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Socially Engaged Documentary and Sport in the Americas

April, 8, 2022, Study Day "Socially engaged documentary and Sport in the Americas", Institut des Amériques
Carla Toquet

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1The study day “Socially engaged documentary and Sport in the Americas” was held in hybrid mode, by videoconference, as well as hosted on the Campus Condorcet on Friday 8, April 2022. The conference was part of a larger event, the annual film festival organized by the Institute of the Americas in partnership with the Cinema Le Studio. Alberto Da Silva (Sorbonne Université, CRIMIC), Marianne Bloch-Robin (Sorbonne Université, CRIMIC), Marianne Kac-Vergne (Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, CORPUS), David Lipson (Université de Strasbourg, SEARCH) and Véronique Pugibet (Sorbonne Université, CRIMIC) coordinated the study day that explored in the same way as in the film festival, the ways in which political sports documentaries can be deemed socially engaged.

2The organizers opened the event with a few words introducing the general questions that would be addressed throughout the day, mainly the relevance of the prism of sport, through which documentary filmmakers reveal political, social and economic issues, as well as the aesthetic and narrative choices of such films, which were central to the reflection of the speakers.

  • 1 Unveiling the past: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the documentary to rewrite the history of (African-)Ame (...)
  • 2 On the Shoulders of Giants: The Story of the Greatest Team You Never Heard Of (2011) directed by De (...)

3David Lipson introduced Yann Descamps who specializes in the history of sports and teaches at the University of Franche-Comté (C3S). His research explores the intersection of sport, cultural history, semiology and media studies. His presentation for our study day was entitled “Désinvisibiliser le passé: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar et le documentaire pour réécrire l’histoire du basket-ball (afro-)américain.”1 It focused on the documentary On the Shoulders of Giants2 and examined the question of auto/self-representation, which is essential to access auto/self-determination, in sports (basket-ball in particular) and in general. Yann Descamps thus discussed the aestheticization of the political discourse in Abdul-Jabbar’s documentary and led a reflection on the production of History by people and narratives in and of power. He demonstrated how sport – and in the case of this documentary, basketball – became an element of language for African-American players, consequently a political element that contributed to build a powerful and historical narrative of self-determination.

  • 3 Colin in Black & White (CIBW), a six-episode documentary miniseries released on October 29, 2021, c (...)

4As we concluded with Yann Descamps on the importance of considering sports not only as a mode of entertainment but also of political expression, David Lipson (SEARCH) transitioned towards his talk, whose initial thoughts seamlessly built upon Descamps’s conclusion. His analysis of Ava Duvernay and Colin Kaepernick’s Netflix series was entitled “Colin in Black & White adolescence and activism in a hybrid world.”3 Colin Kaepernick has always had to negotiate in-betweenness and the series translates this in an unusual format, straddling documentary, fiction, sitcom, clip, and sports report. While we would have expected such an intervention to linger on Kaepernick’s 2016 political gesture that went viral, David Lipson’s talk displaced its focus – just like DuVernay’s series – onto Kaepernick’s teenage years, which might actually be the real political object of the player’s life and that paved the way for his kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games. The presentation demonstrated how DuVernay’s production somehow imitated the situation young Kaepernick had to cope with as an adolescent who always stood between two different – if not opposite – worlds (baseball vs. football; the world of White people vs. the world of Black people). David Lipson argues that the series thus pictures that complex space where opposites gather in a metapoetic representation of itself. He links this self-reflexivity – thanks to which the series seems to finally grant access to self-determination to Kaepernick on several levels – with W.E.B Du Bois’s double consciousness and underlines the weight of always having to be “twice as good” for being a young Black man, while also constantly being trapped between two worlds.

5The second panel then took the conversation South to Latin America. Laure Perez (CRIMIC) focused on the sportswomen of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano, the Cuban cinematic newsreel, produced weekly between 1960 and 1990. She stressed the fact that the Noticiero is a fundamental element to understand the Cuban Revolution and related the role of the sportswomen in the Revolution to the way they were pictured by the newsreel. Laure Perez underlined that being a sportswoman then was, alongside with being part of the workforce or a member of the armed forces, a way of participating in and contributing to the Revolution. The Revolution indeed aimed at democratizing access to sports in order for the athletes to compete on the international scene, where they would represent Cuba. Hence, being a Cuban sportswoman in the context of the Cold War was per se a political act, in that the women not only represented their nation but they also defended its interests on the international scene, thus fulfilling a geopolitical mission. Laure Perez concluded her presentation with her main question, that of the transgression of gender norms. Indeed, their representation by the Noticiero seems to have broadcast a very masculine image of those sportswomen, which further complexifies the question of who / whose bodies get to represent and defend the Cuban nation internationally and whether it is rather a male thing to engage in such political activities.

  • 4 “Smashing the face” in Portugese.

6In the wake of such analyses, Liniane Haag Brum presented us with her reading of Ugo Giorgetti’s first feature, Quebrando a cara (1986)4 from Brazil. She exposed the narrative at the core of the documentary as a counter-hegemonic one, aiming at depicting Eder Jofre, the famous Brazilian boxer, and his “clan” as inextricably tied to the city of Sao Paulo. Haag Brum argues that Giorgetti’s documentary might seem to oscillate between elegy and commitment but the director’s way of portraying the man and his story rather than his performance in the ring underlines his resilience in a very political way. Indeed, since Jofre somehow appears as a metonymic figure for the city, he becomes the embodiment of the city’s resistance for survival through a work of memory that not only pays tribute to the history of the man but also to that of the city with one of the greatest inequality rates in the world.

  • 5 “VI Panamerican Games: seen from the margins” in Spanish.
  • 6 Oiga vea! (1972), by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo

7The representation of the city not only as a gathering of people but also as a complex terrain that is highlighted by doing sport is something we could also understand from the presentation that Ana Maria Lopez gave online from Colombia. Her talk, entitled “VI Juegos Panamericanos: visión desde los márgenes”5 suggested that we explore in depth a 1971 documentary directed by Colombian directors Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo.6 Discussing this documentary allowed us to become aware of the existence of a double discourse around the games. There is the official narrative in the media and what really unfolds in the city/village and that the directors have chosen to represent in a sort of counter discourse to the official documentary about the Pan-American games: Cali, ciudad de América (1972), by Diego León Giraldo. The presentation by Ana Maria Lopez hence shed light on the counter-gaze that the documentary by Ospina and Mayolo offered, as well as on the importance of the margins in the construction of discourse, without which the vision we get from the games is not whole, let alone truthful.

  • 7 The Other Rio.
  • 8 An abandoned Federal Government building.

8The last panel was dedicated to the importance of stories told by the people themselves, which is something the documentary genre truly allows. Thus furthering the importance of counter-discourses, Alberto Da Silva (CRIMIC-Sorbonne Université) moderated a round table discussion with Emilie Beaulieu-Guérette about her film, L’Autre Rio (2017),7 which suggested crossed gazes on several levels. Emilie Beaulieu-Guérette, a Canadian film director, worked with a Brazilian team to film a documentary giving peerless insight into the lives and perspectives (or lack thereof) of people living in one of the poorest favelas of the city, during the 2016 Olympic Games. When all eyes were turned towards the Maracanã stadium, Emilie Beaulieu-Guérette decided to focus her gaze and camera on the IGBE8 people in the favela Mangueira, hence rendering visible the event voluntarily erased from the city as well as from international screens. The director not only discussed the impact such mega-events have, socially and economically, on people who live on the margins, but most importantly, she also evoked the purpose of her art: making room for the voices and stories of these marginalized people, those that the official discourses usually forget or even hide.

9Daniel Durbin’s presentation, given online from California (USC Annenberg), also concluded on the power of documentary in unveiling stories told by the people who were initially denied access to sports and discourse about their own trajectories. His talk, entitled “‘That’s their way of keeping you down’: Stories from the African American Experience in Major League Baseball,” hinged on oral history and addressed the African American baseball players’ own narratives, as opposed to the official discourse that we more easily have access to, such as the league’s narrative, or that of fans or historians, which are undoubtedly necessary but Daniel Durbin reminded the audience that without the perspective of the players themselves, History’s most important voices would remain silent, thus leaving the picture incomplete.

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Notes

1 Unveiling the past: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the documentary to rewrite the history of (African-)American basket-ball.

2 On the Shoulders of Giants: The Story of the Greatest Team You Never Heard Of (2011) directed by Deborah Morales, written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse.

3 Colin in Black & White (CIBW), a six-episode documentary miniseries released on October 29, 2021, created by Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick.

4 “Smashing the face” in Portugese.

5 “VI Panamerican Games: seen from the margins” in Spanish.

6 Oiga vea! (1972), by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo

7 The Other Rio.

8 An abandoned Federal Government building.

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References

Electronic reference

Carla Toquet, Socially Engaged Documentary and Sport in the AmericasInMedia [Online], 10 | 2025, Online since 15 May 2025, connection on 17 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/3277; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/145da

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About the author

Carla Toquet

Carla Toquet is a Teaching and Research Assistant in the Department of English at the University of La Réunion. She is also a PhD student at Paris Nanterre University (CREA). Her thesis explores the intersection of contemporary African American literature and cinema. She is much interested in analyzing the way contemporary African American women’s discourses aim at fighting racial injustice and the criminalization of African American men, by drawing from artistic and historical filiation. The research she conducts on Jesmyn Ward and Ava DuVernay aims at questioning the documentary value of their work of fiction, as well as the type of feminist activism that emerges from the affirmation of such voices.

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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