Take One (Oct 1976)

The game plan Monsieur Jacques Bobet, executive producer of the National Film Board of Canada’s forthcoming $1.2 million featurelength film on the Montreal Olympics, is extremely reluctant to allow anyone from the press to watch any of the daily rushes. “You know how much harm you can do a film if you start saying, ‘I’ve seen the rushes and God they stink’ or ‘Let’s hope the film is going to be better than what I've seen’. That's a terrible thing to do.” Bobet, wearing a blue leisure suit and light blue shirt, is a very cautious man; when he’s especially excited or worried, his voice drops an cctave and several decibels. After reassuring him several times that | wouldn’t attempt to pan the film on the basis of a day’s rushes, he consents and tells me to show up the next morning at the NFB screening room. At eight the following morning a handful of people straggle into the dim screening room where six projectors are already set up. Bobet and his director, Jean-Claude Labrecque (a Quebec filmmaker — Les Canots de glace, Les Smattes, 60 Cycles — with considerable experience at filming sport documentaries), generally watch the previous day’s rushes for an hour and a half each morning, running all six projectors simultaneously. The shooting ratio, Bobet had told me earlier, is about fifty to one. Today’s — Friday’s — rushes are nearly the last set. The Games close Sunday; by then Labrecque and his thirty cameramen (16mm, direct sound) most likely will have shot close on to a half million feet of film for a two-hour documentary. (Article 49 of the International Olympic Committee regulations stipulates that every Olympic Games must be marked by a commemorative film. COJO — that’s the French acronym for the organizing committee for the Montreal games — designated the NFB Official filmmaker for the XXI Olympiad.) When the lights in the screening room go all the way down, the effect of six different rushes at once proves rather like a Chelsea Girls for jocks (but with no sound of course). Seen simultaneously: one, a Canadian athlete sitting in a hotel room talking to what must be her parents; two, a black runner from the States removing a gold chain from around his neck and tucking it into his sock for good luck; three, just the feet and ankles of a goalie nearly tapdancing with anxiety; four, a Finnish runner jogging slowly around the track beaming at Will Aitken is a Montreal-based critic, broadcaster and poet. He teaches at Concordia University and Vanier College. 14 by Will Aitken the crowd; five, at least ten different. still photographers focusing on a high jumper sitting in the infield doing toe-touches; six, an NFB crew member holding up a slate. The rushes, despite the novelty of seeing so many so fast, are nothing spectacular. Considering that perhaps only a couple of minutes out of the total of nine hours of film we’ve seen (11/2 hours X 6 projectors) Jean-Claude Labrecque, director of the Olympics film. may be used, no one expects the rushes to be continually exciting. One specific shot, however, does stand out: black and white lines horizontally score the screen; at the top edge of the lines appears a tiny head, then another and then several more at once. Suddenly the black and white lines are slashed vertically, rhythmically, by impossibly long thrusting legs, and we take in that we are seeing men running hurdles. What comes across most from the rushes is something M. Bobet stressed repeatedly in the previous day’s interview — what he reverently calls “the human element.” The rushes show very few actual athletic events. Lots of warm-ups and bum-slapping, though, and plenty of sexy women in the stands and a good number of talking heads. “Over the years,” Bobet expounded, “Canadians have developed a very very special style of filmmaking which puts the attention where it should be put — on the human element. “We want to get a very close and very discreet intimate portrait of the athlete. There’s nothing which looks more like a fencing duel than another fencing duel. Styles in sports change. The way they swim one year may look ridiculous ten years later. What doesn’t age is people’s feelings.” Well, yes. This human element line composes the NFB’s stock-in-trade. The general philosophy being that if you aim a camera at people long enough, one of them’s bound to say or do something interesting eventually: ° But this reflexive human element shtick couldn't be further from the true nature of the Montreal Games. Television commentators kept babbling about ‘the true spirit of the Games” and “the wonderful camaraderie among young athletes from all over the world” (and in the same breath would go on to explain that an East German swimmer was forced by GDR authorities to decline an American swimmer’s invitation to dinner — “for security reasons.”), but for a film — destined to be far better distributed than any previous Olympic documentary — to spew such journalistic cant about pan-nationalism is to be bogus to a fatuous degree. The Olympics these days have precious little to do with individual athletes. To mix a metaphor, once every four years athletes are pawns on the international playing field. And, since Munich, prisoners off it. Less than forty-eight hours before the Opening Ceremony Gerald Ford can threaten, looking exactly like an angry coach, to keep the whole U.S. team home because the Taiwanese want to compete as China. A score of African governments call back their teams because of New Zealand and South Africa. Athletes living in the enormous, starkly impersonal Olympic Village highrises are surrounded by chain link and nervous soldiers (this is Canada’s biggest mobilization since WW II, bigger even than that of the Korean War). M. Bobet was particularly excited by one personal touch Labrecque had managed to get on film. “We got one of the little Russian girls after a performance and we got her to phone her family. You don’t have to see the family. You can tell by her face and the excitement there.” One would have liked to have seen the emotion on that same “little girl's” face two days before the Closing Ceremony when the Soviets were threatening to quit the Games because their 17-year-old swimmer had seemingly run off with the daughter of a Detroit millionaire. When Bobet talks about making the official film and about “the small club of cineastes” who have done previous Olympic films, his voice drops to the humblest possible tone of awe. “It’s a tremendous challenge making an Olympic film. It's a bit scary.” A sense of awe seems appropriate in light of some of the filmmakers who have already worked the games (Riefenstahl, Ichi