During the past fifteen years, the sports documentary has achieved a heightened level of recognition not just in American and global sports culture but in the broader public imaginary in and beyond American sports culture. This series highlights films that are both culturally and socially incisive and aesthetically innovative. These films, in various ways, use sports' inherent visuality as a resource and a launching point to explore movement, color, physical activity, and sporting space. Spanning geographic locations and time periods of sport history, this film series brings the cinematic to the sporting--and vice versa. Curated by the Center for Documentary Research and Practice, with support from IU Cinema. This partnership is supported through IU Cinema's Creative Collaborations program.
Tokyo Olympiad/Tôkyô Orinpikku | Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad paints a stunning picture of emotion and spectacle in capturing the 1964 Olympic Games, held in Tokyo. A feat of cutting-edge technology and cinematography, the film engages with the drama already inherent to sport, offering a vision of triumph and grief—in short, what makes the Games human—instead of results. Ichikawa’s insistence on the human, the poetic, and the aesthetic makes this a landmark film in documentary filmmaking. A Q&A with Dr. Hannah Airriess (IU Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures) and Dr. Brandon Wallace (IU Media School) followed the screening.
February 10, 7 pm: From Deep | Brett Kashmere’s 2014 film From Deep is an essay-style documentary that interrogates the game of basketball and its place in American culture. Offering both critical sports history and experimental filmmaking, Kashmere blends archival footage, mixtape aesthetics, and social commentary to trace basketball’s evolution in U.S. culture, specifically in African American communities. This inventive blend of experimental form and social consciousness of sport marks a significant intervention in the contemporary sport documentary landscape. A Q&A with filmmaker Brett Kashmere followed the screening.
February 24, 7 pm: John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection | Julien Faraut’s John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection explores the tennis legend’s psyche and emotion on the court of the 1984 French Open. Through 16mm film, Faraut reimagines athletic performance as cinematic and aesthetic performance, blurring the boundaries between these two seemingly separate categories. McEnroe’s obsession and volatility are transformed into an aesthetic consideration of performance and emotion in one of the contemporary period’s most inventive sport documentaries. A Q&A followed the screening.