Wordiezett So much average

ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

chaos-rampant This is the one to watch, Riefenstahl's masterpiece. Das Blaue Licht is great but dares less. You know about Triumph; people being choreographed to embody a new identity, destructive and all that.Olympia Part I had moments of beauty but it was constrained in key ways. It was constrained by Hitler being there. By nations parading and saluting. You could not fail to note that all of it, much more subtle than Triumph, in the end impressed as a show staged to promote a German image, much more subtle because the image was of normalcy and spontaneous celebration.This is a different thing. You probably know that Riefenstahl was a dancer before making her transition to film, you can see her dance in one of her first films as an actress. All of her own films are about choreographed sculpted form, but this is the one most purely about cinematic dance and the body. Eisenstein filmed active crowds in radical collision that creates a world (now his devices are every bit as commonplace as Riefenstahl's but in a different milieu). She films crowds as cheerful observers of vigor. Most of all, she films the body as the fulcrum of harmonious expression that seduces the camera that seduces us seeing and being affected by this. It doesn't matter if the world is changed, or maybe she trusted that it had a few years back, it only matters that the soul - theirs at the moment, ours cinematically - can brush against the heavens.Each sport is a framework that dictates its own dance. Each dance is slightly different and calls for a different camera. The body is free but within confines of the sport. The camera is similarly free to draw its dynamic calligraphy within edges of the frame.In the regatta for instance, white sails group and re-group in swanlike formations and contrast with sailors throwing their weight around the boats and pulling ropes. Cyclists and rowers pass one the other in horizontal forward-dashing and overlap. Boxers are locked in gristly tango. Horse-riders glide over mud as though skating inches above-ground. The gymnastics are all about eddy and suspension in mid-air. In the polo sequence, the dance is all between tracing the zigzag flow of the game and Kurosawa-like whip-pans of the riders smashing against vertical beams in the far background. Other sequences like swimming and football are less interesting.Above all, of course, stand the celebrated divers. You can tell that Riefenstahl loved them (she counted an Olympic medalist diver among her lovers) by how imaginatively she filmed this bit and saving it for last. This notion is never more clear, of a camera that dances with and decides the weight of its partner. She achieves here pure weightlessness. In light of this, the closing ceremony of fire and celestial light - now common tropes of Olympic shows - is on top of ludicrous simply redundant. Her explicit bits of Wagnerian worldview are the least interesting of her work, always were. Yes, Nazis must have been enormously pleased by her artistry of transcendent sensuality. It still looks dull-witted and overwrought.On the flipside of that is her floating calligraphic eye that was unparalleled at this time.

MartinHafer For the most part, this is just a continuation of the first part of "Olympia"--a documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics made by the notorious Leni Reifenstahl. Unlike her slobbering lover letter to Hitler in "Triumph of the Will", the "Olympia" films are NOT filled with German propaganda but are incredibly artistic films. They are filled with some of the best camera-work you'll ever see--and put more modern Olympic documentaries to shame in this regard. The films are gorgeous.The film begins with a lot of nudity--just like "Part One". This time, it's full of naked men doing all sorts of outdoorsy things--swimming, lounging, running and hanging out in the sauna. While it was not intended, there sure seemed to be a strong homo-erotic quality about it. But I assume the real purpose was to show an idealized view of modern Germans--like they are descendants of the original Greek athletes. Regardless, it's a lot of naked blond men cavorting about...artistically.Like "Part One", following this very artsy beginning, the rest of the film is a straight documentary showing the various Summer Olympic events. In all cases, the camera-work was brilliant. But the ones that REALLY struck me were the yachting scenes. How Riefenstahl and her crew did these shots is a mystery. I THINK they tagged along in boats and shot some of the scenes with a telephoto lens. Others, I suspect, were re-created for the film to give it added close-up realism. Regardless, the camera shots were amazing.Unfortunately, however, like "Part One", the film got VERY dull because just showing event after event got tedious--especially since the viewers have no idea who any of these folks are and the events occurred 73 years ago. Of course it looked great and was supremely composed...but still kind of dull. My feeling is that if you are a film snob, cinemaniac or appreciate art films, watch this and the first installment. Others might just find it a tough viewing.By the way--get a load of the gymnastic events. First, the participants were only men. Second, they all performed outdoors! Interesting how times have changed!

Zepheus I watched this film in my International Cinema class, and it was quite interesting. The movie starts out rather oddly, with naked bathing men and about 8 dialogue-free minutes of various people working out. The best part of this film (for me) is near the end. It was the men's high-dive section. Leni set the camera up under the divers and, as they fall, they look as if they're flying. The viewer loses almost all sense of which way is down as they watch the diver tumbling/soaring through the air.Another enjoyable part is the horse-riding section, which plays out similar to an ESPN blooper reel, with riders falling from their horses on difficult jumps. But in this film, it's much more gorgeous through the help of slow motion and fairly tight framing.All in all, a well crafted documentary.

Grand Rarely -- perhaps never before or since -- has the sheer beauty of the human body and the joy in its perfection been as well captured as in in "Olympia, Festival of Beauty". Watching this is film is to capture some sense of what the Ancient Greeks meant when they discussed _arete_ -- the "virtue" of being "beautiful" in body and soul. The great Humanists of the Renaissance would have been honored to count Miss Riefenstahl among their number had they been able, by some miracle, to see this canvas of Beauty in motion. As art, this film ranks with the works of Michaelangelo, Donatello, Phidias, and others who have scaled the empyrean heights and seen Humanity looking back at them. Poignant is the dolorous thought that within a few years so many of these paragons of _arete_ would be killed in the War. It is no wonder that Joseph Goebbels was said to have disliked Riefenstahl -- while she (even in "Triumph of the Will") held a mirror to the beauty of humanity and its highest aspirations, he dredged up the most noxious evils of the soul and twisted them into images of fear & horror; while she emphasized unity and camaraderie, he stressed division & distrust in order to secure his own vile position under the Fuhrer whom they both viewed so differently. Miss Riefenstahl portrayed people of all races and nations at the most sublime pinnacle of their own perfection, while a few years later Walt Disney and the Warner Brothers gave us buck-toothed Japanese midgets and paunchy German robots as The Inhuman Enemy. Today, however, it is SHE who is reviled. The more things change ... the more they remain the same