The "Great Hollywood Soccer Movie"

The Los Angeles Times just published a story under the headline Why Is there No Great Hollywood Soccer Movie?  The sport, says the article's author John Horn, has no Hoosiers, no Raging Bull.  He writes

When it comes to soccer, though, the sport's most memorable Hollywood movie probably has been Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine and Pelé's cheesy 1981 World War II drama "Victory" — only a marginally better treatment of the sport, in some detractors' view, than "Happy Gilmore" was for golf.

Horn ignores a lot of films and seems to accept that we all agree on the "Hollywood soccer movie" as something we want. First off - as far as Hollywood soccer movies go, Victory is totally worth watching. The cinematography is excellent, especially the game footage, and, well - it was directed by John Huston. It's not half bad. The comparison to Happy Gilmore is unfair. Happy Gilmore does not feature footage of one of the best athletes in any sport (Pelé) practicing his craft. Sure, it's cheesy - but so is Hoosiers. Few mainstream sports movies evade the cheesy (Lindsey Anderson's 1963 This Sporting Life does, and is worth watching - it stars Richard Harris as a troubled working class rugby player.)

Maybe by some standards soccer hasn't had a Hollywood treatment, but we do have Stephen Chow's 2004 Hong Kong comedy Shaolin Soccer. And we have the wonderful independent film Gracie (2007), a traditional sports narrative excepting that it is about a girl who wants to play soccer in the late 1970s, and has no option but to play on the boys team. Neither film is mentioned in this article - both are excellent and interesting. Looking for Eric and The Damn'd UTD are also great. But, no, they aren't "Hollywood".  Having just seen Clash of the Titans, Robin Hood, Prince of Persia and Sex and the City 2 - none of which are as good as Victory - I am not sure that is something we should lament. 

Most sports are hard to incorporate into a film. Boxing and martial arts are easier - convincing fight scenes can be choreographed and a fight makes for great cinema spectacle (which is why Shaolin Soccer works). Most sports films avoid showing extended play, and center the drama on the stories off the field (eg Hoosiers and Friday Night Lights).  If we care about a completed pass, or a botched free-throw, it's because we've been made to care about the character. In terms of watching sport (rather than a movie) such cinematic moments are never as satisfying or as complex as a game. You don't watch Jerry McGuire because you want to see a football game.

There are great soccer films out there which are not mentioned in this article. Take Jafar Panahi's Offside (2006) - about women masquerading as boys to watch a World Cup qualifier in Tehran. You don't see soccer in that film, but you see fandom - and because of this focus on passion and politics, it's one of the best soccer films ever made. (Jafar, arguably Iran's most important film-maker, was thankfully just released from prison.)

Horn mentions that Gurinder Chada, director of Bend it Like Beckham, struggled to get financing for her film - he implies that this was because the film is about soccer. Perhaps whatever difficulties she may have had finding backers had more to do with the fact that it is about women players in England (where the women's game was banned for 50 years) and because the original script had a lesbian love story in it. The actual soccer in Bend It Like Beckham is, by the way, kind of lame - but it doesn't matter. It was a huge hit.  Why doesn't Bend It Like Beckham count as soccer's Hoosiers? Because it is about women? (If Hollywood ignores soccer, it's because it ignores women and people of color. That's the story implied but not explored by this Los Angeles Times article.)

Many, like Ken Loach (director of Looking for Eric), assert that soccer demands an experimental eye - the sport is by definition hard to incorporate into traditional film narrative. I disagree - only because one can say this about a range of sports. That said, some of the best soccer films out there are experimental.

On July 6, Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno's art house film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait will be screened at UCLA's Billy Wilder theater.  It will be the city's first public screening of this celebrated film - a total cinema experience, in which seventeen cameras track Zidane across a Real Madrid match. Mogwai did the soundtrack, and it's gorgeous (best on the big screen). It is, perhaps, the sport's Raging Bull. And, no, it isn't a Hollywood film. But then again, filmed in black and white and with its disturbingly blank approach to violence and relatively modest box office, neither was Raging Bull.

Letter to the City of Los Angeles on the eve of the World Cup

We are surely home to more fans of the beautiful game than any other U.S. city. And there is a serious campaign on behalf of a US bid to host the World Cup in 2018/2022.  Please correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can tell Los Angeles has no plans whatsoever to host public projections of the morning matches.

Angelenos are going to local Mexican, Hondoran, Korean restaurants/cafés/bars, Anglo-pubs, etc. Those looking for outdoor projection - which is how a city watches the World Cup - are heading to the Plaza Mexico in Lynwood for Friday's opening match between host country South Africa and Mexico.  LAist reviews a few prime spots for watching the games.

But, Los Angeles - you've let us down. We very much want to watch these games with our fellow Angelenos, and we would most like to do so in public, especially for big matches like South Africa/Mexico and England/US.

Nokia Live? Doesn't that place have a host of outdoor screens? Why is there no plan for WC screenings in downtown LA - easily accessed by bus and train, and perfectly located for the tens of thousands of people working in the neighborhood, desperate to watch these matches in a good atmosphere? There is a viewing party at the Staples Center for South Korea/Greece's 4:30am game on June 12. It's free, too. But why not use the Nokia outdoor screens for other matches? I believe they were used to air Obama's inauguration, for example. Are there no parks, no city-owned spaces at which we can watch the games, and at which fans can be seen, watching en mass? 

Again, perhaps I have been misinformed, in which case I look forward to being corrected and sharing news of a city-sponsored public projection of the tournament's big matches. 

Sincerely,

Left Wing

Puma does the World Cup ad better, with African footballers and fans, Gnarls Barkley and Kehinde Wiley

Contrast the above (and its soundtrack) with Nike's bloated ad, which is seasoned with the most tired forms of machismo and sexism. Here there are even a few girls and women, presented not as sex objects or football failures, but as fans and players (asking the boys to give her the ball!). This ad, furthermore, is actually about African soccer. 

Even crazier (in a good way), is another Puma video made with Kehinde Wiley - a gay African American painter, celebrated for his brilliant and compelling portraits of Black men. Puma commissioned Wiley to make a World Cup poster and to design an "unity" shirt for Africa (below).  Wiley makes portraits in which his subjects adopt the pose of classic works of art (such as Renaissance paintings, portraits of Catholic saints, African statues). 

Below is a video about the making of this work, in which Wiley seems to be falling in love with the beautiful game, and in which we meet actual African players (Eto'o!), who speak in their own words about the sport and the African game.

Thank you Stephen, for bringing these to my attention! As he points out in his comments to the Nike post, these Puma ads are not without their politics, but they are far more interesting.

For Nike, women are only good for laughs

People seem to like Alejandro Iñárritu's ad for Nike's 2010 World Cup campaign ("Write the Future"). I don't. Women appear in it only as sex objects and jokes. Below is a survey of the three moments in this ad in which women figure:

1. Sex objects in the background of a fantasy sequence celebrating Cannavaro's clearing the line and saving the match (35 sec). (Women appear in the audience for this variety show, but not as members of the audience watching the Italy match which inspired it.)

2. As cooks and housewives going about their business while the guys watch this (37 sec). 

3. As a joke - as in "women are funny when they play soccer" - in a sequence picturing boys and men all over the world trying out "Ronaldhino's Turn" in youtube videos, the only female athlete shown trying the move out falls over to everyone's laughter (2:00 minutes).  Note the title of the video which appears as the vehicle for this joke - "women's soccer" - not "Brianna falls over".

That's it, in an ad that is as much about soccer's fans as it is about the sport. (Women constitute at least 30% of the fan base for the men's game.)

It hardly seems worth complaining, as this is basically the primary function of women in mainstream sports media - as sex objects and jokes - not as fans, camerawomen, journalists, athletes or even, apparently, consumers. 

I am demoralized by not only the sexism of this ad but by the ease with which this sort of demeaning and insulting crap is consumed by sports audiences. It is completely and utterly depressing.  The commercial was broadcast to the audience at the Nike Montalban Theater before their screening of the Champion's League final.  I was in a major funk by halftime, and promised myself never to go back there.

Want to write the future? Edit the sexism!

Daniel Lara's Recycled Footballs

Daniel Lara is a multimedia designer and artist. He lives in Los Angeles, and is one of the best players I've had the pleasure of meeting while playing pick-up soccer.  His website charts his incredible range as a visual thinker.

A few months ago, Daniel told me he was thinking about making work using soccer balls. Now he gives kids he sees playing soccer new balls for their old ones. He unravels the old balls, and stitches their skins and bladders together to make objects like the one he is holding here. 

It's a gorgeous object, as you can see - the strange patchwork makes me wonder where these balls came from, it has me looking for traces of the groups they held together in forms of play. Now those people are playing with things Daniel gave them, too - he's left a trace of this project with them.

This isn't the first work to re-purpose soccer-objects, but it's surely one of the best.

In the shadow of the World Cup: ESPN covers the rape of South African soccer players

ESPN has done a story on the frequency with which South African women soccer players are raped, targeted as lesbians. (Female athletes often targets for rape) It is a good thing that a media outlet with ESPN's resources decided to cover this story.  But there are a couple of dots ESPN avoided connecting.

This comes two years after the murder of former national team player, Eudy Simelane. (See On the murder of Eudy Simelane and Girlie "S'Gelane" Nkosi, Eudy Simelane's teammate and lesbian activist, murdered). The timing of this story implicitly links to the opening of the World Cup next month.

I wish, I really wish they'd asked the question of what FIFA has done around this - as I've written in this blog before, were a male national team player murdered in a hate crime in a country hosting the World Cup, you can be sure FIFA would do something to address it - they would at least acknowledge it.  As far as I can tell, there has been absolutely no attempt to enlist the most famous men in the world - gathering in South Africa - in any sort of campaign condemning these violent attacks.

And - to make another point again - the situation in South Africa is extreme, but rape within a homophobic attack is not unique to South Africa. In the U.S., the most famous case of this might be Brandon Teena, a trans teen who was raped and murdered in 1993. His story is the subject of the film Boys Don't Cry.

I wish ESPN had made the FIFA link, and touched base with someone who could raise their awareness about homophobic violence. It would be altogether too much for them to also acknowledge the international importance of this story, as female soccer are marked for harassment and worse for playing "a man's game" in many more places that South Africa. This situation may be extreme, but it rests at the far end of a continuum of experiences of sexism and homophobia all too familiar to altogether too many people.

[Thanks to the reader who gave me the heads up on the ESPN story!]

Q & A regarding Hertha provokes random thoughts on Berlin (and German) soccer

Q from Gustavo Arellano: And now for something different: a great story on the last sad days of a soccer club before it gets kicked out of germany’s top division. Jennifer Doyle: where do these fans rank on the political scale of things? Are they progressives like Barça, or fascists like Lazio? (German Capital Bids Auf Wiedesehen to Top-Flight Football)

A, of sorts: Thanks Gustavo! Read on only if prepared for the distortions of my extremely uneven knowledge regarding German soccer. Hertha has had a spectacularly bad season - they nearly qualified for the Champion's League last year, and now they've been relegated. I will leave The Guardian's Raphael Honigstein to diagnose Hertha's demotion:

In fact it's nigh on impossible to look at the terrible fate that has befallen Hertha Berlin as anything else but divine retribution for sins committed in a former life. Or last season, to be more accurate.

Supporters of the Spreesiders will probably violently shake their heads in disagreement at this point, but this column has still barely recovered from witnessing one or two Hertha matches in 2008-09, when they played (if that is indeed the right word) a brand of football so dull, negative and downright misanthropic that one opponent after another lost the will to live. By the end of the campaign the whole Bundesliga was ready to commit hara-kiri, just to make the pain go away. Forget Jorge Valdano's notorious quip about Rafa Benítez's less than aesthetically pleasing Reds: you couldn't see the pitch for all the excrement in the Olympic stadium.

This year, it's more or less the same. Tedious but very competent catenaccio with excellent results has turned into slightly less tedious general incompetence without results.

To address your query regarding Hertha supporters -fans rioted in March, when Hertha lost a crucial match to Nuremberg. But, honestly, I don't know if that incident squares with Hertha's reputation, or if perhaps if this is just typical football-guys gone wild. 

I am a little creeped out by the "Hertha girlfriend" subsection of the club's page for female fans. Not for fans of women's football. Hertha does have an LGBT fan club - as does Barça, Man City, and a few other clubs who reach out to gay and lesbian supporters.


This brings me to your question - who is Berlin's Barça?: No side in Berlin - or anywhere - has managed Barça's ability to "brand" its progressive reputation. And as to Berlin's Lazio - at least one Berlin-based club draws more than its share of fascist fans (Dynamo - formerly the Stasi's team).  But of course it isn't the high profile club that Lazio is and seems to have tried and failed to wiggle out of  its terrible history and dubious present (by changing its name, then changing it back).

The media tag line regarding Hertha's decline focuses on Berlin as now the only European capital not to have a team in the country's top flight division.  But Berlin's reputation as a European capital has always been that of an atypical capital - a capital of atypicality. 

The city's romance, as a tourist destination, is built on fantasies of cabaret life and spy romance. It's basically the only city in Germany many of the alternative set care to visit - and, drawn by the relatively cheap rent, lots of those folks stay.

So, Hertha's spectacularly bad season is perhaps a higher profile version of the other "beautiful losers" playing in "poor but sexy" Berlin (that designation might just be the official signal for gentrification).  But for those teams, one must look beyond the Bundesliga. (FYI - The Global Game reviews a recent film festival gathering work about East German football - it's well worth reading.)

For example - check out at Türkiyemspor Berlin, playing in the unglamorous domain of regional football for a few years now. Türkiyemspor, founded by players of Turkish immigrant background, threatened to rise to the 2nd division in 1990-1991. Their campaign was ruined by an administrative error (read the history on the club's site). In an incident recalling Germany's attitude towards the workers it recruited from Turkey in the 1960s (Come! - a generation later: Leave!), a player who'd transferred to the club was mistakenly ruled ineligible and the games in which he'd played were either forfeit or replayed.  The club just missed being promoted. The German national FA later apologized for the mistake (!). Things went downhill from there. But the club is still around, and it has a women's team (actually, I think it has three). 

When in Berlin last year, I was supposed to attend a match between Türkiyemspor and Hallescher FC - it was postponed, ostensibly due to inclement weather but probably due to fears of violence from Hallescher FC fans, notorious for their racism. 

Hallescher FC was at the center of a particularly miserable incident in 2006. Hallescher fans heaped racist abuse on a Nigerian midfielder playing for Leipzig. Fed up with the ape noises from fans, and from being spat upon, Adebowale Ogungbure threw two fingers over his upper lip - as a salute to the fascists. Ogungbure was then attacked by fans. Incredibly, he was brought up on charges (making Nazi gestures is illegal in Germany) - they were quickly dropped. From Der Spiegel:

"I was just so angry, I didn't care. I could have been killed but I had to do something," Ogungbure told SPIEGEL ONLINE last week. "I thought to myself, what can I do to get them as angry as they have made me? Then when I lifted my arm I saw the anger in their faces and I started to laugh."

"I've faced some sort of racist abuse at about half the matches I've played," he said, but the spitting was too much on March 25. "I've never seen anyone spit at a dog or a cat in Germany -- why should I be spat at?"

Anyway, Berlin has lots of clubs not playing in the Bundesliga - and some of them, like Türkyemspor do interesting political work - to find them one needs to follow the love, not the money!

A brief note on "Los Suns"

On Cinco de Mayo Phoenix wore "Los Suns" shirts to protest Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 - a jaw-dropping bit of racist, xenophobic legislation. The Suns' decision has sparked much discussion about the place of politics in sports. 

The idea that politics can be kept out of sport is giant fiction. If you are allowed to ignore the politics of your team's owners, it is only because this makes it easier for them to line their pockets.

For those wondering where the Suns got their "Los Suns" shirts, I thought I'd share the following: The "Los Suns" shirt comes out of "Noche Latina" - an annual NBA promotional gesture towards Latino fans, in which teams housed in cities with a large Latino market wear jerseys sporting their names as spoken in Spanish by fans (e.g. "El Heat", "Los Spurs" and, my favorite - though not my favorite team - "Los Lakers.")

A marketing gesture intended to acknowledge (and "monetize") Latino fans of NBA teams returns to the court as a provocative statement about what it means for NBA teams to support their fans.

If you want more on this topic, listen to this conversation between Dave Zirin and Greg Esposito. Zirin lists other instances in which sports is politicized openly - the owners of baseball's Arizona Diamondbacks have used their teams as platforms to raise money for Arizona Republicans, and to organize against abortion rights. It's a good long discussion and heats up pretty quickly. Well I guess we can be glad that soccer isn't baseball.  Except, of course, it is.

WPS gives us the publicity campaign we've been looking for!

This campaign is the first I've seen for the WPS that looks like it was designed by people who play and/or watch the sport. Previous publicity for the women's game seemed aimed at parents looking for a family-friendly activity on their weekend afternoons.

The new campaign for the 2010 WPS season features game highlights, rapid editing, and a rousing, militaristic score. It's actually quite traditional - when promoting men's sports.  The nearest that an ad for women's soccer has gotten to this one was a Gatorade commercial, featuring Mia Hamm and Michael Jordan.  One of the neat twists about this new concept: It centers on defense, and luxuriates in images of toughness.  

Defend Your Turf



Accompanying this ad is a series of team-specific billboard projections. Like:

Defend Your Freedom



Defend Chicago

I can't get enough of this bill board projection of Megan Rapinoe - especially when she heads the ball into the air - as the ball goes off the screen, plaster and ceiling tile falls from the sky as if she's sent the ball "through the roof."




I look forward to more unapologetic publicity that foregrounds the strength, ability, aggression and competitiveness of the female athlete.  Bravo to the WPS for getting this one right.

Best Present Ever - Cereal Box, Celebrating US's 1999 World Cup Victory!

This scarcely needs comment - a US Soccer Golden Goals cereal box. A friend just bought it as a thank you present, she spied it at a shop which just bought up a collection of commemorative cereal boxes. 

Al Jazeera Story about Iran's women's team & a follow up to last week's post

Watch this very informative story from Al Jazeera.



Reaction to last week's post about football and hijab has been caught up in the veil (represented by some commentators as the first step in a "slippery slope to fundamentalism").  Some readers seem to have lost sight of the story at hand: whether FIFA's support of the ban against headscarves specifically, and hijab more broadly, makes sense.

In looking for models for more productive discussion of the question of headscarves and football, I've been reading over some academic work on the veil debate, and find myself compelled by discussions about the local complexities of hijab. In last week's comments section I pointed to a June conference in Canada - I'm inspired by the abstracts for papers to be presented at that conference, some of which center on practical questions like Heather Marie Akou's query, "to what degree does this [athletic hijab] create new stereotypes concerning what the 'proper' Muslim female athlete should look like?" ("Islamic Swimsuits" Filling a Need or Creating a New One?"), and by Rikke Andreassen's suggestion that we ask "in which specific moments and spaces are veils destabilizing [or not]?"("Destabilizing Effects of the Veil(s) - Examples from Contemporary Europe", and then there is Ipek A. Celik's interrogation of the association of the veil with "passive victimhood" and a "failure to integrate" in a paper that explores how the liberal marketplace produces this narrative for popular consumption ("Veiled Women's Narratives as Marketable Commodities").

Clearly, hijab has a destabilizing effect in relation to FIFA's regulating presence in international women's soccer. FIFA makes football a global game by making it look the same - by imposing a conformity on the game in order to allow each nation's football culture appear to be interchangeable with every other nation's football culture - perhaps should I say market, here, instead of culture?

Why do women provoke so much trouble in regulating the game, in making the game "uniform"? Why does the female athlete provoke such a challenge that for decades women were prohibited from playing it at all in countries like England, Germany and Brazil? What exactly is so dangerous about a headscarf-wearing soccer player?

Perhaps one of the reasons why some people can't stand the idea of women playing in headscarves is that images of Muslim women playing this physically demanding sport in hijab challenges a world-view that needs to see the Muslim woman only in terms of radical victimization, and as a completely powerless and passive body.

Surely there must be room here for a non-hysterical conversation about more complex processes - for a discussion, for example, of the impact of the normalization of hijab in sports on Muslim women athletes more broadly, or, alternatively, of the ways that some uses of hijab in sport may disrupt discourse on hijab (and gender) in significant and unanticipated ways.

FIFA Makes Its Islamophobia Official & Bans Iranian Women for Donning the Hijab

 

Iran's National Women's Football Team, 2007

FIFA has declared that Iran can't enter its women's team into this August's Youth Olympic Games if its athletes play in headscarves.  Iran's football association is calling for international protest - quite rightly.

This decision comes from the International Football Association Board, which is made up of representatives of the four UK Football Associations (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) and FIFA, which itself has four votes in these decisions. One can imagine what that boardroom looks like - Sith Lords of Soccer, Imperial Experts in Sexism and Islamophobia.

In making this ruling, the IFAB is hiding behind Rule 4, regarding player equipment. This is an arbitrary interpretation and application of FIFA's rules against wearing uniforms with personal political or religious statements ("compulsory equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statements").  Obviously, national uniforms frequently carry both political and religious meaning (Israel, anyone?). We often watch players cross themselves furiously before taking penalties - why not ban that gesture from the pitch? The demand that these women either remove their headscarves or withdraw from the competition is itself a strong statement about religion and politics.

Women athletes have worn the hijab in Olympic events at least since 2004 when Bahrain's Ruqaya Al Ghasara took the track - in 2008, she made headlines wearing a "hijood," a breathable form-fitting hood designed specifically for athletes.

Soccer players have been allowed to compete in international tournaments recognized by FIFA while wearing a variety of uniforms that meet their needs. Below is a photograph from January's South Asia Games - here the Indian national team competes against a Pakistani team outfitted in stylish green uniforms and headscarves.

CNN published a story about November's historic match between Palestine and Jordan. This match was celebrated as a step forward for women's football in the region and featured a few players wearing long pants and sleeves, headscarves or fitted caps. Muslim women athletes across the world adjust their gear to fit their needs, compete in international tournaments, and this should be encouraged. (See the blog Muslim Women in Sports.)

This ruling is yet another instance of imperialist and patriarchal meddling and it betrays the shallowness of FIFA's investment in developing the international women's game, as well as the profound hypocrisy of FIFA's pretence to being "above" politics.  At least now they've made their Islamophobia official.

This seems like a fine moment to recall Sepp Blatter's most famous statement about the women's game:

"Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball. They could, for example, have tighter shorts."

Fuck that. I'll take headscarves and lime green tracksuits over that bullshit anyday.

[April 4: Follow up - Some articles on this topic point to a 2007 IFAB/FIFA ruling supporting a Canadian referee's ejection of 11-year old Asmahan Mansour from a match for wearing a hijab. The referee claimed it was a "safety" issue (on the grounds that she might be strangled!). Quebec's Soccer Association does ban the hijab as part of a broad ban against "the Islamic veil or any other religious item." Which is I guess a safety issue in a world that imagines a terrorist under every turban, and behind every veil. Her team and four others withdrew from the tournament in support ("Hijab debate gets political in Canada").

That same 2007 IFAB decision left room for football associations to make their own decisions about the hijab - apparently only as long as those FAs cooperate with FIFA's worldview. For more - see "Hijab Ban Belongs in the Sin Bin" from the excellent Muslim Women in Sports.]