This film must be handled with caution & context. To us, its footage looks unremarkable, but it largely *created* norms about how sports are represented and filmed. Think on that a moment. Our film techniques in sports trace their origins in many ways back to Nazi propaganda. 2/
This is why I teach this film. It shows us continuities between our societies today and the racial ideologies and fascism of Nazism. It should remind us how the racist and heterosexist structures of sport are too often invisible/unremarkable, easily mistaken for common sense. 3/
One example is Riefenstahl's interest in linking sporting prowess, masculine beauty & whiteness. This is clearest in film's second part. Camera also shows exoticising fascination w/Black and PoC athletes, setting them apart from film's fetish of a racially pure sporting world. 4/
Berlin's Olympics had many firsts for the modern Olympics, as the video mentions and as the #Gamesmaker training I did in 2012 also highlighted. First, the @Olympics tweet highlights the torch relay: 5/
The torch relay explicitly links Nazi Germany to ancient Greece. The metaphor of the relay isn't subtle (see also Karl Albiker's relay runner statues👇). It implies that Ancient Greece literally passed the baton to Nazi Germany 6/ 
This link to Greece in the film and architecture was used to justify Nazi racial ideologies, views on disability & the body, imperial ambitions, intellectual underpinnings, totalitarian structures. It was designed to (and did) create legitimacy for Nazi regime in eyes of world.7/
Another 'first' was the Olympic village, as featured in a quiz at my Gamesmaker training in Hackney in 2012. The idea of an Olympic village drew closely on the ideology of racial purity associated with the so-called Nazi 'Volksgemeinschaft', in several ways: 8/
1) the emphasis on military-style comradeship, on perfecting certain kinds of masculinity, and on communal living shows the pervasiveness of military values in German society at the time, and of those values of nationalist, antisemitic, white supremacist pan-German movement. 9/
2) cloistering athletes away kept them from seeing the racism and violence of the Nazi police state around them, and also kept athletes from abroad away from meeting local communities in ways that might have disrupted Nazi völkisch ideology of racial purity. 10/
3) it allowed unprecedented control over press access to athletes. Riefenstahl's film was a major part of this, designed to be as far as possible the only substantial visual documentation of athletes' experience of the Games. 11/
4) and the most sinister: location and layout of the Athletes' Village were designed so it could be repurposed as a military base after the Games were over. It was used as a Nazi military installation, and then by the Red Army when it occupied Germany from 1945. 12/
I'll stop; I could go on. We know better than to sign up to the image of sports Riefenstahl created, built on fetishised whiteness, eugenicist body politics and militaristic values. We can learn from 1936 Olympic 'firsts', but this history must be handled w/ care & context 13/13
