Aesthetics and Politics Through the Lens of the Camera: Notes on Informative Documentary Cinema in the Early Olympic Games

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 in the Olympic Studies Centre, especially those produced since the Saint Louis Games in 1904, this article analyses projected significations about the individual and collective body. In other words, these ‘movement-images’ –as coined by Deleuze– show projected meanings about the individual and collective body.

The central focus of this paper argues that informative cinema, through the exhibition of educated bodies, teaches and also forms the sensitivity of the viewer`s 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. 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.