The ‘reel’ Jesse Owens: visual rhetoric and the Berlin Olympics

The story of Jesse Owens has become one of the dominant sports narratives of the twentieth century. The compelling visual record of his performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics has been used to argue for a number of political and social causes. What is particularly fascinating about the images of Owens’s win is the ways in which it functioned for diametrically opposing ideological viewpoints. The story behind the footage reveals an interesting confluence of history and visual rhetoric. This essay considers how the Owens footage was put to work as both an example of American exceptionalism in one case and a transcendent appeal designed to mitigate the stigma of Nazi ideology in another. The principles of visual rhetoric elucidate the ways in which imagery like the Owens footage is purposefully packaged to portray these types of messages.