Educated bodies through a transnational pedagogy by motion pictures: Physical culture and newsreels between Argentina, Spain, and Italy (1934-1944)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to question the usefulness of informative cinema as a pedagogical device. A set of Argentinean, Spanish, and Italian newsreels filmed in the second quarter of the 20th century is analyzed to understand how a notion of symmetrical aesthetics was formed to narrate an ideal of physical culture. The short informative Argentine main newsreel, Sucesos Argentinos, which was broadcast between 1938 and 1972, shows familiarity with other European newsreels, such as Giornale LUCE and No-Do, filmed in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s in Italy and Spain. Argentina, Italy, and Spain had strong economic, political, and cultural connections because of historical immigration. As a result, these countries also exchanged ways of narrating state-organized physical activities. Through the analysis of newsreels, it is shown how sports and mass gymnastics exhibitions operated as a governmental technique to show the strength, virility, and healthiness of individual bodies in symmetry with collective bodies. Based on the nationalist rhetoric characteristic of the interwar period and of the Second World War, it can be said that there was a transnational aesthetic for narrating bodily and cultural techniques. Therefore, by analyzing the images shown in these three countries between 1934 and 1944, what one finds is a decade of political and aesthetic affinities in the construction of a national image of the “correct body.”