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ABSTRACT
This article analyses different ways of perceiving sports based on the study of cinematographic documentary of the first Olympic Games. The aim is to explore the political discourses and aesthetic senses transmitted through images, studying footages from the beginning of the twentieth century until Berlin 1936, when the aestheticization process became analogous to the sportization process, as Norbert Elias pointed out. This ‘movement-image’—as Gilles Deleuze named it—shows that a set of documentary Olympics footages, especially those produced since Saint Louis Games in 1904, projected meanings about the individual and collective body. The hypothesis is that historic filmed physical activities intended to educate through not only the gaze but also the gaze itself, to form ways of perceiving bodies and practices.
The central focus of this paper argues that the informative cinema teaches through the exhibition of educated bodies, but also forms the sensitivity of the viewer perspective. In other words, it not only transmits ways of doing but also forms an ethos, to form ways of perceiving, to form ways of being sensitive. The aim of this study is to explore the political discourses and aesthetic senses transmitted through the Olympic images, which are often loaded with moralism and patriotism. This paper concludes with a conceptual counterpoint between Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin about technical reproducibility and political reproduction, considering the aesthetic-political tension that sports put into play.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In fact, it can be pointed out a third Coubertin strategy: the relationship between sports and arts, specially music and dances (Keys Citation2013). This link between sports and arts it is also evident with the active development of mass-media, especially through newsreels, as this paper analyses.
2. For free access to the images during the stay at the Olympic Studies Centre in July 2015, the author signed a mandatory agreement not to reproduce the images; therefore, this article does not come with graphic support.
3. For a historical review of first Olympic Games on filmic reel, see Taylor Downing, Olympia (Dowing Citation2002).
4. Although this Elias statement’ about the political condition of ‘modern’ sports, it is important to point out the systematic rejections of sports institutions with respect to athletes’ political demonstrations, something especially visible in the Olympic Games, including sanctions. The author thanks the reviewers for making this point.
5. In addition to studying the scene, the framing and the editing, there is a fourth dimension which, according to the theoretical position that this investigation follows, is methodologically unreachable in a historical analysis: the reception of such cinematic aesthetic discourses. In a figurative sense, it is precisely this text that closes the fourth wall.
6. On a filmic review of Olympia, see Naofumi Masumoto, ‘Interpretations of the filmed body: an analysis of the Japanese version of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia’, in Critical Reflections on Olympic Ideology: Second International Symposium for Olympic Research, ed. Robert Barney and Klaus Meier (MASUMOTO Citation1994), 146–157.
7. It is important to say that Deleuze follows here Dziga Vértov’s ‘theory of intervals’. On the other hand, it is not insignificant that Vértov has been a revolutionary of the documentary news cinema, with his Kino-pravda, and the theory of intervals, developed in 1919. For more details on the director of the famous film Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), see Dziga Vértov, The kino-eye: the writings of Dziga Vértov (VÉRTOV Citation1984).
8. The invention of the appareil de chronophotographie by Etienne Jules Marey at the end of the nineteenth century preceded the cinematographic camera, and it has in its origins a pretension to be an instrument of scientific measurement, especially physiological. There is even a relationship between the birth of the cinema and the modern rational gymnastics: both movement-image and systematized and methodical corporal practices are born with the same scientific pretension to attach movements by techniques that interpret the body as its object. For further, see Educar (con) la mirada. Discursos políticos y sentidos estéticos sobre la cultura física en noticieros cinematográficos” (GALAK Citation2017).
9. It is interesting to think about what it is left out of the frame by movement-images regarding body education; legitimizing and at the same time de-legitimizing some practices. They do not show, at least in an open manner, sexuality or intimate personal hygiene, but they educate about them indirectly, precisely by hiding (restricted to the private) or taking them for granted, naturalized.
10. The use of the concept ‘distance’ is not casual; it owes its justification to the works of Walter Benjamin and his conceptualization of the aura associated to the cinematography as a distance, and to the theorization of Jacques Rancière, precisely in Les Écarts du cinéma. The distance shows in a figurative sense that only in an analytical perspective image and movement are separable, such as aesthetics and politics. For the Benjaminean idea of ‘distance’, see Walter Benjamin, Discursos interrumpidos I. Filosofía del arte y de la historia (Benjamin Citation1989) and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Other Writings on Media (Benjamin Citation2008). And for the Rancièrean meaning of ‘distance’, see Jacques Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema (RANCIÈRE Citation2014b).
11. It is important to distinguish Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia from the documentary film records on Berlin 1936 stored at the IOC Olympic Studies Centre, which were two similar but not identical materials.
12. Maria Graciela RODRÍGUEZ (Citation2003) points out that Riefenstahl’s conceptual perspective in Olympia plays between the Olympism sport and the turnen—the German gymnastics method–, fundamentally expecting to merge moral senses with the proposal to return the movement to a certain enlightened nature. For further, see Graham McFee and Alan Tomlinson, ‘Riefenstahl’s Olympia: ideology and aesthetics in the shaping of the Aryan athletic body’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 16 (MCFEE and TOMLINSON Citation1999): 86–106.
13. The reference to the classic work of Kantorowicz is due to his analysis of the medieval worldview regarding the relationship of the individual body (mortal, biological, material, personal) with the collective body that these bodies form (immaterial, immortal, political), represented by the King as God’s delegate on Earth. In a more current philosophical order, it is interesting to introduce the reading that Giorgio Agamben makes on the matter in ‘The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government’ (AGAMBEN Citation2011), since it adds to Kantorowicz interpretation a deep dimension of practical morality in the relationship between these two bodies.
14. It is not accidental that in those years the ‘official’ discourse transmitted a moral mandate that subsumed the individual will: scientism functioned as a legitimating rhetoric, indicating that the hygiene of bodies was the way for the eugenics improvement of the race, and with it of the homeland. With their contextual particularities, totalitarian regimes, such as Nazism or fascism, but also other Latin American ones, as in Argentina or Brazil, made these discourses their public policy. This can be seen in ‘Educar los cuerpos al servicio de la política. Cultura física, higienismo, raza y eugenesia en Argentina y Brasil’ (GALAK Citation2016) and ‘Conceptualizations of the body as a subject and object of study in South American and Anglo-Saxon Physical Education’ (GALAK and VAREA Citation2020).
15. In fact, even if Rancière explicitly states in Malaise dans l’esthetique—translated to English as Aesthetics and Its Discontents (RANCIÈRE Citation2009b)—that he is not saying the same thing; the idea of ‘aestheticization of politics’ is already partly in Walter Benjamin, in a way of fascism denunciation. In The work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility (Cambridge: Harvard University Press Citation2008, AGAMBEN Citation2011), Benjamin argues that the idea of the führer cult represents at one point the triumph of the aestheticization of politics, which is at the end the triumph of totalitarianism, with all its dangers.
16. It could even be added in this line that there is a sort of counterpoint between Deleuze and Benjamin, because even though for DELEUZE (Citation2004) the cinema is mechanical, his perception is not.
17. This reference to the spectator passivity aims to contrast with the athlete action, who is the main actor in the sporting competition. The spectator is not interpreted as a rigid brick of a supposed ‘fourth wall’ that performances, such as the cinema or theatre, generate. On the contrary, interpreting is a fundamental action of viewer perception, as well as looking, analysing, cheering, making noises, singing, and so on.