Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.
Riefenstahl's second Olympia film continues her revolutionary cinematic vision of athletic competition, with groundbreaking cinematography that established techniques still used today — low angles, slow motion, tracking shots that celebrate the human body in motion. The visual language is genuinely exceptional and historically transformative for documentary filmmaking. Novelty is high because Riefenstahl's synthesis of aesthetics, athleticism, and film craft remains singular and unmistakable, whatever the ideological context. However, the 'plot' structure (insofar as a sports documentary has one) is episodic and loosely organized across disparate events, making narrative coherence weak. Acting is largely irrelevant as a documentary, scored low accordingly. The ending lacks dramatic resolution compared to the first part's climactic marathon sequence, feeling more like a montage wind-down than a satisfying conclusion.