[MUSIC]. Hello. In this video we are going to deal with the main social, intellectual and scientific changes that happened during the last years of the 19th century and which will influence the modern Olympics and will contribute to their success and stability over the time as an institution. In the different epochs of the human existence it exists a cultural climate, a Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, which influenced the human creations of that precise time. The last years of the 19th century, when the modern Olympic Movement was born, where a period of time of great technological, communicational, intellectual and social changes. It was a moment of great creativity and cultural awake. The fact that the revival of the Olympic Games happened in that moment in history explains the reason why they consolidated along the 20th century. Without any doubt, the interaction of different forces since the very beginning has permitted stability and the consolidation of the Olympic Games as an event and cultural phenomenon. In other words, it is likely that if the Olympic Games had been revived several years before, they would have not consolidated. It was the combination of several factors what helped to success of the Olympics. We are going to mention a number of changes, discoveries, and breakthroughs of different nature that happened during the previous years of the first modern Olympic Games. First of all, the new means of transportation, trains, faster ships, steamboats, combined with new ways of global communication, previously telegraph and then the telephone, made the world smaller. The last years of the 19th century were characterized by the ideas of progress and narrowing of the world. Several years before, in 1873, Jules Verne had published Around the World in 80 Days. The new communication networks, transportation and telecommunication, were considered as universal links. Secondly there was a growing interest in international expos and thus the French Third Republic was responsible for three of the most important of the late 19th century series of International Expositions, which were held in Paris in 1878, 1889 and 1900. These exhibition exalted the science, the electricity, the new means of transportation and the industrialization as great engines of the global progress. From the intellectual point of view, Sigmund Freud started writing his book, The Interpretation of Dreams in July 1895, and finally published it in German in November 1899. This is the key book in which the first ideas about the Psychoanalysis Theory were presented. This work inaugurated the study of the so-called Depth Psychology. The worries for the study of the inner reality of the individual, how the inner reality affects our behavior, that is how dreams are, as Freud said, The Royal Road to the Unconscious, were contemporary to the revival of the Olympic Games. According to Richard Tarnas, the Depth Psychology not only found its source of inspiration in scientific principles like Newton or Darwin, but the imaginative inspirations of figures such as Goethe and Emerson. However, what is the link between the Olympism and the Depth Psychology? Both are sons of the same epoch. Both combine the scientific approach of the enlightenment and the presence in their imaginary of the myths, the religion, the sacred traditions or the rituals. The Depth Psychology uses the myths, the rituals and the religious elements to study the unconscious, to go in-depth into the most intimate knowledge of individuals. The modern Olympic Games use the myths, the rituals, the pseudo-religious elements to acquire transcendence, entity and an alive spirit which allows to connect themselves to the tradition of the ancient Olympics. The modern Olympics were created at a time where sport was raising as a mass spectacle, supported by the mass press, on occasion, the sensationalist or tabloid press. Nevertheless, from the communicative perspective, the most influential event was the invention of the Cinematograph, which in Greek means writing and movement. The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière presented the projection, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in 1895. This very moment represented a milestone in the origins of television, which has been crucial in the dissemination of global sport. The cinematograph was very important because it leaded to the creation of the language of the motion pictures, the language of the audiovisual, a way of expressing sense throughout images, which was absolutely new. Roland Barthes described the photographs as the presence of an absence, and for the first time, the pictures could be represented in motion. Several years after, the combination of the cinematograph, together with a telecommunication system capable to send images to the households, allowed the invention of television. The previous years to the Olympic Congress in 1894 were the years of controlling the space and time by the human thanks to the telecommunication, the communication at a distance what had been inaugurated years before due to the invention of the telegraph. Even though, the telephone patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 in the USA, was very close to the birth of the modern Games. The first international communication throughtout telephone, in other words, the first international phone call was undertaken between Paris and Brussels in 1887 and between London and Paris in 1891. Therefore, the Olympic Games were revived in a key moment for their future existence, an epoch of progress in the transportation means, the telecommunication systems and the emerging of important media, together with a cultural breakthrough which helped their expansion and future consolidation. [BLANK_AUDIO]
