OLYMPIA dvd set. First I was turned off by the bad transfer of film-to-dvd. Some of it looked as if this "first time on dvd" release was actually taken from VHS, but it looks like low quality transfer... Not totally crap, but considering the noble qualities of this material, one would expect nothing but prime !
-Jugend der Welt, 1936 winter olympics at Garmish-Partenkirchen. Not so perfect image, but fuck, look at those skijumpers!! Flying like birds, falling the dead soldiers quite often. And the luge sport or whatever you call it. People yelling sieg hail to support the men sliding in icy pipes, no helmets, no any protective gear. Damn, it must hurt when they fly off the pipe edge. Looks like there could be casualties. In Herzog document of... was it late 70's or early 80's with skijumper, and it looked like totally lethal, but these guys, decades earlier.. just look at the japanese kamikaze guy take as much speed and just fly to land on his face perhaps 100m later... uh? No helmet, just regular clothes.
-Festival Of The Nations, the normal documentary part of Leni Riefenstahl. 1936 summer olympics. My favorites are high jumping. Both female and male. And shot put. The grande finale is Finnish athlete Sulo Bärlund throwing 2 olympic records, but then the german comes and pushes the ball of steel just little bit further, and damn Hitler is excited! And also that germans got 3rd place. And was it this or measure guy of the "3 step jump" who had hitler mustache too. Spear throwing is ok, Finns got two medals, but if it isn't the sir Seppo Räty, I don't really care. All the sports look very natural and low-tech. Everything seems more about actual sport event, than some gadget/tool/mattress comfort. Even high jumping is without any soft mattresses. Just jump as much as you can and land in the ground. That's fine. German girls with swastika decorations in their chests do 150cm. I'd like to see the modern day pirihuora skingirl do the same. Or slobs like me.
-Festival of Beauty. This is of course the reason why this dvd is being watched and why Riefenstahl is such a goddess of film magick. And that's the reason I didn't watch it yet. Saving it for the good moment.
Double dvd includes also various other bonus features. Stills, biographies, one more documentary about making documents.
