Experience

YBCA's "Beyond ESPN" series brings together fans of all stripes

By Adam Hartzell

I once got the brush-off when I mentioned to a fellow filmgoer in a theater lobby that the only festival missing from San Francisco’s international film landscape was a sports film festival. (I had just seen Bruce Beresford’s 1976 film The Club and Paul Goodman’s 2002 film Australian Rules—both involving that unique Aussie creation, Australian Rules Football.) Luckily, SF Bay Guardian Arts Editor Johnny Ray Huston did not get the same response when he brought the idea for a sports film series to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Film/Video Curator Joel Shepard. The result, Beyond ESPN: An Offbeat Look at the Sports Film, is a film series that may do for the cinema of sport what the MLS is trying to achieve in the realm of soccer: Build audiences for a beloved pastime by screening/playing them in altogether new territory. Beginning August 6 and running through August 30 at YBCA, Beyond ESPN puts the sporting genre in a new context.

Of course, YBCA and other Bay Area cinephile audiences are not completely new to seeing art films on sport. Veronica Chen’s Agua had already pleased crowds at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2006, so it’s likely to regenerate similar crowds at the YBCA on Thursday, August 20 at 7:30 p.m. But it’s the film George Best: Football Like Never Before (Hellmuth Costard, 1971) that may bring back crowds like those that sold out the first YBCA run of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, 2006). Costard’s film was, perhaps, the inspiration for the Zidane film, where several cameras are placed on one exceptional athlete throughout one match. And it was the success of the Zidane film at YBCA that was the inspiration for the Beyond ESPN series. (Shepard disconfirmed any illusions I had of titular relationship to the classic sports studies text by C.L.R. James, Beyond the Boundary.) The rare opportunity to see this film on Belfast-born winger/forward/legend George Best (as someone who came from the land of gridiron football, my first introduction to George Best was as the man on the cover whose name was the title for the debut album by The Wedding Present) is also likely to bring in patrons who are not normally anxious to see the selections on offer at YBCA. (I myself am bringing five.)

Equally likely to draw atypical YBCA patrons are the collection of Rare Films from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Watching these short films of yesteryear (to be introduced by The Wexner Center for the Arts’ Curator of Film/Video David Filipi on Thursday, August 6, at 7:30 p.m.), hindsight allows the images to remix in our minds. For example, the first short from a series called “Dugout Chatter” features a microphone being handed off to Cleveland’s Herb Score to give an analysis of his teammate and roommate Rocky Colavito during batting practice. After which, Score is told he did a nice job. As someone who was raised in Cleveland, I had to smile during this moment because I came to this film with the knowledge that Score would eventually be providing analysis and play-by-play as the regular announcer for Cleveland baseball games after retiring as a player. (Score passed away last November and Cleveland players are wearing a patch in his honor throughout the 2009 season.) Many of the other shorts on offer provide similar re-contextualized delights, such as a public service announcement from the 1970s in which the New York Mets promote car-pooling and walking. That’s the kind of PSA we could easily put back into rotation since such advocacy is even more necessary now.

In his recent memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami also talks a little about cycling. “Sometimes it strikes me as an intricate form of torture.” And it appears Danish director (and sports announcer) Jørgan Leth would agree, for he named his film about the grueling Paris-Roubaix bicycle race, A Sunday in Hell (1976). Such a film seems perfect for a Sunday at 2 p.m. (on August 9) for those who recently took part in the annual San Francisco Seven Hells Bike Tour where cyclists purposely pedal up hills that The Wiggle was developed to help cyclists avoid. And anyone who went to the Bicycle Film Festival recently will appreciate the opening frames in Leth’s film where a professional cyclist lovingly brushes his bike with utmost attention.

Shepard has a reputation for programming challenging films while challenging film canons. As he said in an email correspondence, “I’m opposed to any finite definition of a film canon, and I tend not to separate art from artifacts.” Huston has posed similar challenges to readers and canons in the alternative pages of our local news. In the Midnites for Maniacs-programmed segment of Beyond ESPN, (sadly not actually taking place at Midnight but at 2, 4, and 7 p.m. respectively on Sunday, August 23), Jesse Hawthorne Ficks fits in with his curating companions by compiling a series of nostalgic trips down celluloid lane that will have us rethinking the emotive Ice Castles (Donald Wyre, 1978), the little league-hitting-big-time that was The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976), and the, um, seminal sexploitation flick The Cheerleaders (Paul Glickler, 1973). These three films may initially make us think of ’80s video stores, not the present day art theater, but YBCA has been smashing those high-low art divides for years. As Shepard notes, “Looking at those films again makes me realize that our B movies have gotten more conservative, in many respects. Even though there was an entertaining remake, I don’t think a raw, edgy film about teenagers like [The] Bad News Bears would be made today.”

YBCA screens respected directors Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, and others’ installments in Visions of Eight (1973), a collection of documentary shorts from the tragic ’72 Munich Olympics playing Thursday, August 27, at 7:30 p.m. In William Klein’s French Open documentary, which is simply called The French (1982), on Sunday, August 16 at 2 p.m., you’ll find McEnroe true to apoplectic form and learn that Ivan Lendl is a bit shy about exposing his chest for the camera.

While stretching the sport film canon in many directions, Huston and Shepard are also challenging the very definition of sport by including a film about dance, Claire Denis’ Towards Mathilde (2005). Never before screened in San Francisco until Thursday, Augusts 13, at 7:30 p.m., this film’s selection underscores how dance possesses the same amount of athleticism as any sport on display in this series. (Not to mention that the popularity of reality shows So You Think You Can Dance and the multiple spin-offs around the globe of Dancing with the Stars revealing that the world is beginning to be more receptive to connecting dance with sport.)

One of the major points put forward in Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman’s excellent book Offside: Soccer & American Exceptionalism is that a sport’s hegemonic presence in a country “cannot be acquired through intellect[,] but only through emotion and identity, which is what ultimately sustains them in a historically lasting way”. For a sport to dominate—to hold court so to speak—it must be the topic that allows a stranger to enter a conversation as a welcomed comrade. It must be discussed passionately around the printer (the modern day equivalent of the water cooler) at work the next day. It must be the emotional glue that bonds a significant part of the wider population, allowing for the occasional crossing of racial, class and religious barriers. By transferring sports from the stadium to the art cinema, a similar boundary may be being crossed. If I’m lucky, someone in the YBCA lobby will actually want to discuss those Australian Rules Football films with me this time.

topics: art film, bay area, directors, documentary, genre films, hollywood, sports film, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

08.06.2009