OLYMPIC FLAMES – The Mexico City Olympiad and the Massacre of Tlatelolco
One of the great things about sports is, that much like art, it is perceived as an autonomous social realm, a space for a test of human ability outside of economic or political necessity. Since ancient times, sports offers a space where man’s fate (and more recently, women’s) is not decided by accidents of birth. An athlete does not need to be rich, or well-educated; in this arena, you need only discipline, will-power and training. And of all sports events, the Olympics, with its global span and its UN-backed non-professional ethos, epitomizes the desire for a freedom built around our shared humanity. In the classical period (in the case of the Olympics, a stretch of about a thousand years) the Olympics had a special status, outside of normal bickering between the Greek city states. This was marked by the “Olympic Truce” where ongoing disputes and even warfare were brought to a halt, marked by the famous Olympic Flame.
2024 is an Olympiad year, and with Paris, the most civilized of cities, hosting, spirits are high. It is in this vein that the Metrograph offers us a screening series, “Art Cinema, Olympiad, and the World” which promises both films that offer in some cases “high-style depictions,” and in others “kaleidoscopic investigations of the diverse set of social, economic, political and industrial networks that operate around each of the games.”
They have several documentaries, including significant contributions such as Masahiro Shinoda’s Sapporo Winter Olympics, and Carlos Saura’s Marathon. Also included is The Olympics in Mexico by Alberto Isaac (1969, 111 min.).
The Olympics in Mexico (Dir. Alberto Isaac, 1969)
A bit of background. The 1968 Olympics were held from October 12 to 27 in Mexico City. They were the first ever in Latin America, and the first in a Spanish speaking country. The government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz spent some $150 million dollars to showcase Mexico as a worthy host. The architectural evidence can be seen across the city to this day, but the games themselves live in the shadows cast by the massacre that took place at the opposite end of the vast city from the stadium some ten days earlier.
Mexico was hardly the only country where ’68 was a time of youth rebellion. But the form that unrest took in a country that has been a republic since the early 19th century, but was in 1968 a one-party state run by the PRI, the Party of the Institutional Revolution — ultimately one of the longest lived regimes in 20th century history — differs significantly from stories emerging from Paris or Berkeley the same year, resembling more the Soviet treatment of the youth of Prague.
Tanks confront students in Tlatelolco Plaza, October 2, 1968 / El Grito. ( Dir. Leobardo López Arretche México, 1968)
The story starts on the campus of UNAM, the Mexico National Autonomous University, the star academic institution of Mexico. In June, 1968 the overreaction of the school authorities to a fight on campus led to a series of strikes and demands for student control, guaranteed rights of assembly, release of political prisoners. A strike committee was formed. The struggle struck a chord, and on August 27th a call for a demonstration in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s main square, and the site of the Presidential Palace was answered by over half a million people, far and away the largest demonstration in the country’s history.
The take over of the Zocalo was the last straw for the government. With the Olympics drawing near, the government organized a response to end the student movement — Operation Galeana, a joint effort including the Army, elements of the Presidential Guard, riot police, as well as plain-clothes provocateurs. A demonstration called for October 2 in the Plaza de Tres Culturas, a modern development named for the presence of pre-columbian and colonial era ruins, was their target. Thousands of students gathered in support of the strike committee. A helicopter flew low overhead. A series of signal flares were ignited, shots were fired, and the killing began. There were some five thousand troops with some two hundred armored cars surrounding the students and preventing escape. There was surveillance and crowd control equipment provided by the US. The killing went on all night. The roundup for days. The number of dead is unknown, but estimates run to three or four hundred, with about a thousand wounded and thousands more detained.
I was a young student from Berkeley when I went to Mexico City for the first time in the winter of 1968. Although both the Olympics and the student demonstrations were over, the aftermath was unavoidable. The family I was staying with talked about the stench of the bodies burned at the army base in Chapultepec Park wafting over their upper middle class Polanco neighborhood. And a quiet war of grafitti stencils and posters was still visible as well, posters that made clear the deep connection between the massacre and the Olympics.
All this is just to say that to mention the 1968 Mexico City Olympics is to talk about the massacre by the Mexican government of hundreds of students, many of them from the same campus, the Ciudad Universitaria, that was the site of the Olympic stadium.
So what about the movie? At this point I have to seriously question the programming talents of the Metrograph team. This is a film that should not be shown without significant context.
Admittedly, the film itself was a tour de force. 750,000 feet of film shot in a wide screen format with some 400 on crew. The director, Alberto Isaac had himself been an Olympic competitor in his youth. The film was a significant propaganda victory for the Mexican government and the PRI. It was even nominated for an Oscar when it came out in 1969.
The Olympics in Mexico (Alberto Isaac, 1969, 240 min.)
The programmers at Metrograph include an essay from a well known British author on sports, Geoff Dyer. https://metrograph.com/the-olympics-in-mexico/
Unfortunately, the review seems to emerge from a parallel universe where the Olympics are not just autonomous, but entirely separate from Earthly events. It feels a bit like reading a review of Leni Reifenstahl’s Olympia (1938) in a Nazi newspaper.
To be fair, Dyer certainly noted internal contradictions in his essay. After dwelling on the beauty of the special effects (lots of slo-mo here, at a time when it still required special cameras) he notes that the film has an all-encompassing idea of harmony to the point of soft-pedaling the few signs of politics creeping into the event itself. A key moment in 1968 was the Black Power salutes of two American athletes, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who raised their fists during the the playing of the US national anthem, accompanied by Australian athlete Peter Norman. The demonstration has been called one of the most overtly political statements in the history of the modern Olympics. As Dyer notes, the film shows the moment, but without context, essentially burying it.
“Where’s the harm in that?” one may ask. There is none, if you assume that the Coca-Cola ideal of teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony—rather than freedom from the realm of necessity or whatever—represents the endpoint of political struggle and le cinéma engagé. Geoff Dyer “The Olympics in Mexico”
On the other hand, even the Wikipedia article about the 1968 Olympics has several paragraphs detailing the links between the Olympic events and the massacre, as a bit of homework might have revealed. The Mexican government continued to perpetrate the coverup the documentary The Olympics in Mexico is part of for over thirty years.
Although the documentary ends with a spokesman calling on the youth of the world to gather again in four years, the shadow of the student deaths continued to hang over the PRI throughout the following decades. But it was not until Vicente Fox, the first president from another political party in 70 years, opened an investigation in 2001 that the facts of the massacre started to emerge. US documents showed that the then Minister of the Interior,(and later President) Luis Echeverria Alvarez who was responsible for the deaths was a CIA asset. Attempts were made to charge him with genocide.
As someone who teaches research both for documentary filmmaking, and for documentary film studies, I routinely urge my students to do two kinds of historical investigation, diachronic and synchronic. Diachronic suggests across time, in this case, one might develop a historical sense of Olympic documentaries from the earliest deployment through more recent efforts. The Metrograph programs seem to have done something along these lines. But just as important is synchronic research. What was happening in the rest of the society at the time of the film you’re looking at? Here, the failure of the programmers seems monumental. The unfortunate result is to perpetrate a coverup which was only ever a fig leaf for slaughter.
The Metrograph’s Olympic series tries to offer some kind of social context, although I thought it odd to enlist Kidlat Tahimik’s Turumba for this effort. They might have done better to screen El Grito, a collectively produced documentary from the period that details the student movements struggles, and ends with lighting of the Olympic flame. Lovingly restored by UNAM, it is worth watching if you speak Spanish. Oddly, its narration was written by Oriana Fallaci, who was one of the many observers wounded by gunfire at the plaza.
As a final note, I asked the Mexican filmmaker, Luis Lupone, if he knew anything about The Olympics in Mexico. This is his reply:
The documentary was made by the best cameramen and film directors at the time. Just as it was the first Olympics to be broadcast in color in history, the government wanted a film worthy of showing the greatness of the event, which is why it took a year to edit and only premiered in October, 1969. Evidently, as you say, it is a propaganda film about the achievements of the repressive state. The paradox was that the equipment purchased by the government in July 1968, Arri 16 and 35 mm cameras. 200 and 400mm telephotos, O’Connor hydraulic tripods, Sennheiser directional microphones, this whole set of equipment debuted in the massacre of October 2, where from the 14th floor of the Foreign Relations Tower on one side of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas they filmed more than 80 hours, from October 1 to October 3 October. No one has seen that material; rumors say that it was burned as well as many student corpses. Others say that Luis Echeverria, who was Secretary of the Interior at the time, and was the one who orchestrated the massacre, has it in his house.
Martin Lucas – July 18, 2024