Abstract
By the late 1960s activism had become a major factor in sports. Mohammad Ali’s stance against the Vietnam War had resulted in his being blacklisted from boxing and John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s raising of their fists in the Black Power salute led to their expulsion from the 1968 Summer Olympics. Meanwhile, in American cinema, film’s artistic boundaries were being pushed beyond their previous scope with international art cinema movements from Europe and Japan influencing a new generation of highly literate and politically impassioned filmmakers. This study focuses on how these ascending currents of political activism in sport and international art cinema helped craft a subgenre of stylistically adventurous and politically bold New Hollywood sports films. Martin Ritt’s The Great White Hope (1970), Jack Nicholson’s Drive, He Said (1971), and Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975) will be analyzed to demonstrate how sophisticated art film tendencies merged with the kineticism of sport to exemplify the growing social and political role of sport among international audiences. While sport and art may appear to be radically opposed to each other, Przemysław Strożek writes in the International Journal of the History of Sport how, after the Russian Revolution, there were “various ways in which avant-garde artists were engaged in promoting worker sports.” Now, over 100 years later, as sport has become an industry worth billions of dollars, the emergence of artfully constructed countercultural sports films from the New Hollywood requires excavation to push athletes’ and fans’ consciousness towards those politically radical and revolutionary ideas.
Presenters
William QuadeStudent, PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—-New Aesthetic Expressions: The Social Role of Art
KEYWORDS
Film, Art, Sport, Activism, Hollywood, Socialism, Capitalism, Directors, Pedagogy
