Film #8: Youth of the World (1936)

[StevePulaski]

Youth of the World (1936)
Directed by: Carl Junghans and Herbert Brieger

Rating: ★★★
Film #8/53; part of the Criterion Collection's "100 Years of Olympic Film" box-set

Youth of the World is a short documentary showcasing the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a small Bavarian town practically built for skiing and other winter events. The short is a piece of Nazi propaganda, directed by Carl Junghans and Herbert Brieger, with the goal to further illustrate the Nazi ideal of showing strength through beauty and the unmistakable athleticism of Germans. I'm not very well verses in Third Reich propaganda; what I say is, aesthetically, Youth of the World looks and moves like no Olympic documentary I've seen thus far. Even with political and social motives in mind, Junghans and Brieger both bring impeccable talent to the table in capturing the 1936 games with rich attention-to-detail and a terrific sense of danger.

Consider how Junghans — an experienced editor, writer, director, and cinematographer — and his approach to the Olympic games differs from someone like Wilhelm Prager, who was responsible for two similar documentaries on the Amsterdam Olympics several years prior. While Prager had a better sense of placement, favoring long-shots and canvas shots that tries to encompass all or most of an event in a single frame, Junghans knew what would entertain and what would amuse the Third Reich. With this, it's no surprise he doesn't prioritize humanizing the competitors, not even giving us a name of any one of them throughout the entire 36 minute documentary. He's consumed with the theatricality of the events and the way jump-cuts and tightly packaged sequences help intensify the mood. He also embraces showing the danger so prevalent in whipping down a snowy slope in a bobsled, and the idea of spectacle that accompanies each one of these events.

Youth of the World is crystal clear in what it wants to show, and as a result, it's aesthetically dense. Junghans and Brieger go out of their way to capture overhead shots of the puck during a heated ice hockey game, as well as look to the slashes and scrapes of the skaters' blades that makes for a cacophonous soundtrack. One of the final events is skijumping, which interjects footage of hawks soaring above the snow-covered land in efforts to juxtapose two airborne creatures. It should be noted that this is the first Olympic documentary in the Criterion Collection box-set to feature sound, and how wild is it that the first voice we hear is that of Adolf Hitler, addressing an energized German crowd as the games are about to be underway?

Junghans and Brieger's short film is a rock-solid essence of this troubling period in world history, not to mention a thought-provoking snapshot of the intense nationalism of these games for the Nazi Party. The brief work concludes with a firework display that's as visually arresting as any event captured here, and there are quite a few despite no contextualization. During the 1930s and 1940s, so much Nazi propaganda was filmed, disposed of, and lost that for something like Youth of the World to still exist and hold up as more than what spawned its inception is a special kind of marvelous.

Directed by: Carl Junghans and Herbert Brieger.