Sapporo Winter Olympics

Director: Masashiro Shinoda, Masashiro Shinoda

1972 / 167min / Digital

Japanese New Wave master Shinoda (Pale Flower, Double Suicide), himself a long-distance runner who’d participated in the famous Hakone Ekiden race in university, brings a unique understanding of the athlete’s mentality to this, the official document of the XI Winter Olympics in Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, in 1972. Perhaps the most visually ravishing of all Olympic films, with Shinoda applying his customary avant-garde editing and unorthodox framings—in dynamic widescreen—to a subject that might be bogged down by officious reverence in lesser hands.