'Tokyo Olympiad'

It’s a bit of poetry that the two state-sanctioned documentary films about the Olympics came with Leni Riefensthal’s bombastic Olympia chronicling the 1936 Berlin games and Kon Ichikawa’s film about the 1964 Tokyo games.

The former showed power and force: Germany on the brink of turning the world on its head. It’s manipulative and in concert with the Nazis’ ideas about pomp, circumstance and a good show.

The later caught back up with the Axis powers. Decimated by years of war, the sons and fathers in graves and countries on the brink, Tokyo, by 1964, was on its own brink: From being a financial and cultural stalwart of the east and certainly a world power under very different circumstances.

Japan had pegged famed director Akira Kurosawa for the task. He proved unamenable to suggestion and – being that he was undoubtedly popular – was his own power. So Japan sacked him and hired Kon Ichikawa. He does a beautiful job of focusing less on the medal stands and tote boards, and more on the triumph of the will (so to speak) of the athletes and the stories behind the world’s best.