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Among cinephiles, the 2006 World Cup Final was probably one of the most highly
anticipated events in the history of football -- given that André Heller,
cultural coordinator of the 2006 World Cup, had been touting for years he'd
hire Jean-Luc Godard to direct a live TV broadcast. That didn't happen, but
luckily, Roger Buergel, artistic director of Documenta 12, invited Harun
Farocki to present the match as a 24-channel video installation. This could
have failed just as easily (Farocki's production journal (1) lists countless
financial and technical obstacles, most of which appear structural or systemic
rather than just accidental), but in the end, even though both the budget and
the number of video channels had to be halved, the work actually materialized.
Sadly, those who saw it in Kassel in 2007 most likely never saw it again.
"Deep Play" serves as a reminder how sports television -- usually a confused
mishmash of replay, close-up, slow motion and ornamental CGI -- makes even the
most exciting football match look boring, and how exciting even the most boring
match could become if anyone had the slightest idea about composition, montage
or duration. Farocki's approach is simple, but effective: he constructs a
panoramic view of football as big data, a parallel arrangement of statistics,
heat maps, tactical overlays, movement tracking, computer simulations and
surveillance footage. Thankfully, the one aspect of sports television that
normally renders it unwatchable -- the most incompetent commentary track
allowed in any type of professional mass media -- is entirely absent, and we
can only hear the voice of the official broadcast's technical coordinator, a
variety of ambient sounds, some computer voices, and occasional police chatter.
The match itself turned out to be rather forgettable: not the most boring World
Cup Final in history, but with a stretch of 100 goalless minutes, it's a close
contender. If it will always be remembered, then for its famous anticlimax in
minute 110: Zinedine Zidane's iconic headbutt against Marco Materazzi. For
certain cinephiles, Zidane's dismissal must have come as a bizarre déjà-vu: The
only other truly groundbreaking football artwork of the 21st century, Douglas
Gordon's and Philippe Parreno's film about Zidane's performance in the 2005
Spanish league match between Real Madrid and Villareal (2), happens to end
with the exact same scene. Which is a remarkable coincidence, and even though
it reveals nothing about Zidane, it illustrates one of the most fundamental
tensions in contemporary football: a board game with human pieces that is about
to be "solved" by computer-aided analytics, but whose history will always be
remembered and celebrated as an ongoing series of absurd statistical anomalies.
(1) http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-12/auf-zwolf-flachen-schirmen/
(2) https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20061217
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sunday
july 30
9 pm
deep play
harun farocki, 2007
120 minutes + penalties
pirate cinema berlin
u kottbusser tor
e-mail for directions
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pirate cinema berlin
www.piratecinema.org
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