More than any other athlete of his era, Jesse Owens’s image on film has determined his fate.
It all began with those few seconds of the 100-meter dash that Leni Riefenstahl enshrined in her film “Olympia, Part 1”: the close-up on Owens’s face, the white flare of the starting gun, Owens’s lurch, and then his upright run past his competitors in 10.3 seconds, and the ever-so-close tight shot of a perturbed Hitler.
Commissioned by the Propaganda Ministry to film the 1936 Berlin games, Riefenstahl was set to showcase the triumph of German athletes as proof of Aryan physical and intellectual superiority over the rest of the world.