Of course it's easy to compare this movie to Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad movies, about the Olympic summer games in Berlin, of 1936 but there is also a very good reason to compare both ambitious projects, besides the fact that they share the same subject. Both are also being shot and told in a very similar way, with as of course big difference that this documentary is in color and filmed with more modern technologies.The documentary shows everything involving the Olympic games. From athletes preparing, to the crowds cheering for their favorites. Winners and losers, the ignition of the Olympic flame and the closing ceremony. But foremost it still focuses on the sports, for obvious reasons. It shows beautifully how it's being experienced and executed by the athletes. This is more than just a camera registration of the Olympics. It takes us to places no other camera's are ever allowed and shows us shots from multiple different angles and of things that are never shown on TV.It extensively shows a lot of the sports, some featured still more prominently than others. It's of course impossible to give all 163 events and 5,151 athletes from 93 different countries an equal amount of attention. But the movie manages to find a nice balance between the most important and popular sports and the more surprising and shocking moments of the 1964 Olympics. Basically each sport gets filmed and edited in a different stylish way but at all times the movie feels like one whole, that just flies by, even though it's quite a long one.And stylish is certainly a good word to describe this documentary as. Some of the sports are filmed simply beautifully and are absolutely captivating to watch. They even manage to at times build up a good tension, even though the outcomes of it are already known for almost 50 years by now. There are too many moments that stand out to name but I would nevertheless still like to mention the registration of the marathon, which got featured at the end of the documentary. It's also the sport that gets featured the longest and it's absolutely beautiful and special to watch. It also really makes you respect the athletes all the more.Like basically every Olympics some memorable and legendary events occurred during the games. Don Schollander winning 4 golden medals, Joe Frazier becoming the heavyweight boxing winner, Abebe Bikila winning the Olympic marathon for the second time, Anton Geesink become the very first Olympic open category judo champion, which was entire an Asian dominated sport at the time and many more memorable moments, which are all shown in an unique and beautiful way within this documentary.It's also fun to see how non of the sports have really changed over the years and how all of the athletes in this documentary show all of the same emotions and passion for their sport. Thing that changed the most are some of the country's flags, it seems.The entire documentary still feels pretty dark but as it turns out, the 1964 were also considered to be dark and cold at the time. In other words, the documentary simply does a great job at capturing the mood and atmosphere of its time and place.If I have to say still one real negative thing about this documentary it would be the fact that basically all of the sounds were obviously later added to the documentary. Athletes breathing, athletes running, athletes hitting a ball. All of the sounds come straight out of a studio, which just doesn't always sound natural enough. It's even somewhat comical and annoying at times, especially when the images and sounds don't really go together. It's weird hearing a crowed go ballistic while in the background the mostly Japanese spectators are all calmly sitting and watching.A real more than great and uniquely beautiful registration of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic summer games. A must-see for the lovers of sport and documentary film-making.8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Having watched this film for the first time only recently, it was striking to try to realize how much is forgotten about any given Olympic Games with the passage of time. Many of the names of athletes, including those of the USA, are simply forgotten. Bob Hayes, Billy Mills, Joe Frazier, Don Schollander were about the only American athletes on the 1964 Olympic team that were recognizable in this film.My view of this film is that it did not particularly energize me or inform me about the Tokyo Olympics. Many of the editing choices were not good, and it was not a film that would stand the test of time. Compared with the wonderful Olympic films by Bud Greenspan over the years (16 Days of Glory), this is clearly the product of a relative amateur. But this predates Greenspan's Olympic work, and for its time it was probably the most ambitious approach to filming such an enormous athletic event since Riefenstahl's work in Germany.Individual sequences that were particularly enjoyable were the close close-ups of the shot-putters and the hammer-throwers, the sprinters spiking their starting blocks into the cinder track, swimmers on the starting blocks just before the start, the amazing finishing sprint by American Billy Mills to win the 10,000 meter race (to this day one of the great singular Olympic moments).This film did not personalize the athletes--there was virtually no background provided about them, no personal story. The only portion that came close to that focused for a time on a young runner from Chad who, as was pointed out in the film, was at 22 much older than his country at the time. This was clearly the filmmaker's choice--to present an abstract vision of the Tokyo Games--but it somehow left me cold. To present the first Olympic Games held in Asia in such an impersonal, abstract way, seems like the incorrect choice of approach.Well, I've now seen this film once, probably will never watch it again--it brought back some memories of those Olympic Games, some nice photography. But in the end uninspiring & forgettable. Oh, yes, it rained a lot in Tokyo in October of 1964.

Seeing as how this dvd is almost 3 hours long I assumed that I could fast forward through some of it. I was wrong. As much as I tried, every new scene kept me glued to the screen. It's the Olympics like you've never seen them, shot and edited with the eye of a real artist. Once again Criterion brings us a lost masterpiece.

Kon Ichikawa's "Tokyo Olympiad," a record of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, is not only arguably one of the best sports documentaries ever made, it is also among the best documentaries ever made, period. It is everything one would expect from a man who is known as one of the premiere stylists of the cinema and more. It is poetry, it is art, and it is almost ruthlessly compelling.Whereas most sports documentaries are relatively cut and dry in that they focus mainly on the winners, Ichikawa has almost no regard for winning or losing at all. For him, it is about the event, the preparation and the movement embodied in Olympic competition - and the film follows both the winners and the losers. The film is incredibly textural. Sight, sound, and movement - even the most imperceptible - all weave together to form a remarkable tapestry that is as much about the director's own concerns as it is about the Games themselves. It is for this reason that the film initially had a rather stormy reception from those that had commissioned Ichikawa to make the film (and given him an army of cameramen to do so), though if my recollection is correct it went on to break box-office records in Japan. "Tokyo Olympiad" is not a film about the victory of winning, it is about the victory of attending - of being amongst the awesome crowds, the athletes, the bodies in motion. Being there is it's own victory, which is why Ichikawa focuses so much on the athletes from the newly formed African nation of Chad who, although they do not come close to winning any medals, are the first representatives of their country to appear in the Olympic Games. For Ichikawa their story is just as triumphant as that of the Ethiopian long-distance runner who unflinchingly leaves all his opponents in the dust and goes on to win his event by a mile. "Tokyo Olympiad" is not just about the realm of athletic or Olympic experience, it is about the human experience and about creating cinema out of it. At nearly 3 hours in length it is neither a minute too short or too long, and I personally feel privileged to have seen it.