Leni Riefenstahl still holds pride of place on the winners' podium reserved for the gold medallist. But Kon Ichikawa is only a rank and a silver below her. The German's brilliant Olympia, in 1936, focused on the strain and stress - and sometime poetry - of the human body, truly grace under pressure - the Japanese director records the inner spirit of competitors at the 1964 games, or as much of it as can be teased out by photography with ever-faster lenses, nearly mystical slo-mo deliberativeness and helicopters sneaking in a Gods' eye-view.
He transfigures reality into hyperrealism. So don't expect a documentary of winners, losers and records broken - the viewpoint is intimate and impressionistic. Faces, hearts and minds are what the 164 (uncredited) camera crew - compared with Riefenstahl's 48 - concentrate on most memorably: faces of all nations, determined, agonised, exhausted, smiling, despairing and every other epithet in the breathless lexicon. A Dutch giant unexpectedly vanquishes a native Nippon at judo, gymnasts trapped in stroboscopic illumination twirl like dervishes preparing for war, Japanese girls win at volleyball and celebrate this acquisition of the Yankee art with a fit of weeping, and two Bulgarian athletes take time off between events to go hesitantly through the obstacle course of a marriage to each other by Shinto rites.
True to his countrymen's minimalist styles in the other arts, Ichikawa distils the essence of sport rather than its mere aspect. Yet buffs needn't feel short-changed. He catches the rhythms of particular events, matching the mode of photography to their toil and (sometime) tears - the marathon runners, for instance, caught in long-focus lenses and looking like human pneumatic drills as their pounding limbs seem to mark time on the same spot of asphalt for ages. Ichikawa has a keen eye for those other rites of the Olympics, the reactions of the watching thousands. A little girl perched on her father's shoulders, as if in the royal box, encourages the runners with a spontaneous gesture that seems to add years to her understanding of life and all its coming earnestness.
Why, even Emperor Hirohito manages a smile, possibly to hide his dismay when things are not necessarily in his nation's favour - that unforgettable euphemism he employed for 'defeat' in 1945. He musters more dignity, however, than Hitler and Goering, super-spectators at the 1936 games, clowning around to show their unbuttoned bonhomie - at least until the triumph of the black American athlete, Jesse Owens, whose extensive appearance in the German movie, uncensored by its director in spite of orders from Goebbels, was one of the features that told in her acquittal at her post-war 'purification' trial for fostering Nazi racial ideology too assiduously.
As today's Olympic Games grow bloated by a superfluity of competitors, a taint of illegal additives and an indulgence of borderline 'sporting' events - ballroom dancing surely coming soon ? a film like Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad reminds us of simpler glories and singular graces: a beautiful record of the history of sport. Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia is all that, too, and something more - history itself.
