The official documentary of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal begins with a heart stopping shot of the Olympic Stadium, the camera far away but pressed in tight, tracking left to right, and then eventually pulling back, letting us see the whole structure in full. The construction equipment might intimate how it was never even officially completed in time for the Games, if not also how it went on to become the city’s white elephant. But in the space of this one image, you can also see the way in which the stadium was originally intended, as a futuristic superstructure meant to embody so many radical individual feats of strength. And that is what the quartet of directors, Jean-Claude Labrecque, Jean Beaudin, Marcel Carrière, and Georges Dufaux, working from what was said to be 100 kilometers of footage, choose to emphasize: the athletes, the individuals. Any sense of flag-waving is dispensed with immediately as an image of the Canadian National Team at the Opening Ceremonies gives way to assorted images of athletes in close-ups pointedly sans flags in the background, marking them as humans and individuals more than countrymen and countrywomen. When “Games of the XXI Olympiad” recounts a weightlifting event, we might learn the nations of a few competitors, but the way these scenes are composed almost entirely of close-ups and wide shots of the competitors and the barbell reduces them to nothing more than man v weight.
“Games of the XXI Olympiad” prefers a fly on the wall approach with bare bones context and narration, and occasionally, no context or narration all, that can admittedly make moments and events confusing, but other times, allows for an engrossing kind of embedding with an athlete or athletes. For the Team Pursuit in Cycling, we first see the bikes being prepared, and then the cyclists warming up, and then cyclists waiting for their turn to take the track. (We also see one of the coaches smoking a pipe right in front of his Olympic athletes about to compete at the Olympics.) And though the exact nature of this event is never explained, we feel the sensation of it anyway, the rhythm of four cyclists from West Germany and four cyclists from the Soviet Union going around and around, the roar of the crowd escalating the drama. This also goes to show how “Games of the XXI Olympiad” mines drama from lesser-known events, like Modern Pentathlon. Seen from the vantage point of the Hungarian team, it really does feel as if we are eavesdropping, listening to their strategic conversations and watching them in repose between events. They ultimately win Bronze, standing on the podium and listening to the national anthem of Great Britain, their moment essentially someone else’s. Then they walk away from the camera, grave-faced, as if without the next competition, they do not know where they are going.
That goes to show how “Games of the XXI Olympiad” does not emphasize merely the winners but the losers too, like the 100m dash where one of the favorites, Silvio Leonard of Cuba, who suffers a leg injury in the days leading up to the games and seems to know he won’t have what it takes. He does not even make the final, and when we see it, the camera lingers on his melancholy face off to the side as much as the winner’s on the track. Similarly, the most dazzling competitor of the Games, gymnast Nadia Comăneci, is seen as much through the eyes of Olga Korbut, who occupied the Nadia role at the previous Olympics and now is being passed by. (The footage of Nadia’s uneven bars routine, it must be noted, is something else. She’s not flying anywhere near as high as gymnasts do today, but the way she goes from bar to bar still looks like the future.) Watching Olga compete on the balance beam at the same time Nadia’s floor exercise is concluding becomes the past giving way to the future in real-time; when Korbut lays down face-first on the balance beam, it could be taken for competitive death. For all the vanquished, though, “Games of the XXI Olympiad” ends with a big winner, Bruce Jenner of the United States and his Gold Medal victory in the Decathlon. If the camera is mostly just a fly on the wall, here Jenner invites it in, looking right into it as the competition ends, and observing aloud, “Glad you got all this.” It’s as if Bruce Jenner, who would become Caitlyn Jenner, face of a reality show empire, had seen the future.
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