Sweat, slow motion and solidarity
Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad in Ireland
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18996904 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Horgan (0000-0002-1056-928X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 164-172 |
| Publication date | 2012-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Visual Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1472-586X • E-ISSN: 1472-5878 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1472586x.2012.677265 |
| OpenAlex | W1975341526 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965) is widely recognised as one of the greatest Olympic films ever made, though it remains overshadowed by Riefenstahl's record of the 'Nazi Olympics', Berlin Olympia (1936). My father saw Tokyo Olympiad as a teenager in a provincial city in Ireland in the 1960s, and he credits it with inspiring him to become an athlete. This paper draws together my father's memories of seeing the film and the national context in which he saw it in light of wider critical commentary on Ichikawa's controversial film. Using two sequences in the film as examples – Abebe Bikila's gold medal marathon and Ranatunge Karunananda's 29th place finish in the 10,000 metres – I focus in particular on the ways in which Tokyo Olympiad works to transcend the patriotic nationalism that global sporting events tend to promulgate and, instead, asks viewers to construct imaginatively affinities that are humanist rather than nationalist. Notes [1] For example, across almost three dozen chapters, Raney and Bryant's (2006 Raney, Arthur and Bryant, Jennings, eds. 2006. Handbook of sports and media, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Google Scholar]) otherwise comprehensive Handbook of sports and media ignores the film entirely. More surprisingly, a recent issue of Sport in Society (2011) on memory and sport in Japan bears no mention whatsoever of Ichikawa's film. [2] Nichols' (2001 Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to documentary, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]) six modes of documentary practice are: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative. McDonald (2007 McDonald, Ian. 2007. Situating the sport documentary. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 31(3): 208–25. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) discusses the first four of these in relation to sports documentaries, and positions both Tokyo Olympiad and Berlin Olympia within the poetic mode. See Bruzzi (2000 Bruzzi, Stella. 2000. New documentary: A critical introduction, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) for a strong critique of Nichols' typology. [3] Barrett notes that humanism is a Western ideal derived from Christianity and so does not have a 'strong cultural equivalent' (1989, 78) in Japanese culture. Nonetheless, Ichikawa described himself as a humanist (Quandt 2001 Quandt, James. 2001. Kon Ichikawa, Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario. [Google Scholar], 328)
Humanism · Media studies · Nationalism · Olympiad · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |