The first Olympic Games of our modern era were held in Athens in April of 1896. No motion-picture cameras were on location for that event, even though the inception for the idea can be traced back two years earlier to June of 1894 when the first Olympic Congress was held in Paris – the same city where the Lumière bothers unveiled their motion pictures a year later in 1895. It would take a few years for the global sports event and cinema to overla with The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912 marking the first relatively complete filmed recording of the Olympic Games. From there on out, every edition of the Olympic Games would produce at least one film – although the Olympic Charter would not stipulate that each Organizing Committee must make a film of the Games until 1930. Since then, a few of those films have been lost. Some have been rediscovered – as was the case with The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912.
In August of 2017, the Criterion Collection announced that they would be releasing a landmark and mammoth box set that would span 53 movies and 41 editions of the Olympic Games. Their website trumpeted that “100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a monumental, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of new restorations by the International Olympic Committee.”
When it comes to The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912, of which about two-thirds of the short newsreel-style films survived, cinema historian Peter Cowie refers to this particular restoration as “perhaps the most startling discovery of this collection.” He supports this assertion with two reasons. “The first is the perfectly contrasted black-and-white photography, with pin-sharp focus even when the camera stands at some distance from the action, or when it follows, for example, the marathon runners along roads and through woods outside Stockholm.” The second reason is even more interesting and worth excerpting in full:
“Two years before these Olympic Games, Charles Pathé had quarreled with the mighty Eastman Kodak Company and decided to produce his own film stock in Joinville-lePont, outside Paris, by stripping old movies of their gelatin, polishing them clean, and then recoating the material with his own emulsion. This could explain the brilliance of the footage.”
The clarity of the Stockholm Games footage is truly astonishing. Even a cinephile who has never cared one iota about sports will find much to enjoy throughout the entire 170 minute-runtime, which was restored by the IOC in 2016 before being edited into one a cohesive record. The painstaking process involved a “full photo-chemical and digital restoration of all surviving nitrate and unique acetate elements in their original form, including the recreation of the original title cards.” Assembled into four chapters, it covers the inauguration of the Olympic Stadium on June 1 and runs all the way to the closing events on July 22.
Two athletes competing for the U.S. at the Stockholm Games would go on to prominence in different fields. Competing in five events at the modern pentathlon, George Smith Patton Jr., later became the celebrated and 23rd four-star army general memorably portrayed by George C. Scott in Franklin G. Schaffner’s Patton (1970). Duke Kahanamoku, winner of the 100-Meter Freestyle (1 min, 3.4 seconds), is noted in the intertitles as “The Olympic record holder and first Olympic medalist from Hawaii.” Not only would he accrue other medals in future Olympics, but he would also go on to be a character actor in over a dozen Hollywood films between 1925 and 1955.
