The ‘reel’ Jesse Owens: visual rhetoric and the Berlin Olympics

ABSTRACT

The story of Jesse Owens has become one of the dominant sports narratives of the twentieth century. The compelling visual record of his performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics has been used to argue for a number of political and social causes. What is particularly fascinating about the images of Owens’s win is the ways in which it functioned for diametrically opposing ideological viewpoints. The story behind the footage reveals an interesting confluence of history and visual rhetoric. This essay considers how the Owens footage was put to work as both an example of American exceptionalism in one case and a transcendent appeal designed to mitigate the stigma of Nazi ideology in another. The principles of visual rhetoric elucidate the ways in which imagery like the Owens footage is purposefully packaged to portray these types of messages.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric
• Olympics
• Jesse Owens
• Riefenstahl

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Larry Schwartz, ‘Owens Pierced a Myth’, ESPN, http://www.espn.com/classic/biography/s/Owens_Jesse.html (accessed 18 April 2017).

2. To be clear, considerations of the Owens footage could go in numerous directions. Scholars of film criticism and history have examined the films from those games in a variety of ways, for instance Michael Mackenzie’s look at how the Reich’s media coverage functioned to obscure their moral obscenities. However, my concern is the film’s rhetorical potential. See Michael Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin: The 1936 Olympics and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia’, Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2003): 302–36.

3. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel 1911–1967 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 3.

4. Ibid., 246.

5. Nathan Atkinson, ‘Newsreels as Domestic Propaganda: Visual Rhetoric at the Dawn of the Cold War’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2011): 77.

6. Ibid., 78.

7. Robert Herzstein, ‘Movietone News and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, 1930–1035: A Guide for the Researcher, Teacher, and Student’, The History Teacher 21, no. 3 (1988): 315.

8. Atkinson, ‘Newsreels as Domestic Propaganda’, 80.

9. Keiko Tamura, ‘Shooting an Invisible Enemy’, Journal of Pacific History 45, no. 1 (2010): 117–33. Other researchers have found similar trends of nationalism bleeding through seemingly impartial newsreels. See Brett Bowles, ‘Newsreels, Ideology, and Public Opinion Under Vichy: The Case of La Grance en Marche’, French Historical Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 419–63; Roel Vande Winkel and Daniel Biltereyst, ‘Filmed News and Nationalism in Belgium: Flemish Events at the Crossroads of Politics, Culture and Commerce (1929–1942)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 32, no. 3 (2012): 379–99.

10. The Nazis were particularly adept at this tactic. Herzstein notes that the German newsreels of the Reich were the ‘heavily politicized Wochenshauen’ which were overseen by Goebbels (Herzstein, ‘Movietone News’, 314). David Welch goes on to explain how this arm of the Nazi media machine were focused on stressing ‘Volksgemeinshaft’ or the national or people’s community (David Welch, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People's Community', Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 219).

11. Michael Oriard, King Football (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 50.

12. Pathé eventually integrated with Hearst, which again morphed into News of the Day. See Richard Ward, When the Cock Crows: A History of the Pathé Exchange (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press), 39.; K.R.M. Short, ‘American Newsreels and the Collapse of Nazi Germany’, in Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness, eds K.R.M. Short and Stephan Dolezel (London: Croom Helm), 1.

13. Ward, When the Cock Crows, 9.

14. Oriard, King Football, 11.

15. Ibid., 51.

16. At times the competition got physical: Fielding tells the story of a fight over the Grand National Steeplechase in England where excluded crews set up towers to film the race and the licensed Gaumont photographers tried to shake them off their lofty perches (Fielding, The American Newsreel, 143).

17. ‘Owens Surpasses 3 World Records: Leaps 26 Feet 8 ¼ Inches and Betters the Times for 220 and Low Hurdles,’ New York Times, 26 May 1935: S1.

18. ‘Ten Colored Athletes with Olympic Team,’ Atlanta Daily World, 24 July 1936: 2.

19. Arthur Daley, ‘U.S. is Favored to Gain Major Honors in Berlin Olympics Opening Saturday’, New York Times, 26 July 1936: S2.

20. Frederick Birchall, ‘11th Olympics Open Today in Gay and Crowded Berlin’, New York Times, 1 August 1936: 1, 6.

21. Daley, ‘U.S. is Favored’.

22. Albion Ross, ‘Nazis Start Olympics as Gigantic Spectacle’, New York Times, 26 July 1936:

23. Edward Eagan, ‘Athletics—Medium for International Good-Will’, Journal of Educational Sociology 28, no. 6 (1955): 266; Steven Pope, Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876–1926 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 46–7; Christopher Young, ‘In Praise of Jesse Owens: Technical Beauty at the Berlin Olympics 1936’, Sport in History 28, no. 1 (2008): 87–8.

24. Pope, Patriotic Games, 41; Karen Riggs, Susan Eastman and Timothy Golobic, ‘Manufactured Conflict in the 1992 Olympics: The Discourse of Television and Politics’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 254.

25. Jesse Owens, directed by Laurens Grant (2012; American Experience Films, PBS), DVD.

26. David Large, Nazi Games, The Olympics of 1936 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 11.

27. Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), 169.

28. Cooper Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1986), 23.

29. Riefenstahl, Memoir, 193.

30. Graham Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 82.

31. Richard Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 263.

32. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 83–4.

33. In fact, Stephens was one of the few athletes to receive a title card besides Owens. ‘1936 Olympics, Berlin, Germany,’ Hearst Metrotone News, UCLA Library, vol. 7, no. 293; ‘African-Americans Win at the 1936 Summer Olympics,’ Paramount, Sherman Grinberg Library, negative number 5632. Many of the newsreels are part of different archives that format their newsreel footage differently. I have endeavoured to provide all of the relevant information should readers want to view the footage themselves.

34. ‘The Olympic Games’, Movietone News, Fox Movietone Archive, MTA267029-146; ‘Berlin Olympics,’ Movietone News, Fox Movietone Archive, MTA4374_029_039.

35. ‘The Sporting Page: The Star of the Olympics’, Hearst Metrotone News, UCLA Library, CS1037, vol. 7, no. 292.

36. ‘1936 Summer Olympics’, Hearst Newsreel Archive, UCLA Library, CS208, Hearst Vault Material, vol. 7, no. 292.

37. ‘America’s Olympic Winners’, Pathé, Sherman Grinberg Library, negative number 9561.

38. ‘Olympic Heroes’, Paramount, Sherman Grinberg Library, negative number 5893.

39. ‘The Olympic Game’, Movietone News.

40. ‘1936 Summer Olympics II’, Hearst Newsreel Archive, UCLA Library, CS658, Hearst Vault Material, vol. 7, no. 293.

41. Interestingly all of the footage was filtered through the same set of eyes. The games were covered under a confining contract that the Germans and Riefenstahl forced on the world’s news agencies. Graham’s meticulous research provides a reproduction of the agreement. It stipulated that any ‘shots taken’ during the games must be put at the disposal of the German production company ‘without pay’ before they could be distributed, and they were confined to using them for newsreel purposes only. The contract controlled not only the final product but also schedules and camera placement. It specified that newsreel studios ‘could shoot only when and where authorized, that they must place all positive and negative film at the company’s disposal, as well as one “lavender” print of each finished Olympic newsreel subjec.’ It gave Riefenstahl’s production company ‘all copyrights for the total Olympic coverage of the reel companies’. See Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 68–69, 266–8.

42. Rebekka Andersen, ‘Teaching Visual Rhetoric as Close Reading Strategy’, Composition Studies 44, no. 2 (2016): 18.

43. Valerie Peterson, ‘The Rhetorical Criticism of Visual Elements: An Alternative to Foss’s Schema’, Southern Communication Journal 67, no. 1 (2001): 19–32.

44. See Eric Jenkins, ‘The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes as Expressions’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 4 (2014): 444.

45. Sonja Foss, ‘Theory of Visual Rhetoric’, in Handbook of Visual Communication, eds Ken Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Gretchen Barbastis and Keith Kenney (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum, 2005), 144.

46. Ibid., 146.

47. Linda Scott, ‘Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric’, Journal of Consumer Research 21 (1994): 252.

48. Cara Finnegan, ‘The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the “Skull Controversy”’, Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (Winter 2001): 135.

49. Victoria Gallagher and Kenneth Zagacki, ‘Visibility and Rhetoric: The Power of Visual Images in Norman Rockwell’s Depictions of Civil Rights’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 2 (2005): 182.

50. See Timothy Barney, ‘Power Lines: The Rhetoric of Maps as Social Change in the Post-Cold War Landscape’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 413–41; Anjali Vats and Leilani Nishime, ‘Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld’s “Idea of China”’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 4 (2013): 423–47.

51. Adam Gaffey, ‘Recollecting Union: ‘Rebel Flags’ and the Epideictic Vision of Washington’s Farewell Address’, Western Journal of Communication 79, no. 3 (2015): 330–1.

52. Gallagher and Zagacki, ‘Visibility and Rhetoric, 196.

53. Ibid., 178.

54. Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, ‘Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 365.

55. James Kimble and Lester Olson, ‘Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” Poster’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 4 (2006): 550.

56. Cynthia Hamilton, ‘Hercules Subdued: The Visual Rhetoric of the Kneeling Slave’, Slavery & Abolition 34, no. 4 (2013): 646.

57. ‘America’s Olympic Winners’, Pathé.

58. ‘Olympic Heroes’’ Paramount.

59. ‘African-Americans Win’, Paramount.

60. ‘Olympic Games, Olimpiadi di Berlino de 1936’, Luce Cinecittà, Italian newsreel archive. This reel was retrieved via an Italian archive and was missing its title card. The production is unmistakably American, though it has no markings or titles to indicate its studio.

61. ‘American Stars Roll Up Points at Olympic Games’, Universal News, National Archives, vol. 8, rel. 485, 17 August 1936.

62. Richard Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 19–44.

63. Jeff Motter, ‘American Exeptionalism and the Rhetoric of Humanitarian Militarism: The Case of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Relief Effort’, Communication Studies 61, no. 5 (2010): 509–11.

64. Robert Ivie and Oscar Giner, ‘American Exceptionalism in a Democratic Idiom: Transacting the Mythos of Change in the 2008 Presidential Campaign’, Communication Studies 60, no. 4 (2009): 360.

65. Karen Riggs, Susan Eastman and Timothy Golobic, ‘Manufactured Conflict in the 1992 Olympics: The Discourse of Television and Politics’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 254.

66. ‘Highlights of the 1936 Olympics (Berlin),’ Veribest Pictures, Prelinger Archives, 0684_Highlights_of_the_1936_Olympics_Berlin_22_01_06_00. Veribest was not considered to have the cache of the larger studios, but this release shows that despite that the tendencies toward American exceptionalism remained.

67. ‘Highlights’, Veribest.

68. ‘Olympic Games’, Luce Cinecittà.

69. ‘America’s Olympic Winners’, Pathé.

70. ‘Americans Win Early Lead as 11th Olympic Games Open,’ Universal News, vol. 8, rel. 483, 10 August 1936.

71. ‘The Olympic Games’, Movietone News.

72. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969).

73. Ibid., 507–8.

74. ‘Highlights’, Veribest.

75. ‘Olympic Heroes’, Paramount.

76. ‘Americans Win’, Universal.

77. ‘America’s Athletic Marvel Jesse Owens The Outstanding Performer of the 1936 Olympic Games Winning Four Gold Medals’, British Movietone Digital Archive, Story no. 6864.

78. ‘Owen Strike Gold Again’, British Pathé Digital Archive, 8 August 1936, Film ID: 201206.142. The ‘Owen’ instead of ‘Owens’ typo was present in the archive’s labelling of the reel so I have left it in the reference.

79. ‘America’s Athletic Marvel’; ‘Olympic Sports in Berlin, August 6, 1936’, Pathé, British Pathé Digital Archive, film ID: 873.39.

80. Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 153.

81. Riefenstahl, Memoir, 205–206.

82. Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin’, 304.

83. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 38.

84. Bach, Leni, 144.

85. Welch, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft’, 213. Helmut Heiber writes: ‘His only interest was the responsibilities assigned him under the charter of the Propaganda Ministry: the exploitation of the propaganda value of important sports events; the political and propagandistic concern for German sports in foreign countries; the political and propagandistic supervision of athletic exchanges with the rest of the world’. Heiber, Helmut, Goebbels, trans. John Dickinson (New York: Da Capo Press), 189.

86. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 3–5.

87. Bach, Leni, 167; Large, Nazi Games, 244.

88. Frederick Birchall, ‘Goebbels Denise Intent to Use Games for Propaganda Purposes’, New York Times, 31 July 1936, 13.

89. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 4.

90. Bach, Leni, 143–4.

91. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 92, 179–80.

92. Ibid., 336.

93. Ibid., 80.

94. Steven Goldzwig illustrates this principle at work in his analysis of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, noting how President Johnson worked to cast the act in larger, abstract values in order to reduce tensions over its particulars. See Steven Goldzwig, ‘LBJ, the rhetoric of transcendence, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 1 (2003): 41.

95. Olympia, directed by Leni Riefenstahl (1938; Berlin, Germany: Pathfinder Home Entertainment, 2006), DVD. All references to the film are taken from this release. The International Olympic Committee purchased the rights to Olympia-Film GmbH (Riefenstahl’s production company) and have allegedly restored the film completely, though have not released it.

96. ‘Olympische Spiele Berlin 1936’, German Educational Film, Film ID 2601. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

97. For comparison’s sake, one can see a similar difference in the Italian reels from the games. The Luce Cinecittà Italian reel archive has a summary reel that is all footage from Olympia but was similarly edited to lessen Owens’s appearance and highlight the Italian athletes. See ‘XI Olimpiade, Olimpiade di Berlino’, Luce Cinecittà, D0666001.

98. ‘Sidelights of the Week’, New York Times, 4 September 1938: 38; David Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1991), 80.

99. ‘Sidelights,’ 38.

100. ‘2 Delegates Decry Venice Film Awards,’ New York Times, 2 September 1938. 21.

101. ‘German Film Star Here on Visit Only’, New York Times, 5 November 1938, 14. Riefenstahl also didn’t do herself any favours; when reports of Kristallnacht broke during her US press tour she dismissed them as ‘baseless rumours.’ See Large, Nazi Games, 313.

102. ‘Protest Olympic Movie’, New York Times, 4 November 1938, 20. Her only warm reception was from Walt Disney, whose Snow White and the Seven Dwarves lost out to Olympia at the International Film Festival. See Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, 80.

103. Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, The New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975.

104. Large, Nazi Games, 307.

105. Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl, A Life, trans. Edna McCown (New York: Farber and Farber, 2007), 152.

106. Riefenstahl, Memoir, 229.

107. Ibid., 195.

108. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics, 269-270. Mandell goes on to say: ‘Once at the stadium, the mere appearance of Jesse Owens’ neatly molded heard from some pit below the stands would cause sections of the crowd to break out in chants of ‘Yes-sa Ov-enss! Yes-sa Ov-enss!’’ and records that Owens was constantly hounded by Berlin’s autograph seekers and photographers (226). Large expounds on the subject: ‘With particular respect to the performance of American black athletes, the film also seems at first glance to be more than fair. Jesse Owens is clearly the star. He is treated so favorably that Berliners made a little joke out of the matter: ‘Dem Führer zeigt die Leni dann / was deutsche Filmkunst alles kann/ Da sah er dann im Negativ / wie positiv der Neger lief.’ (‘Leni shows the Führer too/ all that German film can do / He saw in negative print / how positive the Negro could sprint.’) On the other hand, while there is plenty of footage of Owens in action, there are no shots of the long lines of German kids patiently waiting to get the athlete’s autograph’ (Large, Nazi Games, 306–7). In fact, Goebbels was frustrated with the attention Riefenstahl gave to what he called ‘a day of shame for the white race’ (Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 143, 254).

109. Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, 82.

110. Large, Nazi Games, 307.

111. Michael Butterworth, ‘Race in “The Race”: Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, and Heroic Constructions of Whiteness’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 24, no. 3 (2007): 230. See also Susan Eastman and Andrew Billings, ‘Sportscasting and Sports Reporting: The Power of Gender Bias’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 24, no. 2 (2000): 192–214; Nick Trujillo and Leah Ekdom, ‘Sportswriting and American Cultural Values: The 1984 Chicago Cubs’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985): 262–81.

112. Atkinson, ‘Newsreels as Domestic Propaganda’, 77.

113. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1931), 31, 124.

114. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 85–6.

115. Large, Nazi Games, 304.