Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
This impressionistic portrait of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics pays as much attention to the crowds and workers as it does to the actual competitive events. Highlights include an epic pole-vaulting match between West Germany and America, and the final marathon race through Tokyo's streets. Two athletes are highlighted: Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, who receives his second gold medal, and runner Ahamed Isa from Chad, representing a country younger than he is.
Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad is one of cinema's great sports documentaries, distinguished above all by its extraordinary cinematography. Ichikawa deployed an enormous crew with telephoto lenses and innovative angles to capture the human body in extremis, producing images of breathtaking beauty and intimacy — sweat, muscle, agony, and joy rendered with the eye of a painter. Its novelty remains high: rather than a triumphalist record of national glory, the film is a deeply humanist, impressionistic essay that lingers on laborers, spectators, and also-rans as much as gold medalists, giving it a singular voice among sports films. The structural 'plot' is episodic and associative, which is genuinely interesting but uneven in momentum. Acting is a non-category for a documentary; performers are athletes being themselves, so that score reflects the human drama captured rather than craft. The ending, focusing on cleanup crews and departing athletes, is quietly moving but somewhat low-key, not quite delivering a transcendent final statement.