Real-time spectacles: two artworks and the representation of soccer.

Two recent artworks take the soccer stadium as the arena in which to create two radically different representations of the game as a real-time spectacle. Both Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and Harun Farocki's video installation "Deep Play" (2007) have successfully infiltrated the world of professional sports. They have produced works of art that ultimately explore to what extent our view of this industry is defined by all-encompassing mediation. However, while Gordon and Parreno visually comment on this by producing a seemingly coherent filmic re-interpretation of a soccer game, Farocki analyzes and deconstructs in detail the various layers of data that are available to determine and evaluate the contemporary visualization of World Cup games.

SOCCER AS NEVER SEEN BEFORE

The 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany is widely regarded as the first instance of soccer experienced as an international televised event. (1) By the 1970s, the wide-spanning TV coverage became essential to the finals, and shifted in focus from transmitting a visual record of a sporting event to a carefully constructed global phenomenon. Along with this development, another shift occurred during this decade. Credited with the invention of "Total Football," the legendary Dutch soccer coach Rinus Michels, aka "The General," notoriously exposed the cruel nature of soccer in drawing a parallel between the sport and warfare; "Professional football is something like war. Whoever behaves too properly is lost." (2) Throughout the 1970s, Michels radically modernized the game, introducing a strategy that called on players to become extremely tactical by, for example, shifting positions at high speed.

Much in the spirit of Guy Debord, soccer transformed into a "total spectacle" in which social interactions between people are mediated solely by images. Along these lines, Jean Baudrillard, in his essay "The Mirror of Terrorism" (1993), ponders on the ways in which media representation has displaced the "real" event. In this text, Baudrillard evokes the European Cup final of 1987, which was played behind closed doors, with no spectators allowed inside the stadium. The extreme carefulness of the organizers stemmed from the tragic Heyzel Disaster that occurred two years earlier. (3) As Baudrillard suggests, "it does perfectly exemplify the terroristic hyperrealism of our world, a world where a 'real' event occurs in a vacuum, stripped of its context and visible only from afar, televisually." (4) For Baudrillard, in the spectacle of sports the "real" event needs not to take place, as long as it is mediated through broadcasts: "No one will have directly experienced the actual course of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them." (5)

Although Baudrillard's thoughts should be regarded metaphorically, in recent years the occasional employing of large-size screens at soccer stadiums has provided live spectators with an elongated, mediated view of the game. Through techniques such as instant replay and slow motion, the spatio-temporality of the event already becomes fragmented as it is occurring. Furthermore, interactive television features allow the viewer at home to adopt a point of view on a particular action (a tackle for example) or focus on a player through slow motion and super close-ups. (6) Through such ever-evolving real-time technologies, the mediated point of view is the norm through which the imagery of soccer is collectively formed. As such, our relationship to the game is profoundly altered, knowable only through fragmented audiovisual representations, either live in the stadium or at home on television.

ZIDANE

The particularity of Zinedine Zidane as a complex iconic figure of world sports makes him the ideal subject for a "21st century portrait." (8) In their essay "Quiet contradictions of celebrity," scholars Hugh Dauncey and Douglas Morrey state that the French soccer player "has become a blank canvas on which the French media has played out the nation's preoccupation with race and national identity," while also suggesting that "Zidane's careful refusal to take up ideological positions or explain his actions may represent a canny negotiation of a global arena in which the slightest utterance is subject to fine scrutiny." (9) On several occasions, Gordon and Parreno have declared that their intent with Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was to use portraiture as a way to get closer to the unreadable international sportsman. Making a film that would focus solely on Zidane during an entire soccer game, they were aware of the danger of injuries or other unforeseeable interventions that could abort their project. However, as both artists have claimed, they never considered another subject for the project, and in the event of Zidane canceling or proving uncooperative, they would not have created the piece. (10) Their collaborative project became the filming of a regular match held in Madrid between Spanish soccer club Real Madrid (for which Zidane played at the time) and Villareal F.C.

Although both artists have worked collectively on projects in the past, Zidane marks the most extensive collaboration, and the largest artistic undertaking for both so far. Gordon is mostly known for his video installations that investigate iconic moving images and their relation to time, such as his well-known slowdown of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (I960) to 24 Hour Psycho (1993). Parreno makes work that revolves around the nature of images, often using existing material. For No Ghost Just a Shell (2001), he famously purchased the copyright of a Japanese manga figure, offering colleague artists the opportunity to manipulate the character.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For this project, seventeen cameras were placed around the soccer field, allowing cinematographers to capture Zidane from 360[degrees]. The unique technology employed on some of the cameras (NASA lenses used for non-scientific ends for the first time) suited the project particularly well, allowing the cameramen to focus on, and track, a distant moving target with extreme precision. The work first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 as a feature film, but is occasionally also exhibited in museum or gallery spaces as a two-channel video installation. The artists remain vague about which format the work was intended for, but have stated that for them, there is no significant hierarchy between the cinematic "black box" screening and the transferred "white cube" installation. (11) This essay will consider Zidane solely in its full-length film format.

A 21st-CENTURY PORTRAIT

Although Gordon and Parreno cite Andy Warhol's screen tests as an important influence, the meticulous formal and narrative structuring of Zidane into a coherent whole starkly opposes Warhol's cinematic non-events. Notably, a Warholian approach to filmmaking has been more strictly applied to other soccer-themed media artworks. Sam Taylor-Wood's video David (2002) shows an unedited hour-long shot of David Beckham taking a nap, referencing Warhol's iconic film Sleep (1963). Earlier, an experimental film by German director Hellmuth Costard, entitled Football as Never Seen Before (1970), offered a portrait of the British Manchester United star player George Best. The film focuses on Best during an entire game using eight 16 mm cameras. Despite the superficial conceptual analogies, the incomparability between Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait and Football As Never Seen Before is rightfully emphasized by Parreno and Gordon, but perhaps not for the right reasons. (12) What is crucial, beyond technical dissimilarities, is the ways in which Zidane opens up the strict Warholian spatio-temporality of "real time." Manipulating various aspects of their footage, Gordon and Parreno suggest something about the nature of mediated images that is more layered than what the above-mentioned intriguing portraits of emblematic soccer players reveal.

While close-ups are an integral part of televised international soccer games, Zidane employs them in such a way that they evoke a cinematic language, reinforced by the inherent aesthetic quality of 35mm film stock. Certain shots directly quote the visual style of classical film genres, such as the western or even wildlife documentaries, as Mark W. Pennings suggests. (13) Such close-ups and extreme close-ups dominate, occasionally alternating with wide shots of Zidane on the field and tracking shots following his maneuvers. The sporadic amplification of his sighs, "roans, and yells is an aural accompaniment to these shots, offering a striking but distancing focus on Zidane's physicality. The unrelenting scrutinizing of the player's gestures does not provide clues as to his psychological disposition, as Gordon and Parreno suggest. (14) Rather, his physicality seems to largely occur within a closed mise-en-scene to which Zidane's unreadable persona is inexorably linked. By disregarding an essential rule of televised soccer editing, namely using the trajectory of the ball as the guide for the master narrative, the view shifts not only to Zidane, but to all the visual codes that envelop him around the arena.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Early on in the film, Zidane is shown amid flashing, animated ad displays on LED screens installed around the soccer field. On more than one occasion, Zidane appears embedded within multimedia images of giant Gillette razors and other desired consumer products that exude power and masculinity. Such images remind us that Zidane. a multimillion-dollar commodity, cannot be separated from this mediated mass event, and indeed, from the soccer industry at large. A highly self-reflexive moment of the film makes this explicit--when a moving ad shows a soccer ball rolling by, providing a visual echo of how images of soccer, since the 1960s, have come to us in mediated form. Zidane's representation, an integral part of this media spectacle, remains "all image and no inferiority," as Hal Foster notably remarked. (15) Not even the occasionally appearing titles, citing Zidane's thoughts on his soccer career, culled from previous interviews, can counter this. Gordon and Parreno seem to be aware of the impossibility of understanding the player, as they decide to show the climactic moment of the film from a rarely used camera angle (from behind the goal) and in a wide-shot. Toward the end of the game, Zidane, without apparent reason, aggresively attacks an opponent, for which he receives a red card and is sent off of the field. This action is mostly hidden from our view, which reinforces our psychological detachment from Zidane and the impossibility of getting to his persona beyond its representations.

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