Sports On Film

The sports film has become one of commercial cinema's most recognizable genres. From classic boxing films such as Raging Bull (1980) to soccer-themed box-office successes like Bend it Like Beckham (2002), the sports film stands at the interface of two of our most important cultural forms. This book examines the social, historical and ideological significance of representations of sport in film internationally, an essential guide for all students and enthusiasts of sport, film, media and culture. Sport and Film traces the history of the sports film, from the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s, its consolidation as a distinct fiction genre in the mid 1920s in Hollywood films such as Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925), to its contemporary manifestation in Oscar-winning films such as Million Dollar Baby (2004) and The Fighter (2010). Drawing on an extensive range of films as source material, the book explores key issues in the study of sport, film and wider society, including race, social class, gender and the legacy of 9/11. It also offers an invaluable guide to 'reading' a film, to help students fully engage with their source material. Comprehensive, authoritative and accessible, this book is an important addition to the literature in both film and media studies, sport studies and cultural studies more generally.

After covering the genre's early history and theorizing its general characteristics, this volume then focuses on specific instances of sports films, such as the biopic, the sports history film, the documentary, the fan film, the boxing film, and explores issues such as gender, race, spectacle and silent comedy. Four major films are then closely analysed – Chariots of Fire, Field of Dreams, the Indian cricket epic Lagaan, and Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. While recording American film's importance to the genre, the book resists the conventional over-concentration on American cinema and sports by its attention to other cinemas, for example the British, Indian, Australian, South Korean, Thai, German, New Zealand, Spanish, and so on, with the many different sports they depict.

Publisher's description: Since the earliest days of the silent era, American filmmakers have been drawn to the visual spectacles of sports and their compelling narratives of conflict, triumph, and individual achievement. In Contesting Identities Aaron Baker examines how these cinematic representations of sports and athletes have evolved over time--from The Pinch Hitter and Buster Keaton's College to White Men Can't Jump, Jerry Maguire, and Girlfight. He focuses on how identities have been constructed and transcended in American society since the early twentieth century. Whether depicting team or individual sports, these films return to that most American of themes, the master narrative of self-reliance. Baker shows that even as sports films tackle socially constructed identities such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, they ultimately underscore transcendence of these identities through self-reliance. In addition to discussing the genre's recurring dramatic tropes, from the populist prizefighter to the hot-headed rebel to the "manly" female athlete, Baker also looks at the social and cinematic impacts of real-life sports figures from Jackie Robinson and Babe Didrikson Zaharias to Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.

Sport and film have historically been key components of national cultures and societies. This is the first collection dedicated to examining the intersection of these popular cultural forces within specific national contexts. Covering films of all types, from Hollywood blockbusters to regional documentaries and newsreels, the book considers how filmic depictions of sport have configured and informed distinctive national cultures, societies and identities. Featuring case studies from 11 national contexts across 6 continents – including North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania – it reveals the common and contrasting approaches that have emerged within sport cinema in differing national contexts. This is fascinating and important reading for all students and researchers working in film, media, cultural studies or sport, and for broader enthusiasts of both sport and film.

Sports films are popular forms of entertainment around the world, but beyond simply amusing audiences, they also reveal much about class, race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. In All-Stars and Movie Stars, Ron Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke, and Deborah A. Carmichael explore the interplay between sports films and critical aspects of our culture, examining them as both historical artifacts and building blocks of ideologies, values, and stereotypes. The book covers not only Hollywood hits such as Field of Dreams and Miracle but also documentaries such as The Journey of the African American Athlete and international cinema, such as the German film The Miracle of Bern. The book also explores television coverage of sports, commenting on the relationship of media to golf and offering a new perspective on the culture and politics behind the depictions of the world's most popular pastimes. The first part of the book addresses how sports films represent the cultural events, patterns, and movements of the times in which they were set, as well as the effect of the media and athletic industry on the athletes themselves. Latham Hunter examines how the baseball classic The Natural reflects traditional ideas about gender, heroism, and nation, and Harper Cossar addresses how the production methods used in televised golf affect viewers. The second section deals with issues such as the growth of women's involvement in athletics, sexual preference in the sports world, and the ever-present question of race by looking at sports classics such as Rocky, Hoosiers, and A League of Their Own. Finally, the authors address the historical and present-day role sports play in the international and political arena by examining such films as Visions of Eight and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. This important and unique collection illuminates the prominent role that sports play in society and how that role is reflected in film. Analysis of the depiction of sports in film and television provides a deeper understanding of the appeal that sports hold for people worldwide and of the forces behind the historic and cultural traditions linked to sports.

This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection brings together leading international scholars working across the humanities and social sciences to examine ways in which representations of sports coaching in narrative and documentary cinema can shape and inform sporting instruction. The central premise of the volume is that films featuring sports coaches potentially reflect, reinforce or contest how their audiences comprehend the world of coaching. Despite the growing interest in theories of coaching and in the study of the sports film as a genre, specific analyses of filmic depictions of sports coaches are still rare despite coaches often having a central role as figures shaping the values, social situation and cultural expectations of the athletes they train. By way of a series of enlightening and original studies, this volume redresses the relative neglect afforded to sports coaching in film and simultaneously highlights the immense value that research in this emerging field has for sporting performance and social justice. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Sports Coaching Review.

Sports and film are media that create time. They are temporal not only in the sense that they are defined and regulated by certain temporalities as a result of processes of social negotiation, but also in the sense of modulating and intervening in these processes in the first place. They are determined by multiple temporalities referring to and aligning along perceptual corporeality; but at the same time, they also produce time through and along temporalities of bodily expression and perception. Thus, as much as we perceive and understand sports and film by means of our culturally coded conceptions of time, this comprehension is itself already the product of these media’s fabrication and modulation of certain audiovisual imaginations of time. This book examines these imaginations with regard to US team sports feature films, understanding the former as the latter’s constitutive conflict which makes these films graspable as a genre in the first place. By addressing temporality as an ever-new crystallization of a heroic past and an unattainable future in a saturated yet volatile present, this conflict connects substantially to the American Dream as an idea of community-building historicity. Departing from a non-taxonomic approach in genre theory and such philosophical recognition of the American Dream as less an ideological narrative but more a social and socially effective imaginary embedded in an audiovisual discourse of time, this book demonstrates the interrelation of sports, cinema and “American” subjectivization along close readings of the poetics of affect of five exemplary sports films (FIELD OF DREAMS, WE ARE MARSHALL, KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN, JIM THORPE – ALL-AMERICAN, MIRACLE).