Tokyo Olympics

[anne mcknight]

I was wondering if anyone has read anything about the production history of
Ichikawa Kon's Tokyo Olympics, documenting the 1964 games. Watching it
again, it struck me how 'yearbook-like' the structure was, and how devoted
it was to the kinds of seriality that archives are typically interested in,
rather than the kind of narratives that documentary film-goers are typically
interested in. For instance, in the beginning, the film's VO goes rather
interminably through EVERY Olympic locale since 1896, anthologizing the list
in the manner of an archive, not the zippy story-telling fashion of a 90-min
doc. 

I like Yoshikuni Igarashi's piece on the Tokyo O, that locates it in various
hygiene movements of the postwar--cleanups of Tokyo, monitoring of athletes'
bodily functions, and so on. But I was rather intrigued by the seriality,
the anthologizing impulse of the film. Does anyone have any insights into
this it was funded by the Japan Olympics Committee, and I'm not sure they
envisioned anyone actually seeing this on the big screen...or WERE people so
used to watching newsreels and so on, that they could deal with this kind of
endlessness...
Thanks for any speculations.
Anne