Fuck the Olympics

There are countless excuses for a reasonable person to express the above-mentioned sentiment to his or herself, or to another. The asinine commercials. Bob Costas' weak attempt to become one of the Jet Mahogany Hair People. Al Michael's hair plugs. The endless parade of white X-Gamers in their lame pseudo-flannel "uniforms" doing skateboard tricks for "gold."

It is to puke.

But on the other hand there is the exalted sport of ski jumping or, as ideally practiced, "ski flying." And of course I am conjuring up your recollections of one of my favorite celluloid memories, Werner Herzog's "Great Ecstacies of the Sculptor Steiner," which any tiny professor could easily argue is a condensed, if not the most perfectly condensed, example of Herzog's best sensibilities. I'm not going to rehash the aesthetic of the sublime.

But I do remember the first time I saw the movie at San Francisco's Goethe Institute sometime in the mid 1990s (the most complete restrospective of Herzog's movies in the US, at least that I'm aware of), projected in 16mm, as it was originally shot. And I remember the two peak moments in the movie as if they were yesterday. The later of the two shots is the final shot, where the great Walter Steiner has completed a mind-shattering jump and is raising his arms, a darkened glyph melting into a white field of ice, his humanity subsumed by the grain of the film until only a fundamental symbol of human ecstacy remains. It's a quintessential Herzogian moment, awesomely enhanced (as typical of many of Herzog's films up through Fitzcarraldo) by the golden chiming of Florian Fricke's and Daniel Fishelsher's musical accompaniment (not sure exactly which track this but it sounds a lot like "Aus Lebten Die Engel Auf Erden" from the US Polydor soundtrack of Fitzcarraldo....).

Which brings us to the heart of this moment's contemplation: it is 2010 and technology has evolved to the point where high speed film (or ultra slow motion, from the viewer's perspective) has been rendered nearly mundane, but what in the goddamn fuck is NBC's broadcast editor thinking?! Because rather than blowing everybody's minds with the ski flying money shot, the coverage cuts away every fucking time, from sweet "flyer's vantage" shots to mundane spectator's pov bullshit.

For comparison, watch this clip from "Great Ecstacies" starting at 6:44



In particular, catch the moment starting at 7:00, when the Vuh soundtrack is really coming on, when Steiner is ninety degrees to the camera, and watch it keep coming until that miraculous moment at 7:21-7:26 when a kaleidoscopic pattern of parked buses drifts lysergically across the screen.

And that's the sort of image that we never see broadcast. As that stain upon humanity Craig T. Nelson infamously asks in "Poltgergeist": Why?!!?!??!?!? Why?!?!!!?!?!?

Because it's clear that the camera is set up perfectly to provide this image. It's just that whoever the dumbfuck editor is, he/she is choosing to cut away. Every. Fucking. Time.

Alright, enough ranting. Here's a trivia question for the commenters (who will be the first??): on what Popul Vuh album (CD or vinyl or "none") can you hear the musical accompaniment (a solo Fishelsher piece, I'm not mistaken) to the aforementioned filmic passage (7:02- 9:00)?