Visions of Eight

What an incredibly lame documentary. Seven of the eight film makers would have you believe that this particular Olympics was notable for...pole vaulting! Or weight lifting! Only John Schlesinger, to his eternal credit, deals with the 800 lb terrorist in the room. It's as if a team of reporters were covering the unveiling of a new built bridge and in the middle of their coverage the bridge collapses and all but one reporter blithely ignore it.. Simply amazing. And depressing. C minus.

Eight filmmakers are tasked with capturing the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. The first seven segments have these filmmakers do their artistic efforts with the games. It's a lot of close-ups and slow-motion. It's not always the most compelling. Some are more interesting visually than others. I'm not expecting a wall-to-wall documentary about the terrorist disruption especially considering the probable involvement of the IOC. John Schlesinger's last segment does tackle the elephant in the room but mostly as the backdrop affecting the marathon runners. The race is delayed and they have to keep their mind on the competition. It's not the biggest swing but the terrorism is too big to ignore. In the end, the film has to stay on course and put the ugliness behind it instead of facing it head-on.

The summary at the introduction says it all: 'it's not a summary of sports'. This is the kind of production that is willing to rewrite, rather reinvent, the shape of sports docummentaries. Far from the focus on results of the almanac-format production, this new vision of the tension of obsession, of the muscle stress, of the jump of joy, of the tears of defeat and, in short, the beauty of the design sports can provide, brings us the Expressionist angle the Olympics hides in the shadows of the action that TV images will never be able to catch. More than a masterpiece, each of the eight episodes should be treated as a directing class.

The 1972 Summer Olympic Games, in many ways, were the end of an era. Since 1936, the IOC had required each Local Organizing Committee to submit a documentary film as an historical record of their Games. After Munich, less emphasis was placed upon this and more upon Bud Greenspan's independent efforts. Only one-eighth of this film was directed by a West German; today, an American helms them all.

Munich '72 was the last occasion on which Olympic security could be said to be at all relaxed. The face of terrorism, at least before 9/11, bears the stocking mask of the Black September lookout at 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village. John Schlesinger of "Midnight Cowboy" fame, assigned to film a British marathon runner, incorporates the tragedy into his mini-film as a distraction to the absurdly detached athlete.

After 1936 they all were imitating Leni Riefenstahl. Here, Japanese director Kon Ichikawa, filming his second Olympics, rings a change on the German's pioneering use of slow motion, using three dozen Arriflexes and four miles of film to turn the 100-meter dash into a quarter-hour examination of tortured lungs and leg muscles.

Producer David Wolper's take on this film was that it could have been better and was greatly improved in the editing room. The same could be said of any slice-of-life documentary, sporting or otherwise. The voice-over narrator sounds a lot like David Perry, who would soon become ubiquitous as Bud Greenspan's offscreen announcer. For almost the final time, feature directors got to play documentarian all those years ago.

If you're looking for a traditional, narrative, and episodic type of documentary replete with featured interviews, you won't find it here. It's not truly about the 1972 Olympics; the Olympics is more of a venue. This is a somewhat eclectic experiment that results in an often incohesive, mixed bag of hits and misses.

If you're a historian, professor, or student of film, or if you're perhaps a professional cinematographer, you'll probably take a lot more away from this than the rest of us. Eight different segments created by eight different artists bring eight different viewpoints and voices of what fascinates them about the Olympics. Some segments are captivating; others feel like throwaways.

It begins to feel laborious around the 60-minute mark, but then a segment entitled The Losers livens things up a bit. But from there, it starts to drag again. With a running time of approximately 100 minutes, it's too long.

You've got to be a true film buff to sit through it start to finish.