An important and innovative contribution to the evolving discourse of sport cinema

Seán Crosson
University of Galway

Sport cinema is one of the oldest and most enduring of all film genres, having its roots in the earliest attempts to capture movement photographically in the 1880s in the work of Eadweard Muybridge, and the early pre-cinema experiments – often featuring boxing – undertaken within Thomas Edison’s ‘Black Maria’ studio in West Orange, New Jersey in the early 1890s.  The genre has grown over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century to occupy an important and influential place in popular culture. The critical and commercial success of sports comedy-drama Marty Supreme (2025) – nominated for nine academy awards including Best Picture and Best Director at the upcoming Oscars (2026) – speaks to the ever-growing popularity and influence of such depictions.

Neil Archer’s study Sport, Film, and the Modern world is therefore a timely contribution to the growing critical discourse examining the relationship and broader resonances of two of the most popular cultural practices to emerge since the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the nineteenth century origins of both are a key concern of Archer’s work that centrally argues for the sports film as a distinctively ‘modern’ genre. This ‘inherent modernity’, he contends, is evident in the manner in which “the technologies of modernity create the conditions for film to emerge alongside sport, and that sport is a phenomenon that then determines and shapes the cinematic”. In this, the book sets out a compelling central thesis that is developed and supported impressively with a wide range of relevant films.

For Archer film not only provides an important intervention as a means of both experiencing and understanding parkour; he also identifies ‘distinctly modernist legacies at work in parkour both in practice, and in its cinematic representations’.

The concern with the modernist origins of sport cinema motivates the initial focus of the study on the aesthetics of modernist film, and how these “play out via the particular aesthetic demands of the sports film”. Archer challenges the neat delineation of aesthetic practices and movements into particular historical moments contending that modernism continued to inform and manifest in cultural practices well beyond the period to which it is most associated: the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He identifies, for example, the ‘intensified continuity’ of contemporary film practice (evident across sports cinema with Marty Supreme a superb example) as a return to ‘modernist principles’ reminiscent of late 1920s Soviet Montage.

This theme of modernity and the sports film is developed across the six substantive chapters of the book that encompasses analyses of both fiction and documentary productions. Among the innovations in Archer’s work is his consideration of sport cinema depictions of parkour, a sport he considers a distinctive response (particularly evident in depictions of Paris) not just to the urban space in contemporary culture but also to “the city of modernity”. For Archer film not only provides an important intervention as a means of both experiencing and understanding parkour; he also identifies ‘distinctly modernist legacies at work in parkour both in practice, and in its cinematic representations’. He views the parkour film as not just capturing the activity in diverse environments, but being an active contributor to this environment itself and how it is perceived.

One fascinating aspect of this study is Archer’s exploration of assessments of “the good, and of the beautiful” in relation to sport, in his examination of the place of sports metrics in sport cinema. He contends that film is as much a vehicle for comprehension as representation and examines the implications of the data revolution not just for sport but for the sport film itself. These implications are evident within representations of sport but perhaps more significant for the comprehension of sport, as film and visual recording of sport are often critical components of this data analysis, as he demonstrates in his analysis of Bennett Miller’s 2011 release Moneyball.

Archer also makes clear that sport and its depiction has a relevance that extends beyond the particularities of individual film texts, viewing recent sports documentaries in particular as offering impressive attempts to provide deeper understandings of their subjects. This is particularly evident as the book progresses and Archer examines the implications for individual athletes of how elite sport has developed (and the important and revealing role of depictions of sport in this respect). These implications are apparent in terms of the rigorous training and discipline expected of very young athletes today, as he discusses with regard to Russian rhythmic gymnast Magarita Mamum in his analysis of the documentary Over the Limit (2017). They are also evident in the extraordinary pressures that come with the celebrity spotlight now increasingly a part of the experience of elite athletes such as Naomi Osaka, considered in Archer’s discussion of the documentary series Noami Osaki (2021).  For Archer, film in both fiction and documentary forms has an important role to play in highlighting and interrogating “a voraciously consuming sporting culture that insists on the realization of sporting fantasies, while at the same time, often disregarding the uglier truths bringing them into being in the first place”.

Archer’s discussion of documentary includes an extended analysis of Free Solo (2018) in the context of a chapter considering ecocritical approaches to the sport film. His description of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s Oscar-winning production as a performative documentary is perhaps one of the more provocative and arguable contentions of the book, given that the documentary is more commonly placed within the observational or participative modes (as defined by Bill Nichols). For Archer, in line with Nichols understanding of the performative mode, it is precisely the “subjective and affective dimensions” of Free Solo that matter. However, he fails to follow through on the ecocritical framing of the chapter as a  whole; in a sport that prioritises and celebrates individual achievement (encapsulated in the title of the film) and very explicitly describes and celebrates the conquering of prominent features of the American landscape, no acknowledgement, reference, or engagement is made with the historical, social, and political resonances or violence inflicted on that landscape, including for the indigenous native American communities that continue to inhabit it.

Putting this criticism aside, Sport, Film, and the Modern world is an important and innovative further contribution to the evolving discourse of sport cinema. It offers an insightful analysis of recent work and ultimately convincing central argument for the importance of sport cinema not just as popular cultural forms but as texts offering revealing insights into broader issues of concern within contemporary societies internationally.

Copyright © Seán Crosson 2026