The Olympics in Mexico
BY
Geoff Dyer
On a particularly artistic depiction of a historic year of Olympic games.
The Olympics In Mexico plays 7 Ludlow on Sunday, July 21st as part of Art Cinema, Olympiad, and the World.
Harmony! More exactly, harmony in competition: the more intense the comp the greater the harm… Hmm, that abbreviation doesn’t quite work, though as will become apparent, it is not inappropriate.
Director Alberto Isaac begins The Olympics in Mexico (1969), the former swimmer’s Oscar-nominated documentary, with a deliciously long slo-mo sequence of a female athlete ascending the steps to light the Olympic flame. Two things about that. I’m 66 now and I still love the Olympic flame and I still love slo-mo. Slo-mo anything really. Roger Federer’s backhand, the shoot-out at the end of The Wild Bunch (1969), villages getting napalmed in Vietnam—slo-mo renders everything beautiful. You wonder why the world wasn’t created in slo-mo. Maybe it’s especially lovely in the context of the Olympics where the idea is always to go faster (higher, further etc.). Unless there’s some niche event I’ve missed, no one is ever awarded a medal for slowness. The appeal of the speed-in-slo-mo paradox is that so much is going on, so quickly, it can only be fully appreciated when slowed down.
The slo-mo here is especially seductive because of the harmonious color palette: mauve (the color of the track), pink and purple with avocado greens, soft pinks, pastel yellows and sudden bright blooms of red. Even the high-altitude sky turns a pleasant shade of bruise before erupting into a drenching storm during the women’s 100 meters. As part of the opening ceremony a flock of birds is released into that sky in an attempt, presumably, to symbolize peace, but this produces instead a discordant, nightmarish echo of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).
Another less than harmonious quality in Isaac’s film comes from the sound. In addition to the thrillerish score, there’s the sound of feet hitting the ground, balls being kicked, objects (discuss, putts, javelins) landing, and bodies bashing into each other but these are amplified, distorted or maybe just added effects so that it all seem—sounds—fake. Adding subtracts from the total effect. Who needs splashy audio fakery during a particularly malevolent water polo match in which it seems the idea is not to score goals but to drown your opponent in some of the most visually appealing turquoise water ever caught on film? That’s a fun sequence and the viewer, by this point, is starting to locate his or her experience in the Koyaanisqatsti (1982) or Baraka (1992) realm of films best watched stoned: higher to put it in Olympic-speak. The idea in such excursions is to lull the viewer into not missing a paucity of narrative propulsion, to just bask in luxuriant cinematography.
The Olympics in Mexico (1969)
The problem is that except for sports such as gymnastics where display is an end in itself, narrative—who will get to the finishing line first?—is an essential part of the experience. So while you’re tripping out on the whole Antonioniesque color scheme you’re also getting another aspect of the Antonioni experience: boredom. In spite—and possibly because—of the slo-mo you’re (Greco-Roman) wrestling with the urge to fast forward to the good bits.
We all know what those good bits were in Mexico ’68: Dick Fosbury flopping over the bar in the high jump, Bob Beamon almost jumping out of the pit to shatter the world long-jump record (rendered curiously in the commentary as “the broad jump”)… Actually, world records were being broken all over the place because this, of course, was the heyday of doping when plenty of competitors were, in the words of the song, so full of pills that they rattled.
That’s one aspect of the harm mentioned earlier. The other involves the biggest moment in the Games. Beamon’s and Fosbury’s were, let’s say, bronze and silver moments but the gold medal in Mexico 1968 went to Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their Black Power salutes. A certain amount of narrative suspense is hereby injected into proceedings. Will this iconic moment be shown? If so, won’t it disrupt the all-encompassing ideal of harmony? Well, it is shown, but without explanation or comment. We zoom in on a black glove against a blurred background of emerald-green grass. The willful triumph—if one can allow a little Riefenstahlian allusion here—of aesthetics over politics! “Where’s the harm in that?” one may ask. There is none, if you assume that the Coca-Cola ideal of teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony—rather than freedom from the realm of necessity or whatever—represents the endpoint of political struggle and le cinéma engagé.
Still, even though you’ve sofa-slumped into a state of almost total torpor, the sequence of an injured Tanzanian runner—even his bandages look like they need bandaging!—hobbling through the heat of the night into an emptying stadium at the end of both the marathon and the film is impossible to resist. That’s the thing about the Olympics. The speech at the closing ceremony when a blazered official calls on the youth of the world to gather again in four years always has an undimmable power. You hear those words and you believe in the Olympic ideal. As the flame in Mexico is extinguished you look forward to it being lit again, this time in Paris.
Geoff Dyer’s most recent book is The Last Days of Roger Federer; Homework, a memoir, will be published by FSG next year.
The Olympics in Mexico (1969)
