Lange Zeit von den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften ignoriert und als bloße Mainstream-Unterhaltung stigmatisiert, erlangt der Sportfilm zunehmend wissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit. Der interdisziplinär angelegte Band verdeutlicht das vielfältige und vielschichtige, gleichwohl noch nicht annähernd ausgeschöpfte wissenschaftliche Analyse- und Reflexionspotenzial des Sportfilms. Die Beiträge der national und international renommierten Autorinnen und Autoren fokussieren im Besonderen den Sportspielfilm mit seinen zahlreichen Subgenres wie Football-, Basketball-, Box-, Olympia- und Kampfsportfilm. Das steigende Interesse am Sportfilm resultiert aus der wachsenden Einsicht, dass es sich hierbei um ein Genre handelt, das pointiert gesellschaftliche Zustände, kulturelle Ideologien sowie politisch-ökonomische Strukturen reflektiert und kritisiert. Der Sportfilm thematisiert historische Ereignisse, gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen wie auch individuelle und kollektive (Anti-)Helden. Er gibt Aufschluss über kulturspezifische Besonderheiten des Sports und dessen Verflechtung mit anderen gesellschaftlichen Handlungsfeldern. Darüber hinaus inszeniert er zeitgeisttypische und zugleich allgemeingültige (Körper-)Ideale, Werte, Konflikt- und Handlungsmuster. Der Sportfilm reproduziert damit nicht nur gesellschaftliche und sportliche Wirklichkeit, sondern konstruiert sie im Medium einer emotional wirkmächtigen Bildsprache gleichermaßen mit.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Sport in Australian Drama, first published in 1992, provides an intelligent view of Australian society at play.

A collection of essays that focuses on teaching sport-related classes in the humanities and social sciences. It is designed to aid university faculty in proposing or revising courses and features sample syllabi, assignment instructions, and examinations in the appendix to each essay.

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.

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.