Sport in Films by Poulton, Emma; Roderick, Martin;

Short description:

This scholarly contribution to the study of sport in films is one of the first of its kind to examine how sport has been used in movies and documentaries as a metaphor for other areas of social life, including insights into the representation of social identities, politics, consumerism and violence

Long 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.

Table of 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