Africa is a Country

I finally saw the Douglas Gordon and Philip Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. I had to order it from the UK since it is not available in the United States yet. (And to think David Beckham’s arrival at the LA Galaxy was suppose to increase the appetite for football among the American public as well as among retailers. Nothing of the sort, except expensive LA Galaxy no.23 replica shirts followed.)

The film is truly ‘the purest possible depiction of football’ as Sydney, Australia-based blogger Dan Hill (his blog is CITY OF SOUND) summarized the film earlier this year:

Gordon and Parreno set up 17 cameras to follow Real Madrid ‘galactico’ footballer Zinedine Zidane through the course of an average La Liga game. That’s it. They follow Zidane the player, not the match. The idea, in Parreno’s words, was to ‘make a feature film which follows the main protagonist of a story, without telling the story.’

(The game in question was Real Madrid v Villareal at Madrid’s home stadium, the Bernabeau, and was played on April 23, 2005. The result was immaterial. Madrid won of course).

For non-football fans the film will be a bore, but not for those who love the beautiful game. The film is exactly 90 minutes. Zidane controls the ball for perhaps three or four minutes. Throughout, though, he seems very intense, smiling only once after he had set up Roberto Carlos for a goal). As Paul Myerscough writes in the London Review of Books: ‘… Even standing still, [Zidane] is working hard.’ And Myerscough (an editor at the LRB) is right: ‘Searching his face for 90 minutes brings us no closer to understanding his actions at the end of this game.’

Hill’s discussion of the film on his bog (including its ‘pre-production’ elements and a mesh-up of a the film on Youtube) is one of the better reviews of the film I’ve read, along with that by Myerscough in the London Review of Books. A badly translated review in Cahiers de Cinema also stands out.

* The title of the post refers to the film Fußball wie noch nie translated to English as ‘Football As Never Before’ from the director Hellmuth Costard. Made it in 1971 and using only 3 cameras — as opposed to Gordon and Parreno’s 17 — that film follows around George Best in a game for Manchester United v Coventry. I have sadly only seen clips of that film.

Like this one: