The British Football Film

Stephen Glynn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319777276
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book constitutes the first full volume dedicated to an academic analysis of British football as depicted on film. From early single-camera silents to its current multi-screen mediations, the repeated treatment of football in British cinema points to the game's importance not only in the everyday rhythms of national life but also, and especially, its immutable place in the British imaginary landscape. Through close textual analysis together with production and reception histories, this book explores the ways in which professional footballers, amateur players and supporters (the devoted and the demonized) have been represented on the British screen. As well as addressing the joys and sorrows the game necessarily engenders, British football is shown to function as an accessible structure to explore wider issues such as class, race, gender and even the whole notion of 'Britishness'.

Part IIntroduction

© The Author(s) 2018

Stephen GlynnThe British Football Filmhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77727-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. The British Football Film: The Rules of the Game

Stephen Glynn¹

(1)

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Stephen Glynn

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In 2007 the Cannes Film Festival, to commemorate its sixtieth anniversary, commissioned a compendium of 34 three-minute films. Boasting a roster of directorial talent ranging from Theo Angelopoulos to Zhang Yimou and covering 25 countries from 5 continents, Chacun Son Cinéma/To Each His Cinema premiered on 20 May both at Cannes and on French television’s Canal+. Given the sole brief to express ‘their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theatre’, several directors recalled the erotic encounters often coupled with cinema attendance (Roman Polanski , Gus Van Sant ), some inevitably elegised the classic European art house cinema commonly shown at Cannes (Alejandro Gonzalez Iňárritu , Walter Sallas ), others ruminated on cinema houses falling into disrepair or disuse (David Cronenberg , Takeshi Kitano ), while a few indulged in open self-congratulation (Youssef Chahine , Claude Lelouch ). The venture’s final contribution was provided by its only British director, Ken Loach : in ‘Happy Ending’, a father and son (Bradley Walsh and Joe Siffleet), stuck in a fractious Saturday afternoon queue for generic blockbuster movies—mock titles include Warriors of God, Wasp Girl and Campus Girl Chase—decide their time together would be better spent at a football match. As they leave the London multiplex—bemoaning ‘57 screens and nothing on’—the pair perk up and we hear the non-diegetic roar of a football crowd—Local Football 1 Hollywood Film 0.

Loach’s ‘funny but dispiriting little bit’ (Peter Brunette, Screen Daily, 21 May 2007), an ironic capping to a project intent on championing cinema, ostensibly exposes the vacuity of contemporary commercial movie-making; it does so by extolling in its stead the value of association football as a key social site for father–son bonding. A similar cultural choice, but with an opposing authorial inflection, had been expressed in July 1927 when, in the inaugural editorial of Close Up , Britain’s first intellectual (and Europe-leaning) film journal, Kenneth Macpherson capitalised his scorn for a rumoured revival in indigenous film production: ‘REALLY the Englishman can only be roused to enthusiasm on the football field. A cup final will evoke tens of thousands of whooping maniacs. One doesn’t mind that, but in the face of it one does ask WHY attempt art? The preference between the two is so indisputable’ (‘As Is’, 1, 1: 8–9). Both examples, cinematic or critical, approving or bemoaning the popular preference, set up the cultural dynamic between feature films and football matches, constructs of roughly equal duration eliciting an equal range of response, and together the subject of this film historical study.

Sport and cinema have long been held up as a fruitful partnership, mutually supportive for storyline, star appeal and spectatorship. Emma Poulton and Martin Roderick observe how ‘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’ (2008: 107). Gary Jones stresses how, for a celebrity-obsessed viewing public, ‘Film and sport can create myths as well as “living legends” of those blessed with talent, photogenic looks and a good agent’ (2005: 32–3). Seán Crossan notes the economic and emotive attractions of sport for film: ‘Sport attracts huge attention and is one of the most popular cultural practices internationally providing a crucial source of personal, communal, national and occasionally international identification’ (2013: 2). Many, though, contest the sport–film partnership and employ a mirror tactical strategy to condemn a lack of narrative immediacy, actor credibility and audience appeal. For Matthew Syed, the sports film is simply ‘a contradiction in terms’ since ‘Sport is an exercise in unpredictability, an unscripted battle in which the viewer is absorbed in the plot precisely because he does not know how it will end. A movie is necessarily the reverse: scripted, plotted and directed; a confection in which the drama is choreographed in advance’ (‘What makes the perfect sports film?’, Times, 5 February 2010). David Thomson argues that actors are inevitably betrayed on film, especially when heavily edited, since they lack the innate skills and intensive training of top sports stars: ‘as with Fred Astaire dancing, you have to show the whole figure doing what he does best’ and without the requisite ‘mise en scene that employs spatial relationships’, every sports fan can ‘smell the fake’ (‘Playing for Real’, Sight and Sound, September 1996: 13). Finally, numerous commentators have agreed with Robert Cantwell, for whom ‘Sport was Box-Office Poison’, its movie incarnations principally notable for building a history of ‘fiscal catastrophe’ (Sports Illustrated, 15 September 1969). Thus, enduring critical oppositions are established.

However, no mutual antipathy was evident in the late-Victorian period, where the origins of spectator sport and public cinema were largely coeval—the inaugural modern Olympics, hosted by Athens from 6 to 15 April 1896, closely followed the Lumière brothers ’ first paid public screening of short films in Paris on 28 December 1895. The subsequent progress of both practices was inextricably connected: Luke McKernan emphasises how ‘Cinema widened people’s views of the world, and certainly their view of the sporting world. It was the beginning of sport as a world-wide phenomenon, something that went hand in hand with the rise of film through the twentieth century’ and ‘looking back, we see the birth of twins: motion pictures and mass appeal sport’ (1996: 115). Sport was integral to perfecting and popularising the new visual medium: motion-picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge used Stanford horses and San Francisco athletes to experiment in live-action sequence/series photography, while Robert W. Paul ’s recording of the Epsom horse-racing Derby (3 June 1896) was shown in London music halls the day after the race and ‘its ecstatic reception announced the arrival of moving pictures in Great Britain’ (McKernan 2005: 875).

Football quickly followed, kicking off in October/November 1896 with another Paul production, the (lost) one-minute ‘A Football Match at Newcastle-on-Tyne’ (Paul Catalogue No. 46). The earliest surviving footage was reputedly taken by the Lumières’ camera operator Alexandre Promio in London in late 1897: for 41 seconds, Football (Lumière Catalogue No. 699) shows two teams (one long thought to be Woolwich Arsenal, forerunner of future film favourites Arsenal FC ) kicking a ball on an unspecified sports field. ¹ Fellow French critic André Bazin would later epigrammatically assert that ‘the cinema is movement’ (1971: 141), but this debut exposes the difficulties inherent in recording a sport which, unlike its early cinematic rivals horse-racing and boxing, does not reach a clearly defined temporal and spatial climax. Here the immobile camera, facing the right-side goal and positioned on the edge of the penalty area, is problematic as both teams’ players crowd around the ball, allowing the filmmaker to squeeze them all into shot: some look at the camera, others smile briefly before returning to what is evidently a staged, i.e. ‘fictional’, practice session rather than a competitive fixture (Fig. 1.1). Cinema would soon turn to recording professional matches, though the camera was often less interested in the game itself than the attendant crowd members—a lure to attend and identify themselves in the ensuing local exhibition. The earliest surviving match footage offers 50 ft. (under one minute) of Welsh filmmaker Arthur Cheetham’s ‘Blackburn Rovers v West Bromwich ’, filmed at Ewood Park on 24 September 1898, but its limited exposure and perspective, with the largely-distant ill-defined action recorded from a single camera behind one of the goals, conveys little sense of match-play or progression (Blackburn won 4-1). This would not greatly develop until the arrival of newsreels around 1910 which, evidencing an advantageous shift in both multi-camera modes of recording and nationwide exhibition, generated a firmer match narrative (Toulmin 2006). These advances would help to prepare the ground for viable fictional treatments and the birth of the football film genre.

Fig. 1.1

Football 1897—Cinematic Kick-off

Those terms, ‘football’ and ‘film genre’, are in need of ‘early doors’ elucidation. In the (much-derided) hooligan film Green Street (2005), the new American recruit is warned that, should he aspire to full gang integration, he should never employ the term ‘soccer’. This British film study will also favour the more prevalent indigenous appellation of ‘football’, but the terms are in truth synonymous and, if only for stylistic variety, occasional use will be made of ‘soccer’ without intended class or national inflection. More contentious, perhaps, will be referencing the football film as a ‘genre’ since the term is a troublesome constant in film studies. Should genre be assessed as a product or a process? Is it best viewed as a theoretical concept of analysis or a function of industry and market forces? Much as film historians trace an interlinked genesis and development for film and sport, functional and temporal parallels are drawn by genre theorists: Rick Altman, for instance, defines film genres as ‘not the real world, but a game that we play with moves and players borrowed from the real world’, denotes how genres’ dissemination constitutes ‘alternative public spheres’ that parallel sport in ‘existing without physical interaction among fans of the same sport or team’ and, echoing McKernan, determines how ‘It is hardly surprising to discover that the rise of spectator sports takes place virtually simultaneously with the development of film genres’ (1999: 157, 192).

What then constitute the rules of this ‘game that we play’? At its most reductive a film genre can be adjudged to manifest distinct narrative patterns and a secure iconography: ‘Put simply, genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. The Professionals
• Part III. The Amateurs
• Part IV. The Supporters
• Part V. Conclusion
• Back Matter