Canwest News Service
Sat Feb 6 2010
Byline: Laura Stone
Source: Canwest News Service
The Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee has pulled a clip from its torch relay video, a move which comes after drawing the ire this week from Canada’s Jewish community over the inclusion of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia,” a Nazi propaganda film commissioned by Adolf Hitler about the 1936 Berlin games.
The footage – which lasts under 30 seconds at the beginning of the torch relay video, called “Lights Will Guide You Home” – featured a scene from Riefenstahl’s film of a man running the torch along a road and arriving at a stadium filled with people wearing white.
Evidently aware that the clip might cause controversy, VANOC blacked out some portions of the video in which supporters can be seen giving a Nazi salute.
“In creating our video, we weighed our choices as to whether to leave the Berlin 1936 relay footage out entirely, to alter it in order to depoliticize it, or to leave it in unaltered; we chose the middle ground, in order to respect the relay’s history while not highlighting the political environment of the day, ” said Jim Richards, program director for Torch Relays, in an email statement to Canwest News Service.
As of Wednesday, the footage – which was shown on the VANOC website “Vancouver 2010”- was removed. The website now shows “highlight videos” from this year’s torch relay only.
“We are retiring the earlier video to focus on the highlight videos that show the tremendous excitement generated by the torch relay as it has made its way across the country,” said Richards.
Romy Ritter, director of Canadian Jewish Congress for the Pacific region, said she commends VANOC for removing the clip, but added that the footage should never have been included in the first place.
“To the Jewish community . . . (and) to many, the 1936 Games and all images related to those Games are rooted in hate, represents a hateful and distressing period to the community,” she said.
“I think something like that needs to be put into historical context, and there needs to be education around it which is very hard to do in a video clip. ”
The idea for torch relay was born during the 1936 Games. It was designed to link the Nazis to the Greeks, so “when you would think of the Aryan culture, you would confuse it with the ideals of the classical Greek world,” said Ira B. Nadel, an English professor at the University of British Columbia.
Riefenstahl, a German film actress, was commissioned by Hitler to make Olympia after she had made what historians call the premiere Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will in 1933.
Although commissioned by the Nazis, Riefenstahl always claimed she was an artist and not a Nazi, said Jennifer Evans, a German history professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“She was focused on, and communicating a German, but Nazi ideology. So, strength, power, virtue, all through the kind of physical form. And that’s what Olympia is known for,” said Evans.
“It’s really about the kind of beauty, of the strong and proud. And of course the Aryan body. So it’s definitely about Nazi ideology.”
Even if some Nazi images were blacked out in the torch relay video, the story behind it cannot be erased, she said.
“It’s really problematic to let it stand without any kind of narration,” she continued.
“(The films) shouldn’t be taken out of history. They served a purpose, and that purpose was pretty sinister.”
