Tokyo Olympiad: The Wind Passing Through the Flagpoles

An ideological project of the 1964 Olympic Games, which the film was expected to serve, involved establishing an image of a postwar, pacifist, and progressive “new Japan” to a skeptical world. The burgeoning economic power of the country, the willingness, even desire, to demolish the old and all it represented to achieve that transformation, were expressed in the momentous rebuilding of Tokyo and the construction of the Olympic venues, a physical transformation that also signaled a historical rewrite. Japan wished to remake itself in the eyes of the world two decades after the end of the Second World War and little more than a decade after the American occupation had ended. Tokyo Olympiad participates in this revisionism when its narrator slides over Japan’s role in the war that canceled two editions of the Olympic Games—noting that the country was not allowed to participate in the 1948 Games while eliding the reasons—but the film’s depiction of the renovated city simply refuses to celebrate. Ichikawa claimed that Tokyo was “the protagonist of the film,” but what little of the city he reveals appears to be still under construction or curiously nondescript. The American comedy Walk Don’t Run, a remake of The More the Merrier (and Cary Grant’s last film), and Chris Marker’s poetic “essay-portrait” The Koumiko Mystery, both set during the 1964 Olympic Games, give us far more of a sense of the “new Tokyo” than does Ichikawa’s film. And as for the sports venues, a member of the Japanese Olympic Organizing Committee complained, “The main defect in the movie lies in the absence of descriptions of the Olympic facilities such as those for yachting, canoeing, and rowing. Spectators of the film could not know where these competitions had been held.” Indeed, when Ichikawa pictures Lake Sagami, the site of the kayak and canoe races, he’s more interested in the visual possibilities of its diamond-bright surface, which he abstracts into a blaze of glittering splinters by blurring the image, and in the choreographed patterns made by the quartet of red-tipped sculling paddles that rise and fall in the water in meticulous unison.

In an amusing 1955 essay, “CinemaScope and Me,” Ichikawa recounts his forced conversion from his beloved squarish Academy ratio—familiar to him since he had seen his first film, Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid—to the new widescreen format that became the rage of the Japanese studios in the fifties. The director’s initial resistance quickly gave way to awe at this “sprawling monstrosity. I found myself filled with wonder again, like a child. This is why I love CinemaScope so unequivocally. It is, I think, a physiological response.” There are few directors who exploit the Scope frame with such daring and sophistication; witness the cavalcade of widescreen astonishments in An Actor’s Revenge or the precisely balanced compositions of his greatly underrated Ten Dark Women (1961). So it is in Tokyo Olympiad. A rare documentary made in Scope, it takes every opportunity to emphasize the expansive horizontal frame, from that striking study in volumetric contrast between the immensity of Mount Fuji and the tiny runner bearing the Olympic torch beneath it, to the decorous symmetry that positions two competing judo athletes at the left and right of the frame with an empty stage between them, as carefully aligned a composition as the one in Conflagration in which the master monk explains his failure of vocation to his deputy.

The arsenal of visual effects Ichikawa deploys in Tokyo Olympiad, including freeze-frames, smash cuts, montages of still photographs, image masking, temporal intercutting, rack focus, fragmented and disorienting close-ups (which turn wrestlers into an almost illegible tangle of flailing limbs), sudden transitions from color to black and white and back, shadow shots, disruptive zooms, slow motion, and associational edits—the famous rhyming of the blazing sun with the wrecking ball that opens the film, for instance—both imposes a modernist formalism on the documentary material and raises the issue of whether the film carries a discernible authorial signature. Many critics have argued that despite its many aesthetic experiments, Tokyo Olympiad remains, as a commissioned work of actuality involving an army of contributors, outside the classic Ichikawa oeuvre. But the intransigent auteurist finds everywhere in Olympiad the director’s penchant for the lone figure and determined outlier, familiar from such Ichikawa studies in isolation as Conflagration and Alone on the Pacific (1963), and his formalist eye for diagonals, especially in the tightly serried rows of athletes as they march into the stadium during the Opening Ceremony, and for repeated patterns of contour (here, the oblate and the circular).

Tokyo Olympiad also exhibits Ichikawa’s tone of wry detachment and his wicked, voyeuristic savoring of senescence, previously apparent in his comedy of geriatric eroticism, Odd Obsession (Kagi, 1959)—note the montage of older spectators, which fixes on wrinkles, age spots, and rheumy eyes, and, later, two cruel close-ups of men’s rippling chins and sagging gullets. The film’s wealth of odd or irreverent details—from a shot-put contestant’s elaborate, risible ritual of preparation to the bizarre close-up of a marksman’s cheek bulging into a bubble of flesh over the barrel of his rifle—may be partly attributable to Ichikawa’s wife and frequent scenarist, Natto Wada, who wrote some of the film’s narration. Wada’s caustic irony may also explain that moment after the heart-bruising sequence capturing the defeated Chadian runner eating his steak alone, in which the camera then roams the room to describe the food in the athletes’ cafeteria, its depiction of greasy, garishly colored dishes being shoveled into eager male maws anticipating the work of British photographer Martin Parr, that mischievous connoisseur of grim victuals.