A bodily grammar configuration. The visible, the invisible, and the non-visible as the foundation of images and bodies in motion

Abstract

The birth of cinematography as a device that acts on bodies allows us to think of informative documentary cinema as a resource to understand what is considered right to show and interpret the senses of reality that we intend to project through this show. With the mass production of celluloid-based films in the 1920s and 1930s, moving images gave new meaning to what can be considered correct movement, thereby establishing a bodily grammar. That implies methods, sequences, distances, and distinctive harmonies: film editing has produced particular ways of perceiving bodies in motion, articulated in the construction of a correct narrative, with the establishment of certain techniques. For this reason, the proposal is to analyze old images of bodily practices filmed for educational purposes, which represent a succession of documentary shots of people who perform physical activities in front of the camera with the intent of transmitting a message from reproduction. It is thus possible to observe a clear distance with the current registers and a homogenization, succession, and simultaneity of the techniques (corporeal and cinematographic), which produce the configuration of what is visible, invisible, and non-visible in images and in moving bodies. In the background, I propose to think of the oldest surviving moving images of L’École Normale Militaire de Gymnastique de Joinville-Le-Pont, the place where (modern) physical education and the technology that allowed cinema was born, thanks to the works of scientists Étienne Jules Marey and Georges Demeny.