Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1938 • Germany
More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history. In part two of OLYMPIA, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon. Despite the film's fascist origins, OLYMPIA has achieved a certain respectability and endures as a monument of cinema, and of a malevolent ideology.
Up Next in Women Make Film
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La Pointe Courte
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1955 • France
Starring Silvia Monfort, Philippe NoiretThe great Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complic...
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Three Cases of Murder
Directed by David Eady, George More O’Ferrall, Wendy Toye, and Orson Welles • 1955 • United Kingdom
Starring Orson Welles, John Gregson, Elizabeth SellarsThree strange and sinister tales of murder and supernatural mystery make up this atmospheric omnibus chiller. First, a museum worker crosses ...
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Araya
Directed by Margot Benacerraf • 1959 • Venezuela
A work of such overwhelming grandeur that Jean Renoir told director Margot Benacerraf after viewing the film, “Above all . . . don’t cut a single image,” this poetic documentary-narrative hybrid is a landmark of both neorealist and feminist South ...
