Panasonic Pavilion


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Ito: That brings us back to Leni Riefenstahl and her films, which are emblematic of what you're talking about. For example, there is this sequence in Olympia: the ruins of the athletic stadium used for the ancient Olympic Games suddenly float up out of the fog, followed by the temples and statues of ancient Greece╤Achilles, Medusa, Zeus, Apollo and other gods and heroes╤and then a discus thrower metamorphoses into a real man of flesh and blood, who begins to swing the discus around in slow motion. The other statues also are transformed into living people, for example into dancers, and then the people become fire, and that fire is the Olympic flame that is then carried from the temple of Zeus to modern Berlin. I believe Riefenstahl placed great importance on that opening segment of her movie, that transition from ancient times to the present. Rather than recording the actual Olympic Games, her intention was to present a new myth to the 20th century through that intro, and for that myth to serve as the keynote of the whole film. The Olympic Games and athletes' bodies were important factors in this mythical new world she envisioned, and if you look carefully, you see how Jesse Owens, who won the 100-meter dash, and other athletes take on a mythical aura. She films the critical point of the human body, making it so perfect and beautiful that it is beyond physicality, in a special realm of its own. Ichikawa Kon's film, The Tokyo Olympics, did the same thing. Turning the body into an image in this way led ordinary people to the cult of the body. This body worship gave rise to changes in eroticism, with new erotic forms appearing as a result. For example, the classification into


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