A transnational image of the educated body. Physical culture in newsreels from Argentina, Spain, and Italy (1934-1944)

EDUARDO GALAK

Conferencia; Physical Cultures of the Body; 2023

H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports

The aim is to question documentary informational cinema used as a cultural artifact understood as a pedagogical device. For this, a set of newsreels filmed in Argentina, Spain, and Italy in the second quarter of the 20th century are analyzed to understand how a symmetrical aesthetic was formed to narrate a physical culture: sports and massive gymnastics exhibitions organized by the government for schoolchildren.The informative documentary cinema, especially the newsreel genre, consisted of a massive media resource to communicate national and international cultural, social, and political activities. Precisely, the films produced by the Argentine main newsreel between 1938 and 1955, “Sucesos Argentinos” show familiarity with other European ones filmed in the second quarter of the 20th century, especially in Italy (“Cinegiornale LUCE” and “Cine GIL”) and Spain (“NO-DO”). Indeed, in addition to having a strong economic, political, and cultural influence, especially because of historical immigration, these countries also exchanged ways of narrating physical activities organized by the governments.Based on nationalist rhetoric characteristic of the interwar period and of the Second World War, it can be said that there was a transnational aesthetic of how to narrate the correct bodily and cultural techniques. Therefore, images that were mandatorily projected in these three countries in all cinemas between 1934 and 1944, a decade of political and aesthetic affinities in the construction of the national image of the correct body, are analyzed.