TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1965)

The most influential film ever made?  Let’s opt for Louis & Auguste Lumière’s L'ARROSEUR ARROSÉ (THE WATERER WATERED), part of the first-ever publicly projected film program, playing alongside actualitiés in 1895.  In that one-shot/one-minute wonder, a mischievous lad briefly steps on a gardener’s water hose before releasing it to blast him in the face.  Here you'll find the entire DNA code of narrative cinema in embryonic form.  As for second most influential?  I’d pop for Kon Ichikawa's 1964 Olympic documentary.  Full implications showing up not in feature film but in something far more ubiquitous: Televised Sports.  All those technical refinements & innovations you thought Roone Arledge invented on ABC’s Wide World of Sports?  The back stories & cultural positioning a hack like Bud Greenspan glommed onto in his Olympic Recaps?  ‘Jump cuts’ in view and speed as seen in those heavy-handed NFL films?  All taken from Ichikawa in his masterful overview.  Heavy on Track & Field, he skips many events even in its full near three-hour cut.  (What, no diving?)  Somehow managing to glorify and undercut events into artful abstraction without touching the third-rail ‘Kitsch’ of Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous two-part (Berlin) OLYMPIA/’38.  Long available in a bewildering assortment of edits & lowered visual quality (the film had originally been planned to accommodate different cuts aimed at different countries), the original Japanese edition has been beautifully restored at a bit shy of three hours.  Perhaps the last Olympics to feel human-scaled and largely apolitical; you’ll probably not recognize many of the athletes . . . which might be half the point.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Filmed as a sort of tie-in to the Games, Cary Grant made his final feature film as if in the middle of the event, stripping down to his briefs to join the Speed Walkers and play cupid in WALK DON’T RUN/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/04/walk-dont-run-1966.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Who remembers that East and West Germany competed as a single nation in the competition?  Or that their shared anthem was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy?