The formation of a sport imaginary through images. An aesthetic analysis of film images from the first Olympic Games (1904–1948)

EDUARDO GALAK

Jornada; Visual Culture and the global impact of sport; 2023

An image lost in an archive. An image that reminds us that we are facing an image. This is the starting point of this intervention. An image mediated by a technique, in this case, a cinematographic technique. An image that exhibits techniques, in this case, techniques of the body.The idea is to study the filmic idea, as Gilles Deleuze (1984) would say of a set of documentary motion pictures kept at the Olympic Studies Center of the IOC (International Olympic Committee), Lausanne, Switzerland.The sports amateurism of Saint Louis, 1904; the discarded material from the films or the camera that does not get to film the runner because it is slower, from Stockholm, 1912; the filming of Zatopek signing autographs, the filming of Zatopek being filmed signing autographs (London, 1948). The technique, the human machine, and the mechanical lens of the camera are analyzed as aesthetic records of trained bodies in front of a “trained eye” that exhibits the analogy between sportization and aestheticization processes (Galak, 2021).What is the point of cameramen filming each other, taking into account the cost of the film meter at that time? Is it waste material, and since there were meters left, they decided to film themselves? Why keep these images in the official archive of the International Olympic Committee? Who hired these cameramen? But above all, since these images were shot inside a sports stadium, guarded by the IOC, and developed in the context of the Olympics, are those images sports images?