'Reel Injun' and 'Salute' Feeling manipulated by the Olympics' brand boosters? See these two timely documentaries. By: By Dorothy Woodend , 19 February 2010, TheTyee.ca View full article and comments: http://thetyee.ca/ArtsAndCulture/2010/02/19/ReelInjunSalute/ 'Salute' explores famous podium protest at 1968 Games. The sight of entire families wandering around downtown Vancouver decked out in every possible permutation of Olympic-style clothing, grandparents to babies emblemized from stem to stern, everyone glassily smiling like they have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid. Brrrrr. Forgive me, but I find this type of rabid boosterism unbecoming to Canadians. In the lead up to the Games, it was fine to bitch and complain, but now if you say anything bad about the Olympics in mixed company, people look at you like you might bite them. But even if it can seem as if the entire city has pretty much rolled over and let the Olympics have its way, there are still pockets of good old-fashioned Canadian contrariness.
This resistant spirit is exemplified by two documentaries (Reel Injun and Salute ) opening this week and next. Hail Mary, and pass the popcorn, you can hold the ammunition for now. DOXA Documentary Film Festival's Moving Pictures sports series wraps up with a bang next Thursday Febr. 25 with a screening of Salute .
The film centres on the iconic image from the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City when three men took to the podium to receive their medals for the 200m. Two of the athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their fists into the air, while the third wore a button for Project For Human Rights supporting their cause. Two of the men were black Americans and one was a white Australian by the name of Peter Norman. When you witness an act of courage, it is a rare and singular thing.
It's little wonder that the image of black fists raised in silent protest still reverberates some 42 years later. Paying the price for protest Salute , directed and produced by Peter Norman's nephew Matt Norman, lays out the context for the event in detail, systematically explaining that protests in 1968 were happening all around the globe: from Australia, where the burgeoning Aboriginal Rights movement was echoing the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., to France, where student protests prompted a nation-wide strike.
Into this highly fraught moment dropped the Olympic Summer Games. Perhaps it was destiny that these three very different men were fated to be standing on the podium at that particular time and place. Or as Peter Norman says, "Maybe we were all put on this Earth to do just that."
The one thing that the film makes explicitly clear is that there was a very large price to be paid for speaking out. In the case of Norman, whose time in the 200m still stands as an Australian record, the cost was exclusion from all Olympic activities until the day he died. Despite being one of the fastest men in Australia, Norman was not allowed to compete in the 1972 Summer Games. Even in the 2000 Summer Olympics held in Sydney, Norman was shunned by organizers.
Both Tommie Smith and John Carlos suffered even greater levels of retribution, one man even losing his wife to suicide. But the fact remains that despite death threats and worse, this trio of men had the courage of their convictions and the strength of character to speak out.
Before his death in 2006 from a heart attack, Peter Norman gave an interview to The Daily Telegraph about the need to speak up and out: "Today there is a whole new generation, but someone still has to stand up and make a statement on behalf of the down-trodden... Once you've earned the right to stand on that podium, you've got that square metre of the world that belongs to you. What you do with it is up to you -- within limits."
- Seizing the spotlight
In this most current incarnation of the Olympics, it's hard to imagine any contemporary athlete getting up on the podium and taking such a principled stand. Although gag orders were supposedly issued to different Olympic teams during the Beijing Games, even wearing the colour orange (as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with Tibetan monks) proved difficult.
Athletes these days all seem content to toe the party line, smile sweetly and wait for the endorsement deals to roll in. Getting up and telling the world that there's something you don't like, or something you want to change, doesn't come around too often, but it usually seems to starts with an O. The Olympics or the Oscars, for example. The Oscars also have had their fair share of disruption, but none so remarkable as Marlon Brando and Sasheen Littlefeather's speech at the 1973 Academy Awards Ceremony.
The Native Rights movement, like the Civil Rights Movement before it, was at a watershed moment, with the standoff at Wounded Knee. Not permitted to give the whole of Brando's prepared statement, Sasheen Littlefeather was booed by audience members and had to be protected from the fury of a very drunk John Wayne..
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