[MUSIC]. Hello. The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games are in the collective memory of Olympism and for many reasons. These were the so-called Nazi Games organized by the Nazi regime. However, for the purposes of this course, the Berlin Olympic Games are significant because they were the Games that marked the starting of the television era and its very close relationship with Olympic movement. The images from the stadium were broadcast through the television closed circuit to 21 auditoriums located in Berlin, Potsdam and Leipzig. This very first delivery of the Olympics was made with only three cameras. For those TV viewers, the experience watching the Olympics on TV was a social experience, enjoyed in community, as it happened, with the cinematograph. The first television viewers of the Olympic paid a ticket to enjoy the experience in a 50 centimeters screen size television set. Despite the fact that the television technology have to be improved very much, in Berlin started the history of the fruitful alliance between the Olympics and television. The television is a telecommunication system fruit of the alliance between the cinema, capable of recording moving images, and the telecommunication, that enable to send at a distance those images and allows that a TV set receives them. In a few years, the audience would witness one of the major innovation of the television if we compared it with the cinema: The capacity of broadcasting in the distance live events as the Olympic Games. Although the technology had been invented, it had to be improved. Moreover, the social uses of this media, this new media called television, would not consolidate until decades after this first event. Another great milestone of the Berlin Olympic Games was the production of the film Olympia by the German director Leni Riefenstahl. As I have mentioned beforehand, I will explain the great innovations in the language and technologies that were produced in the cinema and that were later used by television. This is without any doubt one of the best movies of all time based on one edition of the Games, although we cannot hide that the Olympia is a very controversial film due to the links of the director with the Nazi regime and the fact that some consider it an element of massive propaganda too. In spite of that, in this great documentary film we can observe great innovations from the perspective of the audiovisual production that will be used many years after by the television. We will mention several of them. The use of the sub-aquatic cameras, that is, cameras encased in a box that could shot above and below the water. They were used for the diving events. Another innovation were the magnificent panning shots of the athletic events from specifically constructed towers in the main stadium. In addition, from this film a very little camera was utilized too. It was the so-called Kinamo Camera, which used only five meters of film. Its relatively small size permitted to be used unobtrusively. At the same time, as Taylor Downing tells, in the Olympia film it was used a enormous 600 millimeters lens, the longest telephoto lens then available. Riefenstahl wanted to use this camera to capture the emotion on the faces of the athletes. The camera could be placed well away from the action so as not intrude thus still catch expressions of pain and anxiety, of triumph and elation, giving the film a particularly human edge, according to Downing. For getting stunning slow motion images, Riefenstahl contracted Kurt Neubert one of the best-known slow motion experts in Europe. Neubert used giant DeBrie cameras that ran film through the gate at up to 96 frames per second: Four times as fast as real-time photography, that allowed to get very good quality slow motion scenes. In addition to the aforementioned, there were more innovations: A camera, without an operators, was catapulted along steel tracks down the side of the running track at the same speed as the sprinters and slightly ahead of them back on the front runners. All these technologies allowed the Riefenstahl style cameraman to take a very original shoots for that time, which became into standards in the sporting broadcasting 40 or 50 years after Olympia. When the Games came back after the stop as consequence of the Second World War, television acquired a new dimension in the Olympic Movement development. The London 1948 Games saw the first live broadcasting over the air of the Olympics of regional nature 50 miles radius. Viewers could enjoy at home the images, even through only 80,000 households in the UK had TV-sets to receive the images. The BBC paid for the first time in history 80,000 Guineas for the rights to deliver the signal through television. By the time the Games took place, television production technology had already made rapid changes. Cameras with three different lens were used and Telecine machines were available, which allowed the broadcasting of TV programmes with images of the day. In Rome 1960 Olympics, the two milestones were the internationalization of the Games and the use for the first time of tape recorders that allowed, among other things, the replay of the images. At the same time, in 1960 an historical moment arrived in the modern Olympic broadcasting when the first live international television transmission of the Games was made from the ancient city of Rome. 18 European countries received live images of the Games and the people from the United States, Canada and Japan could watch the Games only hours after. The distribution of the signal throughout Europe was assured by the Eurovision Network. The recorded tapes were flown to the United States and Japan. It is estimated that 300 million viewers watched the Rome Olympic Games. [BLANK_AUDIO]
