Time and timelessness in sport film

Abstract

The visibility, immediacy and spectacle of sport make it more cinematic than many other cultural practices. Sport's quotidian and mythic qualities are particularly amenable to dramatic adaptation, with sport film crucially dealing with the relationship between the domain of sport and the greater world of which it is a part. Sport film, freed from the demands of the ‘live’ sporting moment, has the freedom to play with time and space in elastic ways. This essay examines two recent sport films, La Gran Final (2006) and Zidane, Un Portrait du 21e Siècle (2006), which in their different ways exemplify sport film's temporal reflexivity. The first (and less intensively treated) is a film that affirms the importance of ‘liveness’ to sport – the need for time to overcome space. The second is a very different text that demonstrates what sport film can do with time – how, instead of reproducing the urgency of the ‘live’ moment, it can de-familiarize it, challenge it, and make it strange without entirely becoming disconnected from the conventionally climactic point of the sport contest. In the process, it is hoped that the complex interplay of time and timelessness in sport film will be apprehended. These films both reflect and reflect upon contemporary media sport culture in a manner extending beyond the self-imposed limitations of the currently dominant media sport form – live and loud televised sport. It is concluded that sport film is simultaneously anchored to chronological time while constantly stretching to free itself of temporal constraint in pursuit of the production of myth.