Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty (1938) is a documentary by Leni Riefenstahl you can watch online on iFILM. The second half of her two-part project leaves the main Olympic stadium behind and follows the cameras into fencing halls, cycling circuits, equestrian polo fields and modern pentathlon courses — events that barely registered in the newsreels of the day.

Riefenstahl spent roughly six months editing the footage from the 1936 Berlin Games. She used slow-motion sequences, underwater angles and rhythmic cutting keyed to the mechanics of bodies in motion — techniques the genre had not seen before. The film picked up the Grand Prix at Venice in 1938. It is also a Nazi government commission: shot on state funding as part of a prestige propaganda effort. That distance between formal innovation and political sponsorship is what makes it one of the most studied, and most argued-over, documentaries in cinema history. Watch Olympia Part Two online on iFILM.