Transcript

NARRATOR

The 20th of April, 1938, was a very special day here in Munich. It was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Five years after taking power, things were going well for the Fuehrer. And he decided to celebrate turning 49 with a screening of his favourite film.

The film was Olympia directed by Hitler’s star filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. And it was a celebration of the recent Olympic games held in Germany which Hitler had used as an occasion to promote his vision of a strong, healthy, not to say aggressive, new nation.

The film opened with a remarkable sequence, a montage of ancient Greek sculpture. The star of the show was a sculpture known as the Discobolus, the discus thrower, created in the fifth century BC by the sculptor Myron. Riefenstahl showed this statue morphing into a real live German athlete. This image of the perfect classical body reborn utterly entranced the Fuehrer.

Scarcely a month after Hitler’s birthday screening of Olympia, the statue itself arrived in Munich bought by the Nazis for a record price of 5 million lira. A cast of the statue can still be found at the former Nazi headquarters in Munich.

To really understand Myron’s discus thrower, you have to put it in context and compare it with the sort of statues that were common just a generation or two earlier. For a century or more, Greek artists had created thousands of standing nude men. They had a certain presence, but they’re also fairly stiff and formal and distinctly unlifelike.

And then in the fifth century BC, with his bronze Discobolus, Myron blew all of that apart. Suddenly we find this naturalistic athlete mid flow. And that spiralling composition is so dynamic, so fluid, a vortex of compressed pent-up soon-to-be-released energy. Myron wanted here to dramatise an ephemeral moment, an instant that he’d ripped from reality. And yet, the result was so satisfying and harmonious that it felt timeless all the same.