National Pastimes Cinema, Sports, and Nation / Katharina Bonzel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bonzel, Katharina, author.

Series:

Sports, media, and society.

Sports, media, and society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics in motion pictures.

Nationalism in motion pictures.

Sports films--History.

Sports films.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (253 pages).

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2019

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2020]

Summary:

Sports have long fascinated filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond, from Bend It Like Beckham to Chariots of Fire to Rocky. Though sports films are diverse in their approach, style, and storytelling modes, National Pastimes discloses the common emotional and visual cues that belie each sports film's underlying nationalistic impulses. Katharina Bonzel unravels the delicate matrix of national identity, sports, and emotion through the lens of popular sports films in comparative national contexts, demonstrating in the process how popular culture provides a powerful vehicle for the development and maintenance of identities of place across a range of national cinemas. As films reflect the ways in which myths of nation and national belonging change over time, they are implicated in important historical moments, from Cold War America to the class dynamics of 1980s Thatcherite Britain to the fragmented sense of nation in post-unification Germany. Bonzel shows how sports films provide a means for renegotiating the boundaries of national identity in an accessible, engaging form. National Pastimes opens up new ways of understanding how films appeal to the emotions, using myth-like constructions of the past to cultivate spectators'engagement with historical events. -- Publisher

Contents:

"Let us praise famous men": creating myth and memory in Chariots of fire

Unifying Germany: the miracle of Bern and national identity

Anxious in America: Rocky Balboa and the American dream

Small towns, big dreams: American pastoral and the sports film

Querying the nation: the "hero other" in sports films

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781496218247

1496218248

9781496218261

1496218264

OCLC:

1125113039