One Hundred Years of the Olympics in Film

The first filmed footage of the Olympics comes from the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm—the fifth edition of a global sporting competition that was still in its infancy. The newsreels predate both world wars and the invention of the television. They come from a time when the Olympics still held art competitions (in five mediums, no less, including painting and sculpture) and didn’t allow women to participate in the athletics events. The footage that remains from this time has been restored by the International Olympic Committee, and transferred to Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection as the first of a comprehensive 32-disc set featuring 100 years of documentaries about the Games.

The Olympics have always been fertile ground for filmmaking. Tension is inherent in competition, and each event features at least one athlete with a personal narrative a director can latch onto. The pageantry of the opening ceremonies—sometimes bumptious, and other times achingly sincere—are pieces of craftsmanship in their own right. The movies made around them can be propagandistic or more purely sensory, or they can dig into the smaller, intriguing stories on the margins of the Games.