The Visual Record of Peronist Childhood Policies. The Case of the Short Documentary “Vacaciones útiles” (‘Useful Holidays’)

EDUARDO GALAK; MARÍA SILVIA SERRA

Congreso; 42nd International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE); 2021

This research analyses the short documentary film “Vacaciones útiles” (“Useful Vacations”, circa 1948), made by Cine Escuela Argentino state policy, a program dependent on the National Ministry of Justice and Public Instruction. It is a 5:47 duration documentary that presents the activity that schools offer for children as public policy for useful vacations. The aim is to use the period without going to school to learn how to swim in the river, to kite, to play traditional games, to watch theatre puppet and singing shows and to learn folk dances. All this within the framework of government agencies aimed at caring for children from popular sectors at vacation time.The short film is a material that can be thought as characteristically Peronist filmic propaganda. Insofar as it mentions certain concepts that are constants in the rhetoric of the Perón governments between 1946 and 1955: the narrator mention “people”, the “descamisados”, and the regular uses of the phrase “the only privileged ones are the children” are terms that appear in the film document in an audio-visual way.It begins by pointing out the danger that the street represents for children when they don’t have to go to school, and how the useful holidays program offers the opportunity to get to know the city, go to the river, play with other children, participate in events and parties. The program presents itself as “the summer vacation of the shirtless children of the nation, for which many games and diversions were in the past an unattainable desire”. In other words, a recurrent idea in Peronism appears as rhetoric: public policy and the role of the State as central in the daily routine of life.Throughout the short-film is shown how school buildings are used in summer times for these activities. It also offers images of a party for infants with authorities, where fruit packages sent by the Eva Perón Foundation are distributed, and where children dance folk dances, as part of the “new national didactic”.It is possible to observe a series of elements, both aesthetic and political, present in the way in which Peronism configured childhood. On the one hand, the role of the State as a central regulator not only of institutions aimed at children, such as school, but also of the use of “free time”: holidays, the street, and so on. On the other hand, the emphasis on childhood as a privileged subject typical of the Peronist project (as was pointed out by Adriana Puiggrós). At the same time, the type of discursive construction that is sustained on this particular age segment about their happiness as effect of everyone putting “love in this crusade for children”. And, finally, the audio-visual record as a device to reach a good portion of the population based on a mechanical reproducibility that enables political reproduction, and thereby develop a documentary film near to a totalitarian non-fascist propaganda, but with a democratic rhetoric.