Masumoto, Naofumi.  “Interpretations of the Filmed Body: An Analysis of the Japanese Version of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.”  Critical Reflections on Olympic Ideology.  Centre for Olympic Studies, 1994.  146-158.  31 Mar. 2008 <http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/ISOR/ISOR1994t.pdf>.

            This article analyzes the Japanese version of Olympia and explores its relationship to contemporary Olympic events.  While it touches on a wide variety of questions such as the film’s political implications, its focus is on the aestheticization of the human body, particularly of the strong and victorious.  It suggests that Olympia was not so much a document of the 1936 Olympics as it was a unified body of art.  While the article acknowledges the historical context of the film and its influence, it affirms Riefenstahl’s commitment to producing an artistically free and independent picture.  For example, it notes that Riefenstahl beautified the bodies of not just Aryan athletes, but also blacks and Asians, against the wishes of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.  Additionally, it argues that Riefenstahl’s use of retakes and overdubs serves to discredit the film as a historical documentary but instead supports it as an artistically united statement.  It connects the film to today’s Olympics by contrasting its emphasis on beauty with mass commercialization yet also notes the film represents universal and unchanging Olympic ideals.

            The article raises several points in the question of the extent that Olympia is propagandistic.  Aside from noting the film’s beautification of the human body irrespective of race, the article suggests the film was not propaganda in and of itself, but rather a record of a propagandistic event.  On the other hand, the article also spends some time on the introductory sequence in which an Olympic torch is carried from Greece to Berlin, suggesting the Germans as the true descendents of the culturally advanced Greeks.  Additionally, it argues that the film’s depiction of Hitler as a typical sports spectator humanized him and was inherently positive.

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I became interested in Matsuda's analysis because, even though it has nothing directly related to gender, it shows a clear picture of how linguistic markers used in verbal speech are carried over into an internet context to delineate identity and power relations.  Matsuda analysed the written communications in Japanese  of Japanese ESL teachers on the online community TESOL Link for verbal markers such as formal verb endings, address terms, and honorifics that are used to signify deference and vertical social relations.  Interestingly enough, he found that there was more horizontal than vertical social relationships on the list, and that when hierarchical distinctions were shown, they were created from a perception of knowledge as power more than seniority or social status.  To this, Matsuda cites the teacher vs. learner role as invoked frequently on the list.  While he notes that hierarchical relations were found to come into play in a theoretically hierarchy-free environment, Matsuda points out that the power relations were able to be re-negotiated by the members online in a way that might never have been possible in real face-to-face communication given social and linguistic norms in Japan.