Training the Eye: Sportization and Aestheticization Processes of the Earliest Olympic Games

EDUARDO GALAK

Seminario; Physical Cultures of The Body; 2021

This research seeks to analyse the 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, investigating footages from the beginning of the twentieth century until Berlin 1936, when the aestheticization process became analogous to the sportivization process. From observing a set of documentary Olympics footages placed on the Olympic Studies Centre, especially those produced since Saint Louis Games in 1904, this article analyses projected significations about individual and collective body. In other words, this ‘movement-images’ –as Deleuze named– shows projected meanings about the individual and collective body. The central focus of this paper argues that the informative cinema, through the exhibition of educated bodies, teaches and also forms the sensitivity of the viewer perspective. In other words, it not only transmits ways of doing, but also an ethos, or 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. The hypothesis is that historic filmed physical activities intended to educate not only through the gaze, but also the gaze itself. In other words, it not only transmits ways of doing, but also to form an ethos, to form ways of perceiving. This paper concludes with a counterpoint between Rancière and Benjamin about technical reproducibility and political reproduction, considering the aesthetic-political tension that sports put into play.