Visions of Eight: Time and Motion

By Sam Lipsyte

Essays—

Jun 22, 2021

<em>Visions of Eight:</em> Time and Motion
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When I was a mediocre but devoted shot-putter in the middle of the 1980s, I loved to leaf through this huge Olympic Games photography book in my high-school library. The book covered the past few summer gatherings—Mexico City, Munich, Montreal, Moscow—and I would imagine the lives of these hippie-looking jocks, men and women from all over the world, with their long hair and extra-large Afros and flowing beards. From the vantage of the Reagan Revolution, they seemed sprung from some liberated, golden interregnum. They’d leapt past the crew-cut conformity of the postwar order and now existed in some sublime limbo of rude health and freedom, with no knowledge of the cultural and political clampdowns that would plague the lame decade to come. Here were the beautiful and strong doing revolution.

It was a silly projection, of course, as it’s clear now that the late sixties and seventies were no utopian picnic. There was the Cold War, for instance, playing out everywhere in horrible ways, especially in Eastern Europe and in the anticolonial struggles of Southeast Asia and Africa. There were Watergate and the ongoing fight for racial justice in America, the Cultural Revolution in China, energy crises. My notion was also misguided because I was assuming that a Greco-Roman wrestler with unkempt hair and muttonchops couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have voted for Richard Nixon. I was confusing style with politics. I didn’t know that Caitlyn Jenner, who appears in a few shots of the fascinating and weirdly revelatory Visions of Eight (1973) and appeared on my Wheaties box many childhood mornings, was a longtime Republican.

And yet, seeing all of the astonishing footage of young athletes in Visions of Eight, one does sense some new vibrancy in the air, and not just due to the multiethnic array of the planet’s most physically splendid humans hanging out, making new connections in their beads and sunglasses and bandannas, though that’s definitely got something to do with it. (Google “sex in the Olympic Village” and you will find numerous articles, stretching back years, about what has been repeatedly, if inadvertently, one of most erotically charged—and active—planned communities in history.) But there were other kinds of electricity in the air. While it’s hard, watching Visions of Eight, not to think of what’s about to happen—the attack on the Israeli team by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September—it’s also important, on a political level, to recall what had already occurred.

Only four years earlier, in Mexico City, John Carlos and Tommie Smith had galvanized the world with their Black Power salute on the medal stand, the most visible expression to that point of an activism that had been growing in elite athletic circles for a while. Some journalists have commented that jocks were historically hard to recruit for the movement because they were so inured to taking orders from Coach, but by 1972, after the examples of Smith and Carlos and of (former Olympic champion) Muhammad Ali’s principled stand against the Vietnam War, among other lesser-known protests, things had shifted enormously.

Speaking of taking orders from Coach, we sometimes forget one of the astonishing facts about the 1972 Munich Games, namely, that they were held in Munich in 1972. The last Olympic Games to be held in Germany had taken place in Berlin in 1936, and Munich, of course, was a cradle of Nazism, the city of the Beer Hall Putsch. Dachau had been erected on the outskirts of the city. As both Mai Zetterling and Miloš Forman highlight in the short films they contribute to Visions of Eight, the West German government was eager to replace the images that recent history conjured with more innocent tropes, including healthy injections of Bavarian kitsch via oompah bands. Cue the alpenhorns and yodelers!

“When you are going for a personal best, you had better be convinced you are about to achieve it. Doubt and iron, together, will crush you every time.”

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Forman’s study of the decathlon exploits this anxious emphasis on the lighter, or lederhosened, side of things to wry effect. As the segment slyly builds to a frenzy of sped-up film, brass horns, and dirndled cleavage, one half expects Benny Hill’s Teutonic doppelgänger to trot out in shorts and a singlet for the discus throw. A Czech orphaned by the Holocaust, Forman is perhaps not buying into Munich’s nervous efforts at rehabilitation, though his stance pivots for the 1,500-meter race, the final decathlon event. Here he couches the agonizing endeavor in a nobler brand of irony, enlisting Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to accompany quite moving shots of the world’s greatest athletes literally running themselves into the ground.

Visions of Eight
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Zetterling, a movie star (both in her native Sweden and the United Kingdom) turned director, also employs a dry humor, intercutting the toots and bellows of a uniformed band with the weight lifters she has chosen as her subject. She claims an interest in their obsession, their isolation, though some of my favorite moments are her portraits of intimacy—one lifter combing another’s hair, a friendly pat on a giant’s shoulder by that amazing mini-Adonis who frog-hops across the gym. Zetterling’s themes emerge as the visual threads start to braid: the martial music; the industrial trays of food required to fuel all of the athletes, including these clean-and-jerk machines (twenty-seven thousand kilos of veal!); the whirring computers tracking all the meat-in/meat-out data. But these curiously intense balloon men are not automatons, after all. Zetterling brilliantly captures the mental part of the proceedings. When the lifters fail, you can see it on their faces before they even touch the barbell. As anybody who has spent time with free weights knows, when you are going for a personal best, you had better be convinced you are about to achieve it. Doubt and iron, together, will crush you every time.

Some of these short films maintain a narrower focus to equally fascinating effect. Juri Ozerov’s The Beginning is in some ways the most predictable in its progression, but with some surprising flourishes along the way, including a sequence in the Olympic chapel, where athletes from countries as far-flung from one another as Malawi, Australia, and Great Britain pray together before competing in the Games, which were founded to foster world peace (sort of) but had become, long before 1972, an ideological battlefield. (For the record, the Soviets won the most medals in Munich, and East Germany beat West Germany, with both countries, as later reports have it, doping heavily.) We also get a montage of athletes of many different phenotypes and body types warming up, stretching (even the heavy dudes are stunningly limber), testing the wind with their fingers. In Ozerov’s ensuing explosion of action, we also flash on the man who would have remained the lead story if tragedy had not intervened: Mark Spitz, the American swimmer who won seven golds.

Arthur Penn’s deep dive into pole-vault aesthetics is an exploration first of focus and then of the fact that, when you film extremely fit people running at top speed in slow motion, the viewer can’t help but zero in on the ferocious flapping of cheeks (perhaps the only slack body part on these marvels). Slow motion, in fact, had been a Penn hallmark since the epic close of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, but a more pertinent point—given its use throughout Visions of Eight and every other depiction of athletic performance, and action in general, in the past fifty years—is the centrality of this one specific technique to the medium as a whole, and to our mind’s screen-trained eye.

Interestingly, while Penn lingers on the stark beauty achieved by changing our relationship to time and motion, a more traditional drama, nearly unacknowledged, unfolds on the ground. Defending Olympic champion Bob Seagren, an American, vies for gold against East German Wolfgang Nordwig. It’s a Cold War skirmish with an interesting twist, as Seagren was forced to use an unfamiliar substitute pole, after his own, a new model, was barred at the last minute. That’s what that weird, momentarily menacing confrontation with the official at the end is about, but for an auteur like Penn, this dispute is not really the point. The Highest is about men in flight, and the horrific twang of the crossbar as the slightest fold of jersey fabric brushes it off the standards.

Michael Pfleghar’s tribute to the women of the Games is a worthy contribution, though one could do without some of the slightly condescending cocktail-shaker music at the start. Hey ho, it’s the ladies! But we get past that quickly, and into some varied and compelling footage of top female athletes, including champion long jumper Heide Rosendahl, who helps illustrate, along with several others depicted in Visions of Eight, just how many Olympians actually used to compete in what appear to be everyday, run-of-the-mill eyeglasses. The Women ends with a powerful performance on the uneven bars by all-around-gymnastics gold medalist Lyudmila Turischeva. Watching it, you wonder why her teammate Olga Korbut got all the attention.

“The poignancy of botching it at the Olympic Games, after four years of sacrifice, is something many of us have probably imagined, with a shudder.”

Kon Ichikawa, the legendary director of Tokyo Olympiad (1965), proffers an odd but mesmerizing meditation on the men’s 100 meters, the winner of which is traditionally deemed the fastest man alive. Here we return to astonishing levels of slo-mo cheek fluttering, and a narrator intones my favorite snatch of voice-over in the entire movie as the runners barrel toward the camera, some heaving openmouthed: “Breathing. Are they or are they not breathing while running? It’s something medical science has yet to establish. It’s something they can’t even answer themselves.” Are we still waiting on studies for this one? Because to me it really looks like they’re breathing. 

Claude Lelouch tackles a topic after my own heart in The Losers. As Warren Oates memorably puts it in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, “Nobody loses all the time.” But the poignancy of botching it at the Olympic Games, after four years of sacrifice, is something many of us have probably imagined, with a shudder. In Lelouch’s film, one boxer cannot accept the result of his match and seems to be making an impassioned appeal to another reality to reverse life’s course. After that, it’s a cavalcade of disappointment, as a cyclist wipes out, swimmers bob forlornly in their lanes (how did you expect to win with that Viking beard dragging in the pool?), and contenders in the women’s javelin mourn their dreams after bad tosses. It’s the best half of the famous line in the intro for ABC’s Wide World of Sports—no “thrill of victory,” just “agony of defeat.” But eventually we move beyond mere sadness and self-flagellation as we watch an Iranian wrestler try to finish a match on a leg that is clearly torn to shreds, if not broken. Though he can’t even stand, he won’t surrender, and by the end everyone present appears profoundly moved by his stubborn spirit, especially his victorious opponent, who helps him stagger off the mat. Here, at last, is the brotherhood the Games were meant to engender.

But it can’t last, of course, and John Schlesinger’s The Longest, ostensibly a study of a British marathoner, is the only film that tries to absorb that darkest of incursions on the Olympic ideal, the attack in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and one West German police officer were killed. Schlesinger filmed Ronald Hill before the Games back in England as well as in Munich, and you can sense the witty and nuanced portrait he was after in tracking this monomaniacal chemist–cum–world-class marathon man. (Schlesinger would actually go on to direct Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman.) Without the tragedy, the film would have neatly captured the loneliness (and obtuse self-sufficiency) of this long-distance runner. But what becomes truly intriguing are the ways the final cut can and cannot handle the terrifying burdens of the moment. It makes for a strange, disturbing close to Visions of Eight, precisely as it should be.

If we are left with questions afterward, some of them might include mysteries about the legacy of this film. Why isn’t it more celebrated, or at least more known? Also, a lot of these directors were heavy hitters with reputations that still stand fifty years later. Don’t their experiments, their essays into the form and meaning of sport, deserve another look? It’s a shame the format was never repeated. Thinking up your own favorite roster of directors for a future Olympic Games would be a fun party game. Steven Soderbergh, Lucrecia Martel, Béla Tarr, Steve McQueen . . . The list would go on and on. For now, we have this intriguing document—eight memorable windows into the trials and tribulations of sports history’s grooviest cohort during a complex and painful twentieth-century inflection point.

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Sam Lipsyte is the author of four novels, including Hark, The Ask (New York Times Notable Book for 2010), Home Land (New York Times Notable Book for 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award), and The Subject Steve, as well as the short-story collections The Fun Parts and Venus Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, n+1, Harper’s, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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