The Greek Ideals within Olympia: Festival of Nations

Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which she directed as a personal request for the Nazi Regime, opens with a brief sequence that traces a path from the beautiful anatomy of Ancient Greek statues to montages of modern German Olympiads through the use of the Olympic Flame. As the runners transverse the flame across Europe they simultaneously move the film forward in time and place from Ancient Greece to Berlin in 1936 creating a direct comparison of the German Figure to Greek idealism with a dependency on the ideas of Johannes Winckelman.

The film’s initial ten minutes introduces this comparison with ancient Greek statues in the Acropolis. The famous Discobolus, a statue admired by Hitler, transforms into Edwin Huber, a modern German athlete, whose muscles ripple with grace and power while he swings the discus back and forth before elegantly hurling it forward into competition. Riefenstahl shoots this direct connection from a low angle shot that imposes the god-like form of Huber on the viewer, signaling power and immanence. It was Huber’s impressive form that Riefenstahl “was extremely interested in studying” to best choose how to film and depict the various athletic figures throughout the Olympic Games (Cooper 53). She wished to model her entire project off of a “superior” German athlete.

In Writing on Art, Winckelmann claims, “The gymnasia…Here he studied the elasticity of the muscles, the ever varying motions of the frame, the outlines of the fair forms, or the contour left by the wrestler on the sand” (64). Winckelman believes that the careful observation of intricacies of form and movement in nature is necessary to portray true beauty, a derivative of nature. Riefenstahl appropriated this instruction for creating “ideal” art in filming Olympia. She inspected and analyzed athletes in their training grounds prior to the actual Olympics to hopefully portray them in the most graceful way possible. She strove to catch the best angles of rippling muscles and trickling sweat on emboldened forms to show power, an artistic decision that while in search of beauty also glorifies the German form as more beautiful and powerful than other races.

This connection between the powerful figures of German athletes and the statues of antiquity correlates the modern German figure to idealized ancient Greek art forms and generates dangerous nationalism for the German race. Butler wrote, “Germans as a whole that they are at the mercy of ideas…Wherever we look we find German poets standing on the shoulders of philosophers in order to view the world; seeking for absolute beauty in the realm of absolute truth” (4). Admitting to her admiration of Wincklemanian ideas, Butler also expresses her idealization of the Aryan Germanic race, thus making her an ideal candidate for the production of Third Reich propaganda, a role that Riefenstahl clearly fulfills through her film Olympia.

She uses low camera angles to impose german superiority on the viewer and ensures the graceful depiction of Aryan beauty through a precise attention to detail and fluidity of motion.

Similarly to Nazi ideology, Winckelman compared the art of different cultures and ranked ethnographic groups based on his opinions of their artworks. He composed an ethnographic ranking system of Greek, Egyptian, and Etruscan art, naming ancient Greek art as the grand style that far surpasses other culture’s styles which he deemed harsh and undivine. Further, Wicklemna praised falsely-white Greek statues that had lost their colorful paint to age as beautiful engravings of Aryan individuals. This organization of cultural value based on personal opinion of aesthetics layed a philosophical groundwork that the Nazis proceeded to exploit during their reign. The Third Reich imposed a pseudo-scientific racial, ranking system on Germanic Society which they utilized for political gain and the oppression of non-Aryan groups, namely Jewish people. Partial success of such horrific ideals can partially be attributed to the normalization of stigmatization and racism through German cultural and philosophical history, as can be seen in the works of Winckelman.

Reifenstahl’s Olympia fulfills this ethnographic ranking system with a careful inclusion of Winckelman’s artistic theories. Her comparison of Germanic and Greek forms creates a nationalistic glorification of Germany and serves as a mass work of propaganda. With generous funding, Riefenstahl was able to film an Olympic sporting event that would be viewed by millions of people, and her work built on a cultural engagement with prejudice. Thus Winckelman’s ideologies paved the way for this more aggressive, pseudoscientific ranking system of hatred.

However, Riefenstahl’s film doesn’t entirely encompass the ideologies of Winckelman due to the innate separation between nature and film. Winckelman wrote, “Thus he will improve every beauty he discovers in it and by comparing the beauties of nature with the ideal, form rules for himself” (68). To be considered art, the rules of its creations had to stem from nature and possess no unnatural qualities in the philosophy of Winckelman, a principle which cinema disobeys. Film relies on an editing process that serves to obscure the natural world granting Riefenstahl the ability to create the unnatural. She could obscure the pain of the athletes in favour of their impressive strength and could purposefully choose angles that altered emotional perception. Film granted Riefenstahl the ability to manipulate reality into her own spectacle, making her film a corruption of the natural world that posed as the truthful depiction of it. She presented a film that glorified the Germanic race while gaining credibility from her reliance on artistic tradition and easy support from a reliance on Germany’s canonization of prejudice and hatred.

Works Cited

Chapoutot, Johann, and Richard R. Nybakken. Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2016. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1f5g5m8. 

Graham, Cooper C. Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia. Scarecrow Press, 1986.

“Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympia.’” International Documentary Association, 3 Mar. 2020, http://www.documentary.org/column/leni-riefenstahls-olympia. 

Mackenzie, Michael. “From Athens to Berlin: The 1936 Olympics and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2003, pp. 302–36. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/374029. 

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl, 1938.

Sooke, Alastair. “The Discobolus: Greeks, Nazis and the Body Beautiful.” BBC Culture, BBC, 24 Feb. 2022, http://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150324-hitlers-idea-of-the-perfect-body.

“Statue: British Museum.” The British Museum, http://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1805-0703-43. 