The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912

Given the opening titles state this is a re-edited version of surviving elements, it's difficult to come to conclusions about the original production. As it exists, it's 175 minutes of clips, arranged in chronological order, of the 1912 Olympics. Events are offered in abbreviated versions, typically showing ten seconds of an event, followed by the names of the winners, and then images of them; the one exception seems to be the women's diving, which shows the young women in their damp outfits.

In 1912, of course, the thought was that people would wish to see the winners. Nowadays, most of the names are forgotten, save for Jim Thorpe and the King of Sweden. Almost everything is shot with a fixed camera, using angles that had become established by a decade earlier, back when actualities would show these sports, each by itself as part of a film program. Given these issues, this becomes a peculiar film, probably the longest documentary of its time, but of interest to an audience of Olympics memorabilists, showing the Olympics in an era when it was a competition of amateurs, people who performed for pride, and then got on with their lives.