Kon Ichikawa (1965)
Tokyo hasn’t been the luckiest of Olympic host cities. The Games scheduled for 2020 were delayed a year by Covid. After being awarded the 1940 Olympics, Tokyo had them taken away by the International OIympic Committee following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. (The 1940 Games didn’t happen anyway, of course, thanks to World War II.) The one time that things worked out as planned was 1964. There had always been a filmed record of sorts of the modern Olympic Games, from Athens 1896 onwards, but rarely was it artistically ambitious. The notorious exception was Olympia (1938) – Leni Riefenstahl’s version of the Berlin Games in 1936, a paean to Aryan endeavour and achievement. Although Romolo Marcellini’s 1960 Rome Olympics chronicle, La grande olimpiade (1961), was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar, Tokyo Olympiad enjoyed a speedier and bigger international circulation. The Games of the XVIIIth Olympiad, as well as being the first staged in Asia, also generated the first official Olympics film to be watched in cinemas worldwide[1].
I’d never seen Tokyo Olympiad until now and although I don’t recall passing up the chance to do so, I hadn’t sought it out. I had the idea that Kon Ichikawa’s much-admired film represented the dawn of poetry-in-motion sports action and felt the director therefore had a lot to answer for. I love and love watching the Olympics as the peak of international sporting competition, not for aestheticised images of the competitors. (It’s getting harder with every Games to enjoy straight replays of events – as distinct from reworkings of them into a supposedly more enthralling sequence of shots, complete with usually annoying musical accompaniment.) There is a lot of slo-mo in Tokyo Olympiad, and plenty more to delight film aficionados who aren’t sports fans, but there’s also a lot of competitive action played at the right speed. I was delighted by the detailed coverage of athletics events, especially by how well Ichikawa conveyed, obviously in abbreviated form, the long duration of some of them – the 10000m[2], the pole vault – going on so late in the evening that the stadium’s in virtual darkness.
The dominance of athletics over other sports in the film was fine by me, too. After Ichikawa’s introduction to the Games – from a wrecking ball hitting a semi-demolished building as construction of the Olympic Stadium gets underway, to the opening ceremony and lighting of the flame – track and field occupies the entire first half of Tokyo Olympiad, save for a gymnastics coda. The second half begins and ends with athletics also, in two otherwise very different episodes. The first, unlike any other in the film, concentrates on an individual athlete, Ahmed Issa of Chad. His country hadn’t previously been represented in the Olympics; one of just two Chadian competitors in Tokyo, Issa reached the semi-finals of the Men’s 800m, and is the main focus of sequences shot in the Olympic village. I think it’s the case that no sport included in the 1964 programme is entirely overlooked though some get only cursory coverage. There’s an increasing sense of Ichikawa making sure to include every discipline as a duty rather than a matter of personal choice so it’s all the more fortunate that the film’s climax is the Marathon.
Ichikawa portrays the Marathon as the apotheosis of effort on the part of Olympians – unique in the extremity of its physical demands yet, in essence, the epitome of what’s involved in preparing for competition in any Olympic event. The race is exciting to watch in several ways. The 1964 Tokyo Games were the first to be broadcast internationally by satellite although the pictures weren’t seen live across the world (as they would be for the Games in Mexico City four years later)[3]. In the 1960s and 1970s, most of a televised Marathon was shrouded in mystery. You saw the runners leave the stadium; for the next two hours, the commentators would every so often report on what they gathered was happening out on the road but nothing more was seen until the leader(s) approached the stadium for the final lap or two of the track. This made the event especially suspenseful; it also means that Ichikawa’s coverage of the middle parts of the Marathon – both the progress of the race and sponges-and-soft-drinks procedure on the streets of Tokyo – is a chance to look into sporting history you’d always assumed to be inaccessible. Even so, what happens in the Stadium at the end is amazing, too: the Ethiopian gold medallist Abebe Bikila doing callisthenics for the crowd to show he wasn’t tired; Britain’s Basil Heatley, who made up many places in the closing stages, sprinting past the Japanese Kokichi Tsuburaya in the last hundred metres to take the silver medal.
The race is shadowed by the tragedy of what happened to the principals subsequently. Bikila, who in Tokyo not only became the first man to win the Marathon in consecutive Games but also broke Heatley’s world record, had a car crash in 1969 which left him paralysed from the neck downwards. He died in 1973. Tsuburaya was mortified by – as he saw it – losing the silver, telling a teammate ‘I committed an inexcusable blunder in front of the Japanese people. I have to make amends by running and hoisting the Hinomaru [the Japanese national flag] in the next Olympics’. Tsuburaya committed suicide in January 1968, nine months before the Mexico Games began. Although his ‘inexcusable blunder’ didn’t cause him to take his own life, when his body was discovered he was reportedly holding his Olympic bronze medal[4]. Basil Heatley retired from athletics competition immediately after Tokyo but it seems that he had a longer and happier afterlife. Heatley died in his mid-eighties, in 2019.
I’ve not seen other films directed by Kon Ichikawa (1915-2008) over the course of his long career. If this had been the only one, it would have been enough. Tokyo Olympiad is so rich that I can’t do more than list a few examples of things that registered with me as filmic highlights and points of particular political-historical interest. The camera’s proximity to contestants across a range of sports is remarkable. As well as creating amazing images, Ichikawa also conveys extraordinary sounds, as feet and bodies make contact with the clay and cinder track in the Olympic stadium, or the gymnasium floor. It’s striking now to reflect that the Tokyo Games, a showcase for post-World War II Japan and source of national celebration and vindication for the hosts, took place at the height, or in the depths, of the Cold War. These being the first Games in Asia, the Olympic torch passed through an unprecedented series of locations en route from Greece. The parade of teams during the opening ceremony really is a march past – decidedly martial. West Germany and East Germany competed as a single team: their flag was the black, red and gold tricolour, white Olympics rings replacing the Imperial Eagle on the red band; the pan-German national anthem was Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. ‘God Save the Queen’ was still played in those days whenever Australia won gold.
As they would again in 2021, the 1964 host nation fared very well and finished third in the medal table. Even allowing for that, a bias in favour of showing Japanese successes, though not intrusive, is hard not to notice. It’s also entirely understandable. Most diehard Olympics fans will, if we’re honest, admit that what glues us to the Games is chiefly a desire to see our own country do well (this tends to be termed ‘patriotism’ but nationalism is nearer the mark). British viewers with long memories are well enough served by Tokyo Olympiad, thanks to its majoring in track and field. Britain did exceptionally well in athletics in 1964 – it yielded twelve of the country’s overall total of eighteen medals, including all four golds. There’s no sign here of Mary Rand or Ken Matthews but Lynn Davies and Ann Packer feature.
The coverage of Davies’s unexpected win in the Men’s Long Jump draws attention to a problem with the film, at least in terms of its English subtitling. It’s long been a gripe of sports fans in three of the four home nations that if an English athlete wins for GB they’ll be labelled ‘English’ by the English press and broadcast media but if a Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish athlete triumphs, they’re ‘British’. I’ve always thought the complaint largely unjustified and that the BBC, at least, bends over backwards not to be Anglocentric. So the continuing references to England rather than Britain in Tokyo Olympiad are a bit embarrassing – things get worse when Lynn Davies is described as Welsh but as having won a gold medal for England. (There’s a similar faux pas in the film’s brief swimming section: Bobby McGregor, aka the ‘Falkirk Flyer’, takes silver in the Men 100m Freestyle for England rather than Scotland.) The Ann Packer section is an unalloyed pleasure, however. The Women’s 800m final is the longest-distance track event to be shown in the film in its entirety. Ichikawa uses, here and throughout, what I assume are the original Japanese television commentaries: although the Japanese voice calling the race is highly animated, as Packer comes from nearly last to first in the final 200m, her triumph isn’t quite the same without David Coleman’s wonderful excitement on the soundtrack. But it’s still pretty good.
20 November 2021
[1] … albeit not everywhere in its entirety. According to Wikipedia, Tokyo Olympiad was first shown in Japan (in March 1965) with ‘its original 165-minute runtime and included an intermission … The film was released in the United States on 20 October 1965, in its edited format with a 93-minute runtime …’ BFI showed the full-length version at the screening this note is based on.
[2] Where this note doesn’t specify an event for ‘Men’ or ‘Women’, it means there was only a men’s version of it in 1964.
[3] Again according to Wikipedia, ‘The games were telecast to the United States …and from there to Europe … Total broadcast time of programs delivered via satellite was 5 hours 41 minutes in the United States, 12 hours 27 minutes in Europe, and 14 hours 18 minutes in Canada. … ‘
[4] Wikipedia again: ‘[Tsuburaya’s] suicide was an emotional reaction to the marriage of his longtime girlfriend, Eiko, to another man. Tsuburaya had wanted to marry Eiko, but his military bosses refused to consent to a marriage until after the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, and Eiko’s parents had been unwilling to have her wait to marry until after the Games’.
