Il caso Tokyo Olympiad. Tra critica e celebrazione degli ideali olimpici

Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad is the official documentary of the 1964 Summer Olympics. Even before its release, the film received strong criticism by the Japan Olympic Committee and the National Diet. In their eyes, the film failed to be a pure record of the Games, to highlight the success of Japanese athletes, and to portray Japan in a positive fashion. Tokyo Olympiad indeed subverted genre conventions by denying the extraordinary nature of the spectacle of the Olympics, while at the same time trying to recover the original meaning of the Olympics. Through a poetic representation of reality, Ichikawa thus questioned the very idea of the “official record”, exposing those cultural politics which are inherent in a documentary on the Olympic Games commissioned by their organizers.