EIGHT WATCHERS

Despite the depressingly--though appropriately--audience-less venues, I thoroughly enjoyed the Tokyo Summer Games, which wrapped up this evening. Thanks to the greatest TV channel of all time, Turner Classic Movies, I also got to observe the Olympiad by watching a film that's been on my list since I read about it back in the '70s...

Visions of Eight--Produced by Stan Margulies and David L. Wolper and scored by Henry Mancini, this is a 1973 anthology of documentary shorts, each on a different aspect of the 1972 Munich Summer Games, by eight important directors of the time. All are interesting; a couple of them are real gems...

The Beginning--Soviet director Yuri Ozerov helmed this brief, briskly edited segment on the Opening Ceremonies. A standard travelogue in style, but a good time capsule of images and people.

The Strongest--Mai Zetterling choose weightlifting for her subject, she says, because she knew nothing about it, but was fascinated by the solitary, obsessive nature of the training. "I am not interested in sports, but I am interested in obsessions." She captured some remarkable physical feats, and some poignant psychology.

The Highest--As pure cinema, Arthur Penn's visual poem on pole vaulting is probably the best of these shorts. Nearly wordless--indeed, nearly soundless; just some dim crowd noise and chatter faded in and out--it's elliptical and almost hypnotically beautiful.

The Women--Though women had been participants in the Olympics since 1900, they were still enough of a novelty in '72 to be patronized in this short by Michael Pfleghar; he got some fine footage, however, including scenes of German long jumper Heide Rosendahl.

The Fastest--Kon Ichikawa had already directed one of the great sports documentaries, Tokyo Olympiad (1965), about the '64 Summer Games; it featured throat-catchingly wonderful footage of Ethiopian marathon great Abebe Bikila. His quick, highly concentrated, almost forensic look at the Men's 100 meter dash at different speeds is another high point of this collection.

The Decathlon--Milos Forman intercuts the event with both traditional and classical German music, at times facetiously. We see some of then-Bruce Jenner's first Olympic appearance.

The Losers--Claude Lelouch's painful and compassionate look at some of the losing athletes is another of the best segments.

The Longest--Except for a vague mention in the opening, this short by John Schlesinger is the only one to include any content about the Munich Massacre; its main subject, however, is British marathoner Ron Hill (who just died in May of this year, at 82). Somehow Schlesinger's style seems, with the possible exception of Ozerov's, the most dated and heavy-handed, but it's still a compelling chronicle.

What I liked about all of these films is how little any of them rely on talk; there are interviews or a scrap or two of narration here and there, but on the whole this is visual storytelling.

Anyway, in the unlikely event that you're not quite ready for a break from the Olympics, Visions of Eight is available to stream at TCM.com through August 18; Blu-ray and DVD editions are available from The Criterion Collection.