Directors Arnold Fanck and Othmar Gurtner offer a film about the 1928 Olympic games in St. Moritz.
The basics of shooting winter sports were established by Peter Elfert more than twenty years before this film was produced, and you can see it in the framing of various events. Confronted with a certain monotony of such images, and the difficulty of making snow visually appealing, the four cameramen shot in a constant variety of focal lengths, and Fanck and Walter Ruttman kept to a lively pace of editing, as well as a variety of undercranking and overcranking to show details of movement and increase excitement. These techniques keep the film constantly interesting: the close-ups of the competitors to show their concentration; the long shots to show them facing their challenges alone. Given the established shooting techniques, it is not much of an exaggeration to write that it's the editing that makes this film still excellent almost a century later.
