Full Description
Sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama. Consequently, sport makes for a compelling film narrative and films, in turn, are a vivid medium for sport.
Yet despite its regularity as a central theme in motion pictures, constructions and representations of sport and athletes have been marginalised in terms of serious analysis within the longstanding academic study of films and documentaries.
In this collection, it is the critical study of film and its connections to sport that are examined.
The collection is one of the first of its kind to examine the ways in which sport has been used in films as a metaphor for other areas of social life.
Among the themes and issues explored by the contributors are:
Morality tales in which good triumphs over evil
The representation and ideological framing of social identities, including class, gender, race and nationality
The representation of key issues pertinent to sport, including globalization, politics, commodification, consumerism, and violence
The meanings 'spoken' by films - and the various 'readings' which audiences make of them
This is a timely collection that draws together a diverse range of accessible, insightful and ground-breaking new essays.
This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Contents
Part 1: Sport and film: a match made in Hollywood . . . and studios around the globe? 1. In praise of an 'invisible genre'? An ambivalent look at the fictional sports feature film Glen Jones 2. 'It's in the game': sport fans, film and digital gaming Garry Crawford 3. Time and timelessness in sport film David Rowe Part 2: Constructing and Representing Social Identities in Sport Films 4. Chariots of Fire: bigotry, manhood and moral certitude in an age of individualism Ellis Cashmore 5. The changing charismatic status of the performing male body in Asian martial arts films David Brown, George Jennings and Aspasia Leledaki 6. Winning and losing respect: narratives of identity in sport films Garry Whannel 7. Remasculinizing American white guys in/through new millennium American sport films Kyle W. Kusz 8. Girlfight: boxing women Jayne Caudwell 9. When kings were (anti-?)colonials: black athletes in film Grant Farred Part 3: Constructing and Representing Social Issues in Sport Films 10. Goal! and the global sports film Aaron Baker 11. 'Smoke and mirrors': evocations of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field in Blue in the Face John Hughson 12. From mice to men: Miracle, mythology and the 'Magic Kingdom' Michael Silk, Jaime Schultz and Bryan Bracey 13. Critiquing the Olympic documentary: Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad Ian McDonald 14. Spectator sports and terrorist reports: filming the Munich Olympics, (re)imagining the Munich Massacre David Scott Diffrient 15 'I predict a riot': forecasts, facts and fiction in 'football hooligan' documentaries Emma Poulton Film Index Subject Index
