To witness Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia is an experience that shakes the very foundations of the cinephile's gaze. This is not simply a matter of viewing a documentary, however monumental, but of confronting a cultural artifact as sublime as it is unsettling, a black monolith that fell to earth in 1938 to redefine forever the possibilities of applying cinematic language to reality. The film is presented in two parts, ‘Festival of the Nations’ and ‘Festival of Beauty’, but this division is almost a formal pretext. The work is a single, uninterrupted symphonic poem dedicated to the exaltation of the human body in motion, a pagan ode to the spirit of competition that transcends sports reporting to become mythology.

Riefenstahl does not document the 1936 Berlin Olympics; she transfigures them. Her approach is demiurgic, not journalistic. This is clear from the prologue, one of the most powerful and conceptually dense openings in the history of cinema. We do not see athletes warming up or stadiums under construction. Instead, we see the mist-shrouded ruins of the Acropolis, a journey back in time to the archetype, to the very idea of the West. The camera caresses the Greek statues, and in a moment of pure cinematic magic, Myron's Discobolus comes to life, transforming into a perfect, naked athlete of flesh and blood who begins his movement. It is a brazen and immensely powerful statement of intent: Riefenstahl is not filming a modern event, she is evoking an ancestral rite, building an ideal and unbreakable bridge between the purity of classical Greece and the present of the Third Reich. It is an operation not dissimilar, in its mythopoeic aims, to what Virgil accomplished with the Aeneid to establish the divine genealogy of Augustus. Here, the medium is not hexameter verse, but a torrent of 35mm images.

The true revolution of Olympia lies in its aesthetic hypertrophy, in its obsession with form. Riefenstahl and her vast crew (numbering, it is said, in the dozens of cameramen) literally invented techniques that would become standard decades later. They dug pits into the tracks to get low-angle shots that made the runners look like titans storming the heavens. They mounted cameras on dollies that ran parallel to the athletes, anticipating the Steadicam and creating an unprecedented dynamic immersion. They used long-focus lenses to isolate the figures from the background, transforming them into pure kinetic abstractions. The use of slow motion is never merely explanatory; it is an almost Cubist tool of analysis, deconstructing the athletic gesture to reveal its hidden grace, its secret geometry. This approach is in direct opposition to Eisenstein's montage of attractions: where the Soviet master sought collision, the dialectic between shots to generate a concept, Riefenstahl seeks fusion, a Wagnerian flow, a visual continuum that hypnotizes and seduces the viewer, drawing them into a state of aesthetic trance.

In Olympia, the athlete ceases to be an individual with a history, a psychology, a nation (despite the title ‘Festival of the Nations’). He becomes an archetype: the Runner, the Jumper, the Thrower. The bodies, often filmed nude or semi-nude, are depersonalized, transformed into living sculptures. It is no coincidence that the film's aesthetic echoes that of the contemporary sculpture of Arno Breker, but it would be reductive to stop there. Within it lies an echo of Boccioni's Futurism, of that "synthesis of what is remembered and what is seen" that translates into Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Riefenstahl's athlete is a perfect biological machine, a flawless cog in the larger machine of the celebration. Sweat gleams on skin like a precious varnish, muscles tense like the strings of an instrument, the face is a mask of almost inhuman concentration. This is an Apollonian humanity, distilled, stripped of all dross of individuality and imperfection.

It is precisely within this compact and hermetically sealed ideological-aesthetic system that a narrative short-circuit occurs, which is perhaps the film’s most fascinating element for the contemporary analyst: Jesse Owens. Riefenstahl, whose mission was to celebrate a specific ideal of physicality, was faced with the necessity of filming the undeniable triumph of an African-American athlete who, with his four gold medals, shattered the myth of Aryan supremacy in its very temple. The director could not ignore him. And so, she is forced to film him. And she films him magnificently. The sequences dedicated to Owens are charged with a strange tension. The camera admires him, extols his feline grace, his explosive power, his disarming smile. In those moments, the film seems almost to betray itself. The unstoppable performance of Owens becomes a checkmate to the underlying narrative, a spectacular glitch in the film's matrix. For a few moments, the reality of the sporting achievement tears through the veil of ideological mythologizing, and what remains is the pure, undeniable greatness of one man. It is an involuntary moment of cinema-vérité, one of telluric power.

The second part, ‘Festival of Beauty’, pushes even further into abstraction. The celebrated diving sequence is a piece of avant-garde cinema that could be screened alongside Léger's Ballet Mécanique or a short by Man Ray. With the context of the competition almost entirely gone, the film becomes pure form, an aerial ballet of bodies cleaving the sky and water. The human figures, filmed against a white, blinding sky, are transformed into black silhouettes, into ideograms in motion, losing all human connotation to become pure line, pure trajectory. It is the final sublimation of Riefenstahl's project: the body is no longer a vehicle of identity, but merely a graphic and dynamic element in the service of a superior and totalizing aesthetic composition. It is a glacial beauty, perfect and, in a way, terrifying. It is the beauty of a Giger spaceship or a snowflake seen under a microscope: an algorithmic perfection that leaves no room for the warmth of human fallibility.

To judge Olympia is, ultimately, a futile and limiting exercise. The work defies any easy categorization. It is a historical document, a masterpiece of cinematic technique, an essay on the aesthetics of the body, a vehicle for propaganda, and a visual poem of excruciating beauty. It is a living paradox, an accursed masterpiece whose seductive power is directly proportional to the unease it provokes. Like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Olympia is an alien object, of a formal perfection that both terrifies and fascinates. It questions us on the very nature of beauty and its dark potential, on the capacity of images to create and destroy worlds, to elevate the spirit and to serve its demons. To watch it today is to look into a black mirror, one that reflects not only the specters of an era, but also our own perpetual, vulnerable submission to the power of impeccable form.