Body and cinematographic techniques. Teaching physical culture through Argentinean newsreel “Sucesos Argentinos” (1942)

EDUARDO GALAK

Seminario; Physical Cultures of the Body; 2022

Informative documentary cinema was the first mass media technology that put movement as its transmission axis, in the first half of the 20th century. Its exponential growth implied the circulation of homogenizing discourses reproducing ways of doing as ways of being.The objective of the research consists of questioning the visual and narrative discourses developed in newsreels how moving images that show bodies in movements reproduced correct senses.In this work, we analyse three classes of Physical Education shown by the most important Argentinean newsreel on history: “Sucesos Argentinos”. Between August and October 1942, three short films of around 3 minutes are exhibited in movie theatres, showing “sports technique lessons”. The teacher, Edmundo D’Acosta, explains in front of the camera different body movement techniques, combining different cinematographic techniques, such as slow motion or camera games, to project the good uses of physical culture, developed those. These images run through discourses on the body, on the educational, on the natural, on youth, on masculinity and femininity.