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Le documentaire engagé : sport dans les Amériques

Socially Committed Documentary and Sport in the Americas

Marianne Bloch-Robin, Alberto Da Silva, David Lipson et Véronique Pugibet
Cet article est une traduction de :
Le documentaire engagé : sport dans les Amériques [fr]
Autre(s) traduction(s) de cet article :
El documental comprometido: deporte en las Américas [es]
O documentário engajado: o esporte nas Américas [pt]

Texte intégral

1We are pleased to publish this special issue devoted to Socially Committed Documentary and Sport in the Americas, just a few weeks before the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The proximity of this event situates us in a wave of collective enthusiasm where the prestige of the sporting event and its political implications (Milza, P., 2004) seem to have pushed into the background the struggles and opposition that marked the decision to locate sporting infrastructures within underprivileged neighborhoods of the Paris region. This critical dimension was at the heart of the reflection we initiated for this second edition of the documentary film festival organized by the Institut des Amériques at Le Studio cinema in Aubervilliers in April 2022, which focused on the theme of sport and socially committed documentary within the Americas.1 These cinematic encounters provided an opportunity for fruitful exchanges and debates among and between researchers specializing in the subject2 and local audiences. The parallel contexts between the exclusion of the underprivileged in Brazil, for example during the 2016 Rio Olympics (L'Autre Rio, Émilie Beaulieu-Guérette, 2018), and France were highlighted and discussed during the screenings with associations that had opposed the construction of facilities, specifically for the Olympics to be held on land occupied by communal gardens cultivated by Aubervilliers residents. This reflection on the representation of sport and activism in documentary film discourses was also developed as part of the day-long conference organized on April 8, 2022 at the Institut des Amériques (Campus Condorcet) on the subject.3

2The articles that make up this dossier therefore focus on the relationships that are woven between sport, politics and society through the prism of documentary film, through the creation of a filmic discourse on sport. The media have contributed to magnifying and staging sporting activities to the point of turning them into mass spectacles (Palacios Arranz, M., 2018). Cinema, for its part, can act as a catalyst for social change and take a critical look at society, acting as a mirror, sometimes a distorting one, of its socio-political issues. Daniel Durbin and Yann Descamps describe this relationship between sports, media and political discourse:

Sport is a global phenomenon whose impact goes far beyond mere entertainment. It expresses and, in performance, embodies moral and cultural values, and it can be a force for change as well as an instrument to control the masses. While sports have always had significant political implications, as the Olympics have shown throughout their history, the political dimension of sports spectacle plays out not only on the sports stage, but through media narratives which engage and, at times, shape political discourse (Durbin, D. et Y. Descamps Y., 2017).

  • 4 For Nancy Berthier, film events "are in themselves historical events whose meaning is linked more t (...)

3Documentary film has been the perfect vehicle to communicate the stories of these sports figures, events and their political import to the masses. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) is a perfect example of co-opting the Olympic Games for national propaganda, although in an ironic twist of fate the film actually promotes the African American athlete Jesse Owens, thus unwittingly disproving the hypothesis of the superior Aryan athlete. Furthermore, it is significant that this "film event" in the sense given to the concept by Nancy Berthier,4 founded an imaginary world that has endured to the present day. In particular, it was thanks to these images that the torch relay ritual, reinvented by Nazi propaganda in 1936, became one of the main symbols of Olympism.

  • 5 Translation by the author, see Galak, E., 2018.

4The first two articles in our dossier focus on the political propaganda dimension of filmic discourse on sport. In "‘Un pueblo de deportistas’. Propaganda y deportes en la Argentina de Perón (1946-1955)" Eduardo Galak analyzes three short documentary newsreels produced in 1951 and 1954 in Perón’s Argentina. According to the author, these films are part of a system of "totalitarian, non-fascist transnational propaganda" Defined as political documentaries on sport, these three short films propose a dialogue between ways of capturing moving images (by playing with editing, shots and framing) and moving bodies, presenting an analogy between cinematographic techniques and bodily techniques. As part of a type of rhetoric that closely links sport and nationalism, moving images allow for the dissemination of a collective dream. This, in the words of Walter Benjamin (2013), comes about through the magic of the image, commensurate with the words of Juan Domingo Perón: "I wish a people of sportsmen for my country, with educated souls and fortified bodies"5 (Galak E., 2018). In "Cine documental y deporte femenino en la Revolución cubana: una comparación entre el Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (1960-1990) y Campeonas (Óscar Valdés, 1988)" Laure Pérez looks at the representation of the figure of the "sports" woman in the Cuban Noticiero, questioning the possible presence of gender stereotypes and the discourse constructed by these film reports on one of the recurring figures of the "new Cuban woman" along with that of the militia woman and female worker. She draws a comparison between film newsreels produced weekly by the ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute) for thirty years (Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano, 1960-1990) and a short documentary by director Óscar Valdés, Campeonas (1988), about the Cuban women’s national volleyball team. According to the author, the Noticiero offers a very positive vision of female sports, both amateur and professional: it celebrates the triumph of Cuban athletes in international competitions, presents sport as part of a broader movement for women’s emancipation and as a means of spreading the values of the Revolution. It shows how sportswomen are magnified by the Noticiero without their bodies being sexualized. The short film Campeonas, made in the same esthetic vein, reveals the difficult lives of female players, whose family dimension is sacrificed for the sake of their sporting careers. It features black women, but does not address the issue of racism in sport, since racism was officially banned in revolutionary Cuba. In these various propaganda images, sport is presented as a means of integrating women into the revolutionary process, as the only emancipatory outcome.

5Andrea Cabezas Vargas’s article, "Los puños de una nación: el boxeo y los avatares de la construcción de la identidad nacional panameña" analyzes director Pituka Ortega-Heilbron’s documentary Los puños de una nación (2005), in which she discusses the construction of the figure of Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán as Panama’s national hero. She shows how, just as baseball is "Cuba’s game" (Berthier, N. and M. Bloch-Robin, 2012), from a nationalist perspective, the boxer defends his country’s honor with his fists against the United States. The author relates the fighter’s sporting history to his relationship with the history of his country. It is an allegory of the relationship between two forces, the physical force of one human being against another, that of a Panamanian against a U.S. citizen, and the symbolic force of each battle for the world title, i.e. the battle of a small country against the almighty country of the North American continent: the United States. To understand this allegory, the author goes back to the origins of the nation that was historically divided into two – to allow the two parts of the world to communicate with each other – in 1903 with its independence from Colombia and the beginning of the creation of the Panama Canal in the shadow of the United States, evoking the political liberation project undertaken by General Omar Torrijos to restore national hegemony in the Canal Zone.

6In a different, but still political vein, the following two texts question the counter-discourse of media images produced by certain documentaries that rewrite the history of a sport or a great sports personality. In "A entrevista como enquadramento de histórias: as faces de João Havelange" by Lívia Gonçalves Magalhães and Sérgio Settani Giglio, the authors highlight the "fixed" and homogeneous construction of the discourse elaborated about his life story by João Havelange, one of the most important sports leaders of the 20th century, President of the International Football Federation (FIFA) from 1977 to 1998 and member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for over fifty years. Because of his career, Havelange has constantly been asked to tell his story, and has also sought to share his personal version of his career. In 2007, journalist Ernesto Rodrigues published Jogo Duro: The Story of João Havelange, conceived as an official biography. In 2013, the same journalist made the documentary Conversas com JH, in which he not only presents the circumstances surrounding the writing of the biography, which was the subject of disagreements on the part of João Havelange, but also points out the many conflicts that arose on this occasion. Based on their own interviews, the authors analyze the extent to which Havelange’s version prevails in most media coverage.

  • 6 See also Corps politiques de Nicolas Martin Breteau (Martin Breteau, N., 2020).

7Yann Descamps’s article "Un-Covering Stories You Never Heard Of: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's On the Shoulders of Giants and The History of (African-) American Basketball" examines the documentary film On the Shoulders of Giants: The Story of the Greatest Basketball Team You Never Heard Of, written and produced by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a former National Basketball Association player and author of numerous books aimed at de-invisibilizing African-American history. The article analyzes the process of mythologizing the New York Renaissance team through documentary film, transforming this team, then largely excluded from the official history of American basketball, into a veritable political myth. In this film, directed by Deborah Morales and co-written by Anna Waterhouse, Abdul-Jabbar tells the story of this African-American basketball team in the complex historical context of the United States in the 1920s. It allows the silenced voices of the African-American community to emerge and express themselves, embodying a kind of countervailing power in the production of the historical record in the United States.6

  • 7 Kaepernick knelt instead of standing during the national anthem, which is played at the beginning o (...)

8In line with this discourse of de-invisibilizing athletes excluded from official history, the articles by David Lipson and Lucie Pallesi focus on the creation of documentary works that denounce the discrimination suffered by athletes. Their analyses focus on films that highlight resistance in the face of racial and gender injustice and discrimination through the formulation of a discourse of advocacy and commitment. In "Colin in Black & White: Adolescence, Activism and In-Betweenness in a Postmodern World" David Lipson studies a documentary mini-series directed by Ava Duvernay about and starring Colin Kaepernick, an American Football player who, like Tommie Smith and John Carlos 50 years earlier, used the national anthem to denounce injustice and racial discrimination in the USA.7 The mini-series is complex, as it integrates three different types of narrative discourse: Colin Kaepernick as an adult addresses the viewer alone, analyzing examples of discrimination that appear in the TV sitcom about Colin as a teenager, which is also part of the mini-series, and the episodes also incorporate archival footage evoking racial discrimination. By playing with these different formats of audiovisual text, these six episodes carry out a fragmentation of the object through a postmodern perspective. The mini-series revolves around the story of a biracial teenager searching for his identity in a white space. This space is also linked to his white parents (Colin is an adopted child from the affluent suburbs) who raised him and passed on their cultural values. The adolescent Colin, from an adult’s perspective, gradually becomes aware of the discrepancy between the image his parents and others have of him, what he actually experiences and how he chooses to see himself. Lucie Pallesi, in "100% Woman: filming a trans cyclist's race against controversy" analyzes director Karen Duthie’s committed approach. The documentary 100% Woman. The Story of Michelle Dumaresq (2004) tells both the sports story and personal one of Michelle Dumaresq, a Canadian trans cyclist and the debates surrounding her presence in women-only competitions. Contrary to the traditional sensationalist media treatment of trans people, the film takes the athlete’s side, recounting the abuse experienced along the way. It also shows the different positions, at close quarters with the controversy within the Canadian and international downhill mountain biking community, at a pivotal time when the current framework for the debate around the participation of trans people, and trans women in particular, in high-level sport was being set up. The analysis of this pioneering film is invaluable at a time when, in 2023, almost 20 years after the documentary was made, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) is finally banning trans women from competing in the female category. The controversy at the heart of 100% Woman, between respecting the human rights of trans people and protecting the female category, is therefore highly topical (Lucas C.B. and K.E. Newhall, 2019).

9Finally, still with a view to denouncing discrimination, Ana María López Carmona’s article "Oiga Vea! (1972): Hacer cine de lo invisible en el marco de los VI Juegos Panamericanos de 1971" analyzes the short film by two young Cali directors who would later become famous, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo. The filmmakers set out to portray a city that remained on the margins of the 6th Pan-American Games in Cali in 1971, a far cry from the clean, developed and modern city that the authorities wanted to project to the press and the international community. On the contrary, the documentary Oiga Vea! takes a critical look at the problems facing the city and its inhabitants. In the context of the 6th Pan-American Games, the premise of equality and fraternity, proclaimed in sport, is called into question. The inequality between the city’s inhabitants and the deep-seated social problems they experience are made visible by the camera, which turns its back on the sporting event to denounce this discrimination. Street sports and popular culture function as marks of authenticity in the face of the artificiality offered by international competitions reserved for the privileged. The idea of mass culture associated with sport is called into question, and the documentary emphasizes that it is the exclusion of the people that marks the presence of international competition in the city.

10To complete the dossier and in a perspective that echoes the analysis of this short documentary, we wanted to include, in the "Interview" section of this issue, a conversation between Alberto da Silva and director Émilie Beaulieu-Guérette on her film L’Autre Rio (2017) during the February 8, 2022 conference. In L'Autre Rio, the director also moves away from the sporting festivities and global spectacle, to focus on an old, derelict building that once housed the offices of a public institution and is home to many families completely excluded from the spectacle of the 31st Olympic Games. Under the director’s eye, the building becomes a character in its own right, and interviews with the inhabitants, most of whom are young women, weave singular life stories of pain, sadness and resistance into a portrait of a hostile political environment. This film is the winner of the 2022 edition of The Socially Committed Documentary Festival organized by the Institut des Amériques and Sorbonne Université. Émilie Beaulieu-Guérette talks about the experience of making her documentary, while reflecting on her place as a white, foreign woman from a privileged class who looks at this reality. In this interview, she also addresses fundamental ethical and methodological questions as a filmmaker and anthropologist – two complementary facets of her training.

11The documentaries analyzed in this dossier reveal the complex political, social and economic stakes of society in the Americas through the elaboration of a discourse on sport, or based on a sporting event (Sheinin, D., 2015). The films studied from a multidisciplinary approach always assert a point of view that ranges from state propaganda to a critical authorial prism. These discourses take sides and participate in the configuration of an imaginary world of the athlete and sport by questioning stereotypes and official narratives. The stimulating analyses presented by the authors of these articles allow us, in particular, to question the place and role of major sporting events as vectors of discrimination, exclusion and inequality.

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Bibliographie

Benjamin, Walter, L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique, [1955], Paris, Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2013.

Berthier, Nancy "‘Raza’ de Jose Luis Saénz de Heredia, una película acontecimiento", in Vicente Sánchez-Biosca (dir.), España en armas: el cine de la guerra civil española: ciclo de cine, Valencia, MUVIM, 2007, p. 53-61.

Berthier, Nancy and Marianne Bloch-Robin, "El juego de Cuba de Manuel Martín Cuenca: del Paraíso perdido al desencanto", in Nancy Berthier and Álvaro A. Fernández (dir.), Ópera prima en el cine documental iberoamericano (1990-2010), Guadalajara, Universidad de Guadalajara/Paris-Sorbonne Université, 2012, p. 181-202.

Carlos, John and Dave Zirin, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2013.

Durbin, Daniel and Yann Descamp, "The Politics of Discourse on the Fields of Dreams: Political Messaging and the Mediated Representation of Sports", InMedia, n° 6, 2017, https://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/833.

Duthie, Karen, 100% Woman: The Story of Michelle Dumaresq, 2004.

Faure, Alexandre, "Peut-on évaluer l'influence des Jeux olympiques et paralympiques sur les villes ?", Variances, 21th February 2022, https://variances.eu/?p=6441.

Galak, Eduardo, "Hacia una estética peronista: Educación del cuerpo y formación de subjetividades a través del noticiero cinematográfico ‘Sucesos argentinos’ (1946-1955)", in Pablo Pineau, María Silvia Serra and Myriam Southwell (dir.), La educación de las sensibilidades en la Argentina moderna: Estudios sobre estética escolar, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2018, p. 211-225.

Lucas, Cathryn B. and Kristine E. Newhall, "Out of the Frame: How Sports Media Shapes Trans Narratives", in Rory Magrath (dir.), LGBT Athletes in the Sports Media, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 99-124.

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Milza, Pierre (dir.), Le pouvoir des anneaux. Les Jeux Olympiques à la lumière de la politique, 1896-2004, Paris, Vuibert, 2004.

Palacios Arranz, Manuel, "Plano aéreo desde dron. El deporte y la imagen audiovisual en la emergencia de la cultura global", in Magali Kabous and Sonia Kerfa (dir.), Image et Sport – Actes du 10e Congrès International du GRIMH, Lyon, 17-18-19 novembre 2016, Les Cahiers du Grimh N° 10, Lyon, 2018, p. 371-379.

Riefenstahl, Leni, Olympia, The Complete Original Version [DVD], [1938], Pathfinder, 2006.

Rodrigues, Ernesto, Jogo duro: a história de João Havelange, Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2007.

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Notes

1 See the website dedicated to the documentary film festival organised by the Institut des Amériques: https://cinema.institutdesameriques.fr/presentation/.

2 During the evening devoted to the Olympic Games, Alexandre Faure, a specialist in political and urban timeframes in the context of world city bids for the Olympic Games (Faure, A. 2022), spoke with local residents’ associations and cinema-goers.

3 See the web page dedicated to the study day: https://crimic-sorbonne.fr/manifestations/documentaire-engage-et-sport-dans-les-ameriques/.

4 For Nancy Berthier, film events "are in themselves historical events whose meaning is linked more to History than to the history of cinema. As such, they are recorded in our collective memories, constituting points of reference, fixation, and memorial crystallization" (Berthier, N., 2007: 53).

5 Translation by the author, see Galak, E., 2018.

6 See also Corps politiques de Nicolas Martin Breteau (Martin Breteau, N., 2020).

7 Kaepernick knelt instead of standing during the national anthem, which is played at the beginning of each game. Smith and Carlos both raised a black gloved fist during the medal ceremony of the 200m in the 1968 Olympic Games of Mexico (Carlos, J. and D. Zirin, 2013).

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Référence électronique

Marianne Bloch-Robin, Alberto Da Silva, David Lipson et Véronique Pugibet, « Socially Committed Documentary and Sport in the Americas »IdeAs [En ligne], 23 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 février 2024, consulté le 14 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/17557 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ideas.17557

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Auteurs

Marianne Bloch-Robin

Marianne Bloch-Robin is a lecturer in visual arts at the UFR Études ibériques et latino-américaines, Sorbonne Université. She is a statutory member of the CRIMIC.
marianne.bloch-robin[at]sorbonne-universite.fr

Alberto Da Silva

Alberto Da Silva is a senior lecturer at Paris Sorbonne, specialising in Brazilian history and cinema.
a.dasilva8888[at]gmail.com

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David Lipson

David Lipson is a doctorate in American civilisation from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is a lecturer at the Université de Strasbourg. His research focuses on documentary films, late-night TV, marginalised voices and the history of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
lipson[at]unistra.fr

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Véronique Pugibet

Véronique Pugibet is a lecturer at Sorbonne Université and a member of the CRIMIC, Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Mondes Ibéro-américains Contemporains.
Veronique.Pugibet@paris-sorbonne.fr

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