Sport in Films

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.

Emma Poulton joined the staff at Durham University in 1999 from Loughborough University where she undertook her PhD analysing the construction and representation of national identities in Euro 96. This research interest has continued and developed to include analyses of the media representation of football fans and football-related disorder. Martin Roderick spent several years at the University of Leicester before moving to Durham University in 2004, where he is a lecturer in Sociology. In 2003 he completed his PhD examining the careers of professional football. He is the author of The Work of Professional Football: A Labour of Love? (Routledge 2006). His other research interests concern the sociology of emotions and sport, and the problems of participating in sport at elite levels.