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Visual Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2, June 2012

Sweat, slow motion and solidarity: Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiadin Ireland

MERVYN HORGAN

Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965) is widelyrecognised as one of the greatest Olympic films ever made,though it remains overshadowed by Riefenstahl’s record ofthe ‘Nazi Olympics’, Berlin Olympia (1936). My fathersaw Tokyo Olympiad as a teenager in a provincial city inIreland in the 1960s, and he credits it with inspiring him tobecome an athlete. This paper draws together my father’smemories of seeing the film and the national context inwhich he saw it in light of wider critical commentary onIchikawa’s controversial film. Using two sequences in thefilm as examples – Abebe Bikila’s gold medal marathonand Ranatunge Karunananda’s 29th place finish in the10,000 metres – I focus in particular on the ways in whichTokyo Olympiad works to transcend the patrioticnationalism that global sporting events tend to promulgateand, instead, asks viewers to construct imaginativelyaffinities that are humanist rather than nationalist.

INTRODUCTION

For as long as I can remember, I have known the nameAbebe Bikila (1932–1973). He is a legend of marathonrunning. In Rome in 1960 he became the first BlackAfrican in history to win an Olympic gold, a victorymade all the sweeter since he was representing Ethiopiawhere memory of the Mussolini-led Italo-Abyssinianwar (1935–6) was still strong. Iconically, he won thatgold running barefoot. Four years later, he went on towin a second gold for the marathon at the TokyoOlympics. Bikila’s name is remembered by those with aninterest in Olympic history and athletics; however, whilethese are good reasons for knowing his name, his featspredate my birth by over a decade. The reason I havealways known of Bikila is because I grew up listening tomy father talking about the film he skipped school towatch as a teenager, a film that he credits with inspiringhim to become a long-distance runner. That film wasTokyo Olympiad (1965), directed by Japanese filmmakerKon Ichikawa (1915–2008), one of the most criticallyacclaimed sports documentaries of all time.

Mervyn Horgan is Assistant Professor of Sociology and a member of the Graduate Faculty in Social and Political Thought at Acadia University, Canada. Hisresearch interests span cultural sociology, cosmopolitan studies, symbolic anthropology, urban studies and the sociology of everyday life.

The last athletic event covered in Ichikawa’s film is themarathon, and this coverage contains an extendedslow-motion sequence of the closing stages of Bikila’sgold medal winning run. I grew up listening to my fathertalk about this two-and-half-minute slow-motionsequence from a film that he saw only once almost half acentury ago. Clearly it is etched in his memory, andsubsequently in mine. We will return to this extendedslow-motion sequence later since it was responsible forgetting my father, as he put it, ‘hooked on distancerunning’. Though he was no Olympian, between the late1960s and early 1980s, my father enjoyed an amateurcareer as a relatively successful competitive long-distanceand cross-country runner in Ireland.

Tokyo Olympiad (hereafter, Tokyo) foregrounds themundane elements of an otherwise spectacular event, itfocuses less on the triumph of winners than it does ongiving a human character to all involved in the Olympics,whether as athletes, officials, volunteers or spectators.For these reasons, Tokyo is recognised as a masterpiece ofhumanist documentary film (Quandt 2001). While afilm may receive critical acclaim, as a sociologist I believethat it cannot be understood independently of thecontexts in which it is viewed. What interests me here,then, are the meanings and interpretations that might bederived from thinking about my father’s encounter withTokyo in light of both critical commentaries on the filmover the last half century and the specific context inwhich he viewed it. In this sense I wish to examine onepoint on what Wasson calls the ‘expansive horizon ofscreen-spectator encounters’ (2005, 37). This meansattending to the ways that my father’s experience weavestogether the viewing context with the film content. I willbegin by sketching out the broad social and historicalcontext in which my father saw the film, and thenproceed to discuss commentary on and analysis of Tokyoby situating it within the traditions of sportsdocumentary and Olympic films. Finally, I will turn tomy father’s encounter, which I position at theintersection between an important and unique work ofhumanist documentary and Ireland of the 1960s.

ISSN 1472-586X printed/ISSN 1472-5878 online/12/020164-9 © 2012 International Visual Sociology Association

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2012.677265

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Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad in Ireland 165

FIGURE 1. Official poster of the 1964 Olympics. Reproduced courtesy of the International Olympic Committee.

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CORK, IRELAND, 1966

On the day I went to see the film it was aWednesday and we had a half day from School. . . the half day was a break from academicstudies and we were supposed to go to thesports field to participate in ‘games’, but theonly organised ‘games’ played in our school atthe time was just one game, namely hurling.So [my friend] and I decided to give the games askip and ‘escape’ to the Savoy Cinema. Needlessto say the following day when we returned toschool we were in a spot of bother. When wetold our master that we were at the picture henearly flipped. Luckily before he decided to takeaction he asked us what film did we go to see.When we told him Tokyo Olympiad, much toour relief a transformation came over him. Allof a sudden he was asking us about it, and askedus to tell the class about it. I think we must haveconvinced others to go also . . . At that time,even though I was probably 16 or 17 years ofage I had seen very few movies. I had seen TheTen Commandments, my first cinemaexperience at the age of about 12 with mymother. The other movies were mostly cowboyfilms and Laurel and Hardy . . . Tokyo Olympiadwas something else. It was the first sports filmthat I had ever seen. You got the impression andthe feeling that you were there in the thick ofthe action. (Interview, 2011)

This was the autumn of 1966, the Savoy Cinema, one ofhalf a dozen or so single screen theatres in Cork city atthe time. 1966 was the year that my father’s familybought a television. It was also the 50th anniversary ofthe 1916 Easter Rising, taken to be the pivotal moment inIrish history, which set in motion a chain of events thatwould lead to the creation of the Republic of Ireland in1922 and the ensuing civil war. Additionally, 1966 isprior to the escalation of armed conflict in NorthernIreland that would come to define Irish politics from the1970s through to the late 1990s.

On the national scene, Cork city in 1966 was the secondcity of the Irish Republic, overshadowed by Dublin interms of its centrality as a political, economic andcultural centre. Bearing its mark as a provincial city in acountry that was still primarily agricultural andhomogenous, Cork was conservative and quite parochial.Like most of the Republic, it was strongly Catholic, andclergy dominated many aspects of the daily life ofchildren. In line with this, my father, like many boys ofhis generation, was educated primarily by ChristianBrothers in a strict and tightly controlled schoolingregimen that combined academics and physical activity.Any of his school sanctioned sporting involvements atthat time would have been largely limited to Gaelic

games, sports explicitly connected to Irish patriotismand the nationalist project (Cronin 1999). That myfather skipped sports practice without reprisal in anotherwise punitive schooling environment suggestssomething of the peculiar appeal of this film. While thespecific national and local historical context in which myfather saw the film bears on my analysis, that contextoperates relatively independently of the film’s content,critical reception and analysis by scholars.

THE OLYMPIC DOCUMENTARY: THE LEGACY OFBERLIN OLYMPIA

Berlin Olympia (hereafter Berlin) is an importanthistorical document of the most notorious Olympics todate. As McDonald notes, Berlin ‘continues to cast alarge shadow over the sub-genre of sport documentaryfilm’ (2008, 302). Riefenstahl’s film is generally cast as aterrifying masterpiece, a piece of fascist propaganda thatexplicitly uses sports coverage for political ends. Whilethere is an extensive literature on the aesthetics andpolitics of Riefenstahl’s Olympia (see, most notably,Sontag 1991), a lot less scholarly attention has been givento Tokyo: Tokyo is rarely discussed without reference toBerlin.1

In comparative work on these two films, most scholarsemphasise that despite their common subject matter, thedifferences between the two films are near absolute(Vaughan 1999; McDonald 2008). Vaughan, for example,offers a careful analysis and comparison of Berlin andTokyo, demonstrating how Riefenstahl spectacularisesevents by using camera angles and slow motion todisplay the power and strength of competitors, to makethem appear larger-than-life. Spectators are treated as alargely undifferentiated mass, save for their partisanshiptethered explicitly to the successes of their countrymenand women. Tokyo, on the other hand, operates in adifferent register entirely, humanising athletes anddrawing attention to mundane elements of the everydaylives of competitors, spectators and officials throughoutthe event.

Not all scholars agree that the filmsshare only an association with the Olympics. Downing(1992) notes that Berlin and Tokyo are the only twoOlympic films to diverge from the dominant style; wheremost are simply highlight reels of the games bookendedby the opening and closing ceremonies, these twofilms offer more aestheticised representations of events.Drawing on Nichols’ (2001) modes of documentarypractice, McDonald has noted that both films workwithin the poetic mode, ‘characterized by an expressiverather than an argumentative logic’ (2007, 211),offering aestheticised representations of the real, rather

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than seeking direct and accurate accounts of events.2

Consequently, ‘familiar assumptions about sportingpractices and settings are disrupted and deconstructed,and the audience is left with the beautiful, bizarre,and barbaric nature of modern sport’ (ibid.). Suchdocumentaries ask the audience to encounter somethingthat they may be familiar with in new ways, often throughstrange or jarring juxtapositions of sound and image.

Clearly, aesthetics are not politically neutral; they can beas easily fascistic and aggrandising as humanistic andhumanising. Along these lines, anthropologist Martinezsuggests that the very different political contexts inwhich Berlin and Tokyo were made have led to verydifferent interpretations of their meanings and legacies,differences that ignore ‘the intense intertextualrelationship [that Ichikawa’s film shares] with the visual,narrative, techniques of the Riefenstahl film’ (2009, 817),noting of Tokyo, that ‘many, mainly western, scholarshappily ignore the politics in his film, or read them asbenign and powerful invocations of good human globalvalues, when exactly the same visual tropes are damnedin the case of Riefenstahl’s work’ (819). Martinez’scritique sets aside entirely the question of viewingcontext. Because Tokyo is also an Olympic film,Ichikawa’s subject matter and visual presentation willinevitably overlap in some ways with Riefenstahl’s.In Tokyo, they are reframed in a way that implicitlycounters elements of the former’s nationalist ideology,albeit in a Japanese context. Consequently, it would bedifficult to argue that Tokyo is equally jingoistic to Berlin.As McDonald says, ‘Ichikawa provided the necessaryhumanistic corrective to this fascistic rendering of theOlympic Games and of the ideals of Olympism’ (2008,

303). Where Berlin is propaganda for Nazism, Tokyo ispropaganda for Olympism.

I do not wish to add much more to the relatively smallbody of comparative work on the aesthetics of the twofilms here but I do want to suggest that, while theproduction of any film purporting to represent an eventon the scale of the Olympics cannot be understoodindependently of its embeddedness in historicallyspecific social and political milieu, these cannotovershadow or determine the context in which the film isviewed and interpreted by audiences. This latter appearsto me to be an important domain for social scientists toinvestigate, especially given that despite the film’s criticalacclaim, Tokyo has received scant attention from socialscientists (save for work by Martinez and McDonalddiscussed above). While this paper cannot claim tocorrect this oversight, it does offer a particular kind ofcontribution to thinking about Ichikawa’s film, the socialmeanings that viewers in different contexts might drawfrom it and the kinds of engagement that itpotentiated.

The context of spectatorship is central to framing thesocial meanings that viewers can and do derive fromfilms. While I agree with McDonald’s claim thatwell-made sport documentaries can make it ‘impossibleto separate the sporting content, the social context andthe documentary aesthetic’ (2007, 222), it does beg thequestion as to what we can make of the viewing context.Is this to be reduced to a mute variable or can we thickenthe connections to be made between context ofproduction, film content and context of reception atspecific sites? The humanistic values for which Tokyo has

FIGURE 2. Ceylon’s Ranatunge Karunananda on the home straight in the 10,000 metres. From Tokyo Olympiad. Reproduced courtesy of the International OlympicCommittee.

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FIGURE 3. Still from the slow-motion sequence of Abebe Bikila’s marathon. From Tokyo Olympiad. Reproduced courtesy of the International Olympic Committee.

been widely praised – Martinez’s pointed and importantcritique notwithstanding – are best understood not onlyby careful scene analysis and elaboration of thesocio-political context of filming alone, but, in line withan interpretive sociological approach, should becomplemented by amplification of the film’s reception atspecific sites and by specific audiences. By way ofreturning to my father’s encounter with Tokyo, I shallelaborate on some elements of the film and its widerreception in the mid-1960s.

TOKYO OLYMPIAD AND HUMANISTDOCUMENTARY

Setting aside the complex entanglements that the legacyof the Nazi Olympics bring to any documentaryrepresentations of subsequent Olympics, it is importantto note that Ichikawa’s film was mired in controversy atthe time of its release in Japan precisely because it didnot engage in the kind of nationalist triumphalism forwhich Berlin is now routinely critiqued. As has been welldocumented (Masumoto and MacDonald 1997; Quandt2001), Tokyo was criticised by prominent politicians inJapan for failing to showcase Japan in a clear way. TheJapanese Athletic Federation was unhappy with the film’sradical departure from the more standard mode ofsports coverage, where events are covered in line withconventions (Becker 1982), that is, with winners andlosers duly logged and the narrative driven by the spiritof competition. While there are some cursory nods thatlikely appealed to politicians and organisers alike, such asimages of demolition and new construction for theOlympics, and visually stunning images of the rising sun,the film frustrated the Japanese political establishment

since it did not plainly highlight and promote Japan’sre-emergence in the wake of the Second World War andits elevation amongst modernised nations.

The initial hesitation of Olympic officials was likelyassuaged by the overwhelmingly positive reaction of theJapanese public to the film (Cazdyn et al. 2001). OutsideJapan, the film won a critics award at the Cannes FilmFestival and a best film award at the somewhat lessprestigious Cork Film Festival (Organizing Committeefor the Games of the XVIII Olympiad Tokyo 1966, 484).More than Cannes, the latter award may have accountedfor some of the local hype around the film when myfather saw it.

Tokyo is significant as a visual document of the 1964Olympics for many reasons; chief among them isIchikawa’s decision to depart radically from conventionsfor the visual representation of sporting events. Bockcalls the film ‘deeply moving’ and claims it is ‘one of thefirst sports documentaries to favour people’s feelingsover the simple recording of events’ (2001, 38). The filmdoes not glorify individual athletes, the distinctpersonalities of champions, the triumph of winners andthe pain of losers. While all of these sorts ofrepresentations are present in the film, none of them isgiven special place. Similarly focused on the film’shumanism, Cazdyn et al. note ‘the constant spotlightingof the banal within the spectacle of the Olympics’ (2001,330). Throughout, the images counter the viewer’sexpectations, for example, a dozing official or acompetitor casually eating lunch alone. Or, in a morepoignant example, extended coverage of the last placedathlete in the 10,000 metres, Ranatunge Karunanandafrom newly independent Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

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FIGURE 4. Still from the slow-motion sequence of Abebe Bikila’s marathon. From Tokyo Olympiad. Reproduced courtesy of the International Olympic Committee.

Despite being lapped several times until he is the onlyone still running, Karunananda continues his race andIchikawa follows his lonely progress for the entirety ofhis final lap, up to and including his sprint finish to placean otherwise instantly forgettable 29th. This remains oneof the most affecting scenes in the film, compelling towatch precisely because it jolts expectations and drawsout the viewer’s affinity with the athlete. That Ichikawadedicates time to such athletes in the film speaks stronglyto the humanist compulsion towards the generation ofsolidarity by cultivating identification and recognitionwith all comers.

Without doubt, Ichikawa’s visual language is organisedaround a humanist vision of film and of the Olympics,and this fits well within the Japanese context.3 It is notwithout relevance that a humanist visual culture enjoyedrapid rise in the post-Second World War era (Hamilton1997). While the fight to win is absolute and singular, thestruggle to complete is relative and general. It isaccessible to and comprehensible by all. Ichikawa’sstrategy is to stray away from a positivistic recounting offacts or the now well-stretched belief in the primacy of aGod’s-eye objective worldview, instead seeking toelaborate forms of consciousness and representation thatmake clear our shared existential predicament, and byimplication, the responsibility of selves to others. Thisrequires the recasting of the Olympics not ascompetition, but as a human event rather than simply anathletic one.

In light of the above, the film’s humanism can beunderstood as the conduit through which I can begin tomake some sense of my father’s encounter as a teenagerin the mid-1960s. To connect the above discussion ofhumanism with my father’s encounter, I want to returnto the slow-motion scene of Abebe Bikila, thus

elaborating what Hansen calls the ‘interpretive,intersubjective dimension’ (1994, 323) of viewing.

SLOW MOTION, SWEAT AND SUBTLE SOLIDARITIES

The part of the scene from the Marathon that Ican still vividly remember is the slow motionscene. I think the whole idea of slow motion wasnew at the time. It certainly was to me as I hadnever seen anything like it. The scene seemed togo on for ages. You could see the close up ofBikila’s face. The beads of sweat dropping fromhis chin in slow motion. The serene calmrelaxation on his face. It was almost as if thewhole run was effortless to him . . . From thatmoment on I was hooked on distance running. . . when I was out on my own on long trainingruns, that Bikila slow motion scene oftenflashed through my mind. (Interview, 2011)

The English language version of Tokyo Olympiad clocksin at 170 minutes. The marathon coverage alone lastsalmost 25 minutes and continues in the mould of the restof the film, juxtaposing conventional representations ofathleticism with the quixotic; spending time on quirkyinteractions between competitors and officials, the chaosof the watering stations, athletes stopping to urinate, andbattered and blistered feet. The slow-motion sequence ofBikila is over two and half minutes long. It begins with ahead on shot showing that he is alone with no one insight behind him, then cuts to the movement of his legs,before spending a full minute and a half on his face inprofile. This is the scene that my father has oftendescribed, scarcely two minutes of film etched forever inhis imagination. In Bikila’s face, we do not see the lookof determination that has become the cliché of sportsfilm, but rather he appears to be in a meditative state,

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FIGURES 5–7. Stills from the slow-motion sequence of Abebe Bikila’s marathon. From Tokyo Olympiad. Reproduced courtesy of the International OlympicCommittee.

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Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad in Ireland 171

clearing moving quickly but with the kind of composurethat most world-class marathon runners share. There is asort of stillness to his movement, and the slow motionserves to magnify the beads of sweat that drip nearrhythmically from his chin.

In athletics coverage more generally, slow motion isusually reserved for events characterised by high speedand brevity. Given that marathons are over two hourslong, extensive use of slow motion is unexpected, andbecause it is in slow motion, the sequence appears to bemuch longer than it is. Russell notes that Ichikawa’s useof slow motion throughout ‘serves to deflate thecompetitive grandiose quality that pervades mostOlympic coverage’ (in Cazdyn et al. 2001, 328). Writingabout the Bikila sequence in particular, Vaughan showshow Ichikawa (unlike Riefenstahl) uses slow motion tobring the viewer’s experience of the film closer to ‘therunners’ subjective timescale . . . [than] the hurly-burlyof normal pace’ (1999, 101). Where Berlin is populatedby the superhuman, the God-like, the different-than-I,Tokyo is populated by the human, the earthly, theothers-like-me. Russell, on the other hand, places theBikila sequence ‘within a limited ethnographic paradigmof Othering’ (in Cazdyn et al. 2001, 329). Drawing onmy father’s account of his experience, I want to concludeby arguing – contra Russell – that the scene effaces thedistance – or Othering – that the aestheticisation ofbodies generally produces, and instead places the viewerdirectly with Bikila.

Unlike Olympic films more generally, in Tokyo theexclusivity of national belonging is noted buttranscended. Where Berlin called out to the viewer forvertical affinities, asserting hierarchical arrangementsthrough triumph over others, placing some competitorsover and others under, Tokyo asks for horizontal affinity,focused on commonality, where all endure and enjoy themundane, and share joy and pain. Some viewers willrecognise a particular athlete’s nationality, but no one isprecluded from identification with that athlete. Forexample, my father was initially interested in themarathon because an Irish athlete, Jim Hogan, wasrunning. Nonetheless, in watching the film, my father’ssense of affinity was more with Bikila than with hiscountryman. In many ways, Tokyo undermines themediating force of national affiliation. Here, origin, evenwhen recognised, is suspended and belonging isde-hierarchicalised so that the viewer is asked to haveaffinities that are general and human rather thannational and particular. Thus, my father’s encounterwith Bikila was unmediated by the patriotic affiliationsthat most global sporting events promulgate.

Film is a paradoxical medium that simultaneouslycreates distance and proximity between subject andviewer. By extending distance and intensifying proximity,the realist anchoring of documentary film heightens theparadox. The Olympic film can add an extra layer to thisthrough the generation of patriotic identification withfellow citizens. In Tokyo though, rooting for an athleteon the basis of national belonging alone is set aside. Thevisual language employed by Ichikawa and thetechniques he uses to draw out a humanisticidentification with Abebe Bikila provided an absorbingvisual mediation between the particularity of myfather’s context of viewing and his sense of wideraffinities in the world. The key in Tokyo is that the filmbrings the viewer to treat national, racial or ethnicdifference as relative rather than absolute. In this sense,the film motions towards the cultivation of acosmopolitan imagination. Bikila’s racial and nationaldifference from my father makes the encounterproto-cosmopolitan, and it is their sameness, their sweat,that makes it humanist.

Vaughan suggests that the Bikila sequence acts ‘like abeautiful work of calligraphy, an object of contemplationin its own right’ (1999, 107). The sequence, like the filmmore broadly, speaks to an inherent and assumed ‘we’,forging some sense of global solidarity through a simplevisual language that resists the impulse towardstriumphalism and competitive hierarchicalisation. Itsimultaneously aestheticizes the ordinary and makes theextraordinary – world-class athleticism – into theeveryday. Consequently, the Olympics become arelatively mundane but nonetheless compelling affair.As global sporting events become grander in scale andwith the obligatory hyperbole that accompanies theirincreasingly extensive commercialisation, revisiting thescene from Bikila might slow us down, and bring us toconsider the extent to which the Olympics humanistaspirations are becoming illusory.

NOTES

[1] For example, across almost three dozen chapters, Raney

and Bryant’s (2006) 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) six modes of documentary practice are:

poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive

and performative. McDonald (2007) discusses the first

four of these in relation to sports documentaries, and

positions both Tokyo Olympiad and Berlin Olympia within

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the poetic mode. See Bruzzi (2000) 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,

328).

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