“Un pueblo de deportistas”. Propaganda and sports in Perón’s Argentina (1946-1955)

EDUARDO GALAK

Budapest

Congreso; 44th International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE); 2023

ISCHE

Argentina’s political processes during Juan Domingo Perón’s two presidencies, between 1946 and 1951 and 1952 and 1955, meant both a strong incentive to participate in sports and a sustained intervention for public policies that had sport as their object (Pons, 2010; Orbuch, 2020). A continuous effort was even made to incorporate sports into daily school life, especially as physical education content but also through school competitions (Almada, 2019).In this direction, three pieces of informative documentary film produced by the Secretary of Press and Diffusion of the Nation are analyzed: Perón y los deportes, developed in 1951 on the occasion of the First Pan American Games that took place that year in Buenos Aires, El Deporte con Perón, from 1954 and made up of images from cinematographic newsreels that narrated sports successes, and Perón deportista (no year), a piece for the dissemination of the Argentine industry and the skills of the President.These are three short films between 6 and 19 minutes long, pieces of informative documentaries in which archive images are combined with montages of competitions, with a rhetoric of the announcer strongly identified with the ruling political party and with happy music, and even, playing in the background, the Peronist march “Los muchachos peronistas”.This set of informative documentaries can be framed in the idea that it was totalitarian non-fascist transnational propaganda (Galak, 2022), which included official and unofficial productions, to disseminate institutionalized sports practice as a work of government. Defined as political sports documentaries, these three short films expose a dialogue between the ways of recording motion pictures (from playing with the montages, shots, and frames) with bodies in motion, exhibiting an interesting analogy between cinematographic techniques, and body techniques (Mauss, 1996). Part of a rhetoric of the time that exponentially linked sports and nationalism, moving images allow the unfolding of a collective dream, as Walter Benjamin (2006) puts it, making us replace imagination with the magic of the exposed image, and thus incorporate the enunciated speeches. As the explicit phrase said by Perón about sports: “I wish a country made by athletes, educated their souls and strengthened their bodies”.