SPorts Films

Biopics have become call of the day for Bollywood as they not only give honor to the legends but are also being appreciated and enjoyed by the audience. From kings and queen to gangsters and freedom fighters; several movies had been made throughout the time. There have been many biopics made recently on various personalities but these days, sports biopics have become popular. For many they are the dream project and for some it is a medium to pay tribute to their favorite sports star; but for the audience it is the moment of inspiration and rejoicing and reliving the victory of their favorite sports person.

This chapter is concerned with questions of sport, gender and sexuality in relation to cinema, with a specific focus on depictions of female athleticism. It brings into dialogue feminist critiques of women and/in sport as well as women and/in cinema, in an attempt to explore the ways in which gender and sexual identities are re-constituted in contemporary female sports films, including Bring it On

This chapter examines the place of association football in European cinema. Sport cinema has been among the most enduring, popular, and critically acclaimed of genres within American cinema; however, limited research has been undertaken as yet of the European experience. Though a less prominent feature of European cinema, the European sports film has had a long history dating back to the earliest Lumière brothers productions. This chapter provides some initial findings from a quantitative survey of European sport cinema, which identifies football as by far the most commonly featured sport. An overview of the historical development of the football film sub-genre is provided, with particular attention paid to the impact of a number of representative films in a variety of European contexts. As these films have responded to larger developments within specific European countries and the continent more broadly, it is argued that they have served as a barometer of changing cultural values and concerns since the early twentieth century.

Christianity has been an enduring feature of the mainstream sport films from its emergence in the early twentieth century, such that religious icons, references and rituals have now become naturalised as a familiar and recurring aspect of the genre. This includes scenes of athletes seeking religious inspiration or support –  evident in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and the more recent work, Soul Surfer (2011) – , or teams praying before big games and drawing inspiration from religion to achieve victory (as in for example Hoosiers (1986) and Facing the Giants (2006)). Religious figures have also taken lead roles in sports films, occasionally as athletes – from The leather Saint (1955) to Nacho Libre (2006) – or employing sport as a means of instilling discipline and character in young people, most famously in figures such as Father Flanagan (Spenser Tracy) in Boys Town (1938), or Father Jerry (Pat O’Brien) in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). Sometimes, parallels are drawn between Christ and athletes, including Babe Ruth in the biopic of the legendary baseball player The Babe Ruth Story (1948) and in one of the most influential of all sports films, Rocky (1976). In more recent years, Christianity has continued to feature prominently within the genre, including in such commercially and critically acclaimed work as Million Dollar Baby (2004) and The Blind Side (2009). This chapter provides an overview of the historical development and ideological importance of Christianity in the sports film. A fundamental and recurring concern in many of these depictions is the affirmation of a central ideology in American life, the American Dream. Sport, with the support and imprimatur of Christianity, has functioned throughout the twentieth century and into the twentieth-first as one of the most popular cultural vehicles for the apparent affirmation of the American Dream trajectory, a trajectory repeatedly employed within Hollywood cinema.

In the United States, sport stars have provided crucial affirmation of the American Dream ideology despite the considerable evidence that questions the validity and appropriateness of this belief for understandings of American society today. The focus on the individualistic achievement, good character and most importantly humble origins of sport stars in film and other popular representations seems to offer dramatic evidence of the openness of opportunity to those with appropriate ‘values’, including hard work and perseverance, within American society. Sports stars, such as Babe Ruth in the past and Michael Jordan more recently, have been crucial to the persistence of this individualist ethic, a central aspect of contemporary capitalist culture internationally.

Online version of entire article available here: http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=573&feature

This chapter - taken from a larger study considering the role of sport in film - examines the representation of gender in the mainstream sports film genre. While identifying the main focus of the genre on masculinity and the male body, the chapter is principally concerned with tracing the role of women in the mainstream sports film. Historically women have featured within the genre primarily in the roles of inspirational lovers or femme fatales. In the aftermath of World War II, film responded slowly to the changes more generally in Western society, with women featuring increasingly in more significant parts even on occasion crossing the ropes of the boxing ring. However, a recurring feature of such films is the repeated attempts to reaffirm patriarchy through the undermining of strong women. While female owners of sporting franchises are viewed with suspicion, female athletes are subordinated to their male coaches while been repeatedly subject to sexualisation.  Films considered include National Velvet (1944), Pat and Mike (1952), The Main Event (1979), Raging Bull (1980), A League of Their Own (1992), Bring It On (2000) and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

The sports coaching film has a long history, dating from at least 1932 with the production of Paulette McDonagh’s How I Play Cricket which featured the legendary Don Bradman. However, coaching films dedicated to indigenous Irish sport, or Gaelic games, are a more recent development, emerging in the late 1950s. This article considers two such films – Peil (Louis Marcus, 1962) and Christy Ring (Louis Marcus, 1964) – dedicated to Gaelic football and hurling, respectively, and produced by the Irish-language cultural organisation Gael Linn. The principal concern in undertaking this examination is to identify the process by which these films configure Irishness, not just through the depictions of the indigenous sports featured but also through the manner in which these depictions are framed. In “configuring Irishness”, the article examines in particular how these films articulate Irish identity and its constituent properties, particularly in terms of language, geography, politics and religion, thereby “coaching” viewers in Irishness itself, its features, and Ireland’s political and moral leaders.

Sports have long fascinated filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond, from Bend It Like Beckham to Chariots of Fire to Rocky. Though sports films are diverse in their approach, style, and storytelling modes, National Pastimes discloses the common emotional and visual cues that belie each sports film’s underlying nationalistic impulses. Katharina Bonzel unravels the delicate matrix of national identity, sports, and emotion through the lens of popular sports films in comparative national contexts, demonstrating in the process how popular culture provides a powerful vehicle for the development and maintenance of identities of place across a range of national cinemas.

As films reflect the ways in which myths of nation and national belonging change over time, they are implicated in important historical moments, from Cold War America to the class dynamics of 1980s Thatcherite Britain to the fragmented sense of nation in post-unification Germany. Bonzel shows how sports films provide a means for renegotiating the boundaries of national identity in an accessible, engaging form. National Pastimes opens up new ways of understanding how films appeal to the emotions, using myth-like constructions of the past to cultivate spectators’ engagement with historical events.

This peer-reviewed chapter emerged further to ongoing research into the representations of Gaelic games in the cinema and is focused on films directed, or part-directed, by John Ford, in particular The Quiet Man (1952), The Rising of the Moon (1957), and Young Cassidy (1965). For Ford, Gaelic games would seem to have provided a useful motif encapsulating prevailing stereotypes regarding the Irish, including their alleged proclivity for violence. Where referred to, hurling in particular seems inevitably to proceed or suggest an occasion of violence in Ford’s work. However, these allusions also reveal Ford’s tendency towards ‘self-interrogation, to raise doubts at key moments about their own veracity’ (Luke Gibbons) in the director’s focus as much on the prejudiced reactions of those unfamiliar with the sport of hurling as on the sport itself, never actually depicted in his films. Furthermore, Ford realized the performative potential of Irish stereotypes, exploiting in the process the comic potential of hurling (a process also evident in earlier American cinema) to diffuse anxieties regarding the Irish, and to help integrate Irish-American culture into mainstream American life.

This paper examines the place of the football film in British sports cinema. Though a less prominent feature of British cinema than American, the British sports film has had a long history with some of the most important figures in British film choosing sport as a subject of their work, including Alfred Hitchcock. Among the sports featured has been football which would appear, at least on one level, to offer an obvious parallel with the feature film; the average length of the feature film and a football match, at 90 minutes, is about the same. Indeed, directors have attempted from the earliest days of the cinema to capture football in fiction film, with varying degrees of success. This paper engages with a number of central issues with respect to the football film, including a consideration of what we mean when we refer to ‘sports cinema’; how it has featured in films that have emerged from Britain; what have been the distinguishing features of these films, particularly in relation to the dominant Sports Cinema as it has developed in Hollywood; and what role has football played within them. In terms of this final aspect, this paper considers a number of films by British director Ken Loach, whose 1998 film My Name Is Joe provides the title: “I know it’s just football, but it’s important to us”. The apparent paradox contained within this remark by Joe Kavanagh raises a question that is central to this paper's consideration of the football film: How can something that is ‘just football’ be so important? While recognizing the limits of the representation of sport in film, Loach identifies the important role football plays in British male culture, providing a crucial space for male association and community building.