After touching on the specificity and limitations of cinema in history, this paper focuses on representations of physical education in the second part of the 20th century. It describes the setting, apparel, and various portraits in fifteen films made since « la Libération ». Our purpose is to measure the gap between reality and fiction in order to gauge historical distortions. We can see that cinema proposes another history of physical education, more superficial than the in-depth picture of successive transformations with different temporalities. While participating in creating a history of the mentalities of this discipline, it reveals an atypical and slow academic integration.