The White Stadium is a beautifully shot documentary of the 1928 Winter Olympics held in St. Mortiz, Switzerland. It was the second edition of the Winter games, though the first to be held as a separate event, the first taking place in Paris in conjunction with the 1924 Summer Olympics. The breakout star of was Norway’s Sonja Henie, who won figure skating gold at the age of 15 – the youngest Olympic champion in history up until that point (she would be unseated 70 years later by fellow skater Tara Lipinski).
German director Arnold Fanck had his breakthrough with the melodramatic, shot-on-location Alpine “mountain films” he made with actress and director Leni Riefenstahl, starting with The Holy Mountain (1926). This made him a logical choice to co-direct this film about the snow-capped games in St. Moritz, which would be released as The White Stadium (Das Weisse Stadion, 1928). The other credited director was mountaineering journalist and enthusiast Othmar Gurtner, who would later become the director of the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research.
Fanck is credited as “Dr. Arnold Fanck,” as he had earned a PhD in Geology at ETH Zurich, though he swiftly transitioned to the film business, forming the production company Berg-und Sportfilm, or Mountain and Sports Film, in 1920. They would make an influential skiing movie, Wonders of the Skiis (Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs, 1920), but wouldn’t take off in popularity until The Holy Mountain paired their enthusiasm for mountaineering with slam-bang romantic drama. So, The White Stadium was a detour and not necessarily a welcome one. Fanck wrote in his memoirs, as conveyed in David B. Hinton’s The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, “that he wasn’t very interested in making the film, since he regarded dramatic feature films, not documentaries, as his specialty.”
Fanck was further aggrieved by the condensed post-production schedule: “although his cameramen shot over 30,000 meters of film, UFA gave him only 17 days to edit it.” A seemingly impossible task, Fanck employed Walter Ruttman, who had just completed directing and editing his masterpiece documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). So while it doesn’t have a rigorous structure, The White Stadium is filled with gorgeous B&W photography, starting with the contemplative opening shot of the “white valley,” a stunning landscape composition that could have come out of the American Hudson River School. This inaugurates a lyrical 20-minute introduction that captures St. Moritz as Olympic fever slowly takes over, the townspeople shown changing from their work clothes into toques and ice skates while the kids annihilate each other in snowball fights.
Then, after an opening ceremony battling a snowstorm, Fanck and Gurtner have to figure out how to capture each event with the four cameramen they had on site. Each sport presented different challenges – for speed skating they show the skaters breakout in slow motion, but then cut to a bird’s eye view, which shows the scope of the track but doesn’t convey the speed of the athletes. They also insert extreme close-ups of a thumb starting and stopping a stopwatch and provide the times for a few of the competitors. By the end of the race they were able to get cameras on the stadium floors, and the panning shots trying to keep up pace with the skaters is the most kinetic and thrilling shot of the sequence.
Each segment provides this kind of feeling out process, as the directors attempt to utilize their limited resources in the most efficient and impactful way. This shines through in the cross-country skiing segment, with remarkable slow-motion footage of Norway’s Ole Hegge scrambling uphill, his legs pistoning down with such force the snow powder explodes off the ski blade – all as the Alps gleam in the background.
The highlight of the film for Olympic historians and aesthetes is the exhibition put on by Sonja Henie, the 15-year-old wunderkind who took home her first figure-skating gold with a performance of remarkable speed and precision. Even in slow motion she looks faster than the other competitors, and she caps it off with a megawatt smile that led to a career in Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Fanck would go on to make a few more mountain film hits with Riefenstahl, but his career suffered under the Nazis. However, Riefenstahl’s star under Nazism ascended, and she would go on to film the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, released in 1938 as Olympia.
