Renowned Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura is well known for his Flamenco trilogy – Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983) and El Amor Brujo (1986) – in which he fuses drama with music and dance. These films are notable for their meditative attention to the body in motion. Saura continued to explore the relationship between the visual limits of the camera and the physical limits of the human form in the 1990s with Dispara! (Outrage, 1993) and the documentary Flamenco (1995). Sandwiched among these films is Marathon (1993), the official film of the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics.
Each Olympics is accompanied by an official Olympics movie. Big directorial names in global cinema have documented and celebrated the event. Claude Lelouch, Mai Zetterling, Arthur Penn and Miloš Forman have all had their hands in Olympic cinema. Infamously, Hitler asked Leni Riefenstahl to direct the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics film; Olympia remains controversial for its Nazi pageantry. In contrast, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, the official film of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Games, begins with the torch being carried by Sakai Yoshinori, the “Hiroshima baby” who was born the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan –a symbol of life in the aftermath of the Pacific War. Considered one of the greatest sports films ever made, it moves beyond winning and patriotism to intimately portray the human side of athletes and spectators.
Then there is former Mexican Olympic swimmer turned director Alberto Isaac’s film, The Olympics in Mexico, about the 1968 Summer Games. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, its notable for its focus on individual heroism over national achievement. Very few national anthems are heard during the film. Nationalism is replaced by iconic images, like when Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists to the sky as they received their medals, protesting the limits of Black citizenship in the United States.
Film critic Linda Ehrlich has said, “Olympic films have often been haunted by spectres of horror and catastrophe even as they celebrate hope and triumph.” And like the aforementioned Olympic films, Marathon acknowledges painful histories and politics. As an open anti-Francoist, Saura likely saw Marathon as a document that marks Spain’s resilience and the strides it has made since Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975. Yet Marathon also stands apart from these other great Olympic films. For even in their most artistic and stylized moments, other directors nevertheless offer a recap or a clear sense of which event the audience is watching and the names of the athletes competing.
However, Saura’s unconventional Marathon does not offer a summary of events, nor does it clarify who won which event. There is limited explanatory voiceover and little situational framing. The men’s marathon appears at intervals throughout the film, enshrining the Games’ most emblematic event – the film’s two-hour and 10-minute runtime is just a little shy of Hwang Young-Cho’s gold-medal-winning time. Yet, there are also images of runners finishing last or nearly last, exhausted and even injured. And while all the winners are on view, Saura gives as much attention to the training routines as the finals themselves. (This attention is particularly remarkable in the images of gymnasts practicing. Saura recognizes their achievements – and the drama of their experience – by pairing their rehearsals with Maurice Ravel’s “La valse.”)
What gives the film its cohesion, then, is not the marathon itself, but its incessant focus on movement – the body at the brink. Viewers are implicated in Saura’s visual play. Like his Flamenco Trilogy, and other films on dance in the 1990s, Marathon stands out for its commitment to the study of motion and embodiment. Steadicam shots from an array of vantage points capture much more than an athletic achievement. Saura doesn’t shy away from showing how bodies break down – nor does he shy away from moments stolen, as when one non-medaling marathoner is abruptly told to leave the track after finishing the race. His camerawork captures aging, injury and irreparable fatigue – on individualistic, communal and national levels. The Games – perhaps life itself – is a dance for Saura, with complex choreography studded with improvisation, luck, and loss.
With this context in mind, the title of the film may be more figurative than literal. It could refer to a strenuous task that requires endurance and dedication; its challenges are as much mental and emotional as they are physical. It could be an invitation to his viewers to see in the Games their own personal dances, their own marathons, their own lives hurtling toward the finish line.
