Olympic fascism. The relationship between sports spectacles and mass propaganda

Abstract

When limiting fascism to a time and often, a country (Germany), it is considered whether its cultural devices and communicational strategies are still valid, not as part of a classical fascism, but instead as functional equivalents that preserve pragmatic features and social conditions. To do this, there is an analysis of the fascist imagery in the documentary Olympia (1938) by Leni Riefenstahl, a film about the sports storytelling besides Nazi propaganda. There is a critical analysis about the concepts of leader and public. The aim is to stablish projections towards other official films of modern Olympic Games to question whether there is a point of contact between the mass culture, fascism and propaganda. The overcoming of the mechanic relationship between the ideas and the image is identified, as well as the propaganda possibilities of aesthetical or documentary codes and the coincidence of fascist and contemporary communication policies.