intertitle information so that it can sometimes be difficult to understand what’s happening, director Jean de Rovera’s “The Olympic Games in Paris 1924” is content to just unspool its footage. Running two hours and fifty-four minutes, it feels exhaustive, epitomized in how it ends with no wind-up or warning, like it literally ran out of footage to show and that was that. You sort of must put yourself in a 1924 mindset to appreciate it, to think how at a time when seeing this international multi-sport event necessitated getting on an ocean liner and going there, how revelatory it must have been to be able to see it without going there. Still, I will confess to watching it all in 15–20-minute intervals at home, even if I also couldn’t help but yearn for a big screen experience given how incredibly crisp and clear the comprehensive footage remains to this day. 

There were over 3,000 competitors at the 1924 Summer Olympics and the conspicuous whiteness of them will jump out, as will the industrial plant parked not far from the Colombes Olympic Stadium, the repeatedly glimpsed smokestacks billowing black smoke right at the field of play. It was a different time, after all. Indeed, the drink stations during the marathon appear to dispense not the grab and go paper cups of today but actual glasses. Then again, when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were in Paris last fall and bought a bottled water to go with our lunch, we were also given two actual glasses because drinking straight from the bottle is so uncivilized. Maybe that’s just France. Anyway. Gymnastics, I noted, took place outdoors and in the Olympic Stadium and included events like the rope climb and some sort of calisthenics with armies of competitors performing all at once. This event might have been a century old, but it was news to me, and worked well with the silent movie organ as did other events like rugby, and the pole vault, and the pre-Fosbury Flop high jump in which competitors just pitched forward over the bar, kind of athletic flailing.

An intertitle advises that extreme heat and the difficult nature of the marathon course “caused several competitors to break down, but fortunately there were no fatal consequences,” which is just screaming for more follow-up, and more visual evidence, than we get here, and speaks to how some events translate better through this approach than others. There is footage of such famed athletes as American swimmer Johnny Weissmuller and tennis player Helen Wills Moody as well as the exalted English runners Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell made famous by “Chariots of Fire” (1981), though what we see of them here sadly doesn’t do much to translate their prowess. In fact, what stands out most in Liddell’s race isn’t him but a rival that falls before the finish line. The movie doesn’t mention him, the vanquished lost to time. (A minimal amount of internet digging revealed him to be Josef Imbach of Switzerland.) What isn’t lost to time is Armond Blanchonnet of the host country winning the Gold Medal in Road Cycling. As “The Olympic Games in Paris 1924” does with many of the medalists, we see him posing for the camera afterwards, getting misty-eyed, and now, here, 100 years later, I got misty-eyed too. Some things do translate.

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