Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations

Olympia (1938) is Leni Riefenstahl's documentary, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Part one, "Festival of the Nations," chronicles the 1936 Summer Games held in Berlin.

She opens with a prologue set in ancient Greece, where marble statues seem to dissolve into living athletes. Then come more than twenty events — sprints, the long jump, the discus, the marathon. The centerpiece is Jesse Owens, the Black American sprinter who took four gold medals and turned the host regime's racial propaganda into an embarrassment.

To capture motion no one had filmed before, Riefenstahl sank cameras into the pool, laid tracking rails beside the lanes, floated lenses on balloons and leaned hard on slow motion. Commissioned by the Nazi state, the film can't be separated from the propaganda it served — yet it rewrote the grammar of sports filmmaking for generations. Stream Olympia (1938) online on iFILM.