Rituals and Records: the Films of the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games

The title of Allen Guttmann's landmark study of sports history,From Ritual to Record, captures the way cinematic treatments of the Olympic Games, Europe's most resonant sporting invention, developed in the early twentieth century. Projected film and the modern Olympic Games began in the same year, 1896, and the way the two phenomena have grown together demonstrates a progression from formality and ritual to an ever-increasing emphasis on individual, nation and achievement. This transition from ritual to record is demonstrated by two Olympic films from the European Games of Paris 1924 and Amsterdam 1928,Les Jeux Olympiques Paris 1924andDe Olympische Spelen. These cinematic records are not only documentary records of the events they portray, but are an important reminder that modern sports are witnessed by most not as stadium spectators but as viewers – in the case of the 1924 and 1928 films, as members of a cinema audience. The film record is essential to our understanding of the popularisation of modern sports, while through their contrary impulses to document and to idealise (particularly through the use of slow-motion photography), the two films demonstrate what is meaningful about Olympic sport.

An Examiner-Induced Visual Vigilance Apparatus

A film/record instrument is described that could measure attending behavior, distractibiliry, hyperkinetic movement, and selected aspects of visual perception by recording the subject's response to significant visual stimuli.

The Control of Movement in the Preferred and Non-Preferred Hands

The nature of the difference in skill between the preferred and non-preferred hands was investigated using a peg-board task. The first experiment examined the effects of varying movement amplitude and target tolerance on performance. The difference between hands was found to be related to tolerance rather than movement amplitude. The second study analysed a film record of well-practised subjects, confirming the hypothesis that most of the difference between hands is due to relative slowness of the non-preferred hand in the positioning phase involving small corrective movements. Analysis of the type and number of errors further suggested that this result is not due to differences in duration of movements but to their increased frequency, implying greater accuracy of aiming with the preferred hand. Thus whilst the initial gross analysis implicated feedback processing in skill differences the more detailed analysis suggests that motor output of the nonpreferred hand is simply more variable.