[In Tokyo Olympiad] Ichikawa has made a document of such yielding warmth and variety, of "play" and candor, of "eye" rather than "I," of the heroic in defeat rather than triumph, and triumph shared, as to provide the documentary a new classic.

Tokyo Olympiad is a "classic" in at least three ways. First … a human document. Ichikawa has shots (and one feels the director behind the photography) of human faces that would satisfy and delight a Cartier-Bresson. The faces touch every continent, every age, and virtually the whole gamut of human emotion….

Secondly, Ichikawa gives the event, the Olympics, more stature than, in fact, it has—by showing what is most human about it, constantly implying man's world. I doubt if anyone would otherwise have realized such meaning in such a spectacle. Where [Leni] Riefenstahl glories to the physical machine of man [in her Olympiad] Ichikawa lets the...