All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History

by Ron Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke, Deborah A. Carmichael

Overview

Sports films are popular forms of entertainment around the world, but beyond simply amusing audiences, they also reveal much about class, race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. In All-Stars and Movie Stars, Ron Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke, and Deborah A. Carmichael explore the interplay between sports films and critical aspects of our culture, examining them as both historical artifacts and building blocks of ideologies, values, and stereotypes.

The book covers not only Hollywood hits such as Field of Dreams and Miracle but also documentaries such as The Journey of the African American Athlete and international cinema, such as the German film The Miracle of Bern. The book also explores television coverage of sports, commenting on the relationship of media to golf and offering a new perspective on the culture and politics behind the depictions of the world's most popular pastimes.

The first part of the book addresses how sports films represent the cultural events, patterns, and movements of the times in which they were set, as well as the effect of the media and athletic industry on the athletes themselves. Latham Hunter examines how the baseball classic The Natural reflects traditional ideas about gender, heroism, and nation, and Harper Cossar addresses how the production methods used in televised golf affect viewers. The second section deals with issues such as the growth of women's involvement in athletics, sexual preference in the sports world, and the ever-present question of race by looking at sports classics such as Rocky, Hoosiers, and A League of Their Own.

Finally, the authors address the historical and present-day role sports play in the international and political arena by examining such films as Visions of Eight and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. This important and unique collection illuminates the prominent role that sports play in society and how that role is reflected in film. Analysis of the depiction of sports in film and television provides a deeper understanding of the appeal that sports hold for people worldwide and of the forces behind the historic and cultural traditions linked to sports.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813124483
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	06/20/2008
Series:	Film and History
Edition description:	1
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	1,025,763
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ron Briley, assistant headmaster and teacher of history at Sandia Preparatory School, is the author of Class at Bat, Gender on Deck and Race in the Hole: A Line-Up of Essays on Twentieth Century Culture and America's Game. Michael K. Schoenecke is professor of literature and languages at Texas Tech University. Deborah A. Carmichael, assistant professor at Michigan State University, is associate editor of the journal Film & History and editor of the collection The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre.

Table of Contents

Foreword   Douglas Noverr     vii
Acknowledgments     x
Introduction   Ron Briley   Michael K. Schoenecke   Deborah A. Carmichael     1
Sport as Cultural Production and Representation
Endless Summer: Consuming Waves and Surfing the Frontier   Joan Ormrod     17
"I'm Against It!": The Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers as Cultural Critique; or, Why Big-Time College Football Gives Me a Haddock   Daniel A. Nathan     40
Bobby Jones, Golf, and His Instructional Reels   Michael K. Schoenecke     55
Televised Golf and the Creation of Narrative   Harper Cossar     64
What's Natural about It?: A Baseball Movie as Introduction to Key Concepts in Cultural Studies   Latham Hunter     86
Masculinity, Misogyny, and Race in Sports Films
You Throw Like a Girl: Sports and Misogyny on the Silver Screen   Dayna B. Daniels     105
As American As ...: Filling in the Gaps and Recovering the Narratives of America's Forgotten Heroes   Pellom McDaniels III     129
Basketball's Great White Hope and Ronald Reagan's America: Hoosiers   Ron Briley     155
"Just Some Bum from the Neighborhood": The Resolution of Post-Civil Rights Tension and Heavyweight Public Sphere Discourse in Rocky   Victoria A. Elmwood     172
Fighting for Manhood: Rocky and Turn-of-the-Century Antimodernism   Clay Motley     199
National Identity and Political Confrontation in Sports Competition
Do You Believe in Miracles? Whiteness, Hollywood, and a Post-9/11 Sports Imagination   David J. Leonard     219
An Olympic Omnibus: International Competition, Cooperation, and Politics in Visions of Eight   David Scott Diffrient     237
Why He Must Run: Class, Anger, and Resistance in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner   John Hughson     261
"Every Nation Needs a Legend": The Miracle of Bern and the Formation of a German Postwar Foundational Myth   Tobias Hochscherf   Christoph Laucht     279
List of Contributors     303
Index     307

Editorial Reviews

Demonstrates that sports films are rich documents, that they offer much for scholars of film, television, cultural studies, sport, and history.

American Studies

This collection is rigorously detailed and has quite an impact. Baseball, boxing, cross-country, track.

Choice

The scholarship throughout the essays is solid and grounded. A careful, yet thoroughly engaging look at how sports in film speak to audiences of values, identities, and the cultural thrills that draw us to competition.

Cynthia J. Miller

The works chosen reflect legendary sports figures or movements, large audiences, significant filmic innovations, or critical accolades...a handy package that serves personal learning, reference, library collection, or course introduction.

Film and History

"The scholarship throughout the essays is solid and grounded. A careful, yet thoroughly engaging look at how sports in film speak to audiences of values, identities, and the cultural thrills that draw us to competition." — Cynthia J. Miller, Emerson College

"This collection is rigorously detailed and has quite an impact. Baseball, boxing, cross-country, track." — Choice

"Demonstrates that sports films are rich documents, that they offer much for scholars of film, television, cultural studies, sport, and history." — American Studies

From the Publisher