Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference
March 2015 | Montreal, Canada
Panel Call for Papers: Soccer, Cinema, Media, and Culture
A World Cup year is an opportune moment to examine soccer’s place in film and media culture. International tournaments like it and the European Championships namely, are ever expanding spectacles and commercial enterprises. Prominent leagues are widening their audiences due in no small part to media conglomerates willing to spend ballooning sums of money for broadcast rights. Popular teams and star players are now global brands. At the same time, the higher stakes and greater exposure have illuminated the underside of soccer’s assiduously polished veneer as “the beautiful game.” News stories about exploitation and displacement in host nation Brazil’s preparations have transcended the sports pages, as have reports of corruption surrounding the award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.
Alongside those developments, the game has left a trail of compelling but understudied cinematic footprints. The French experimental documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) for example, about the multiracial superstar who emerged at the turn of the millennium, offers ample opportunity for us to examine the intersection between soccer, cinema, and media archaeology. Formally, the film itself reminds us of filmmaker Hellmuth Costard’s 1970 film about legendary winger George Best, Football as Never Before – a revered work of German cinema in some circles. Likewise, commemorative films produced for the 1982 and 1986 World Cups – G’oleì! (1983) narrated by Sean Connery, and Hero (1987) narrated by Michael Caine – are arguably cult objects. All these works represent attempts to aestheticize soccer through film. Finally, luminaries of world cinema like Emir Kusturica (Maradona, 2008) and Ken Loach (Looking for Eric, 2009) have also contributed notable works to the genre.
This panel seeks multidisciplinary contributions that venture to treat the “intersection” between soccer, cinema, and media in creative and interesting ways. We welcome proposals that use soccer films and related media objects to examine a range of possible topics that include:
• Documentary theory and history
• Media archaeology
• Aesthetics (of soccer, film, television, etc.)
• Broadcast innovations (satellites, camera placements, mobility, replays, etc.)
• Film genre
• Negotiations of social identity (working class, national, racial, etc.)
• Political economy and postcolonial networks
• Film and media industry studies
• Sports television networks
• Influence of YouTube
• Video game studies (FIFA, Pro-Evolution, etc.)
• Reception studies
Please address questions and send 300-word proposals, 3-5 bibliographical items, along with a 50-word author bio, to both Gerald Sim ([log in to unmask]) and Michael Meneghetti ([log in to unmask]) by August 10. Notifications will be emailed by August 12.
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