Sports As Never Before: Isolating Celebrity Athletes in Football As Never Before,Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait,and Kobe Doin’ Work

Football As Never Before

Produced in 1971 for West German television, Hellmuth Costard’s Football As Never Before is the most ambivalent of these three documentaries in terms of its attitude toward sports as spectacle. In their article on Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Martin Beugnet and Elizabeth Ezra (2009) briefly described the film as a “fascinating exposition of the thinness of reality mediated by images” (p. 78). This description captures the way the film’s aesthetic conceit contests dominant modes of sports coverage and spectatorship. By reframing Best, the film exposes the simplicity of the activity that constitutes the sporting event and challenges the legitimacy of the dominant style’s claims to transparency and realism. At the same time, however, the film’s relentless focus on Best cannot help but observe his incredible talent and replace the familiar narrative of the game with a deeper exploration of the nature of his star attraction.

Football As Never Before was not Costard’s first attempt to contest the establishment of aesthetic norms. Just 3 years before making the film, Costard made Besonders Wertvoll (Of Special Merit) (1968), an attack on morality clauses in a 1967 West German Film Subsidies Law (Dawson, 1979). Of Special Merit, which featured “a penis in close-up mouthing the speech of a high court judge defending the quality ratings, before spitting into the camera,” was accepted into the 1968 Oberhausen Film Festival, but then “withdrawn for fear of police reprisals, which led to a walkout by most German film-makers” (Elsaesser, 1989, pp. 80-81). Football As Never Before is similarly antagonistic in its perspective: The film works to frustrate the familiar pleasures of televised soccer.

While he was not a football fan (Bouwes, 2006), Costard would have been well aware that there were aesthetic conventions dominating the sport. As Garry Whannel (1992) has documented, U.K. television industry professionals working on regularly scheduled highlight programs and occasional live broadcasts of marquee competitions gradually negotiated the style of televised soccer. This aesthetic, which also included voice-over commentary, was designed to cultivate an apparently transparent “realism” while guaranteeing the entertainment value of the game event (Whannel, 1992, pp. 33-34). Visually, coverage was based on an establishing long shot from a midfield camera, which zoomed, panned, and tilted subtly to track the ball. This camera dictated the position of a secondary camera used for tighter framing, and editing strictly conformed to the 180-degree rule (Whannel, 1992). As a general rule, cuts to medium shots or close-ups took place at breaks in the action (i.e., the ball went “dead”). Medium shots were used to capture play in more detail when it was confined to a smaller area of the field, while close-ups were used for personalization. Replays of exciting moments began to be incorporated into the pattern in the 1960s (Whannel, 1992). While 21st-century telecasts include more cameras and have adapted to take advantage of more sophisticated lenses, the basic grammar of this coverage, hashed out during the early years of broadcast television, persists today.

Football As Never Before rejects this style and decontextualizes its star. As Best runs around the field, very little of the larger game action is made visible. There are occasional reminders that this is a sporting contest: A few times during the film, Costard superimposes a clock graphic on the image to indicate the time remaining/elapsed in the game. But the film’s framing choices disrupt this narrative. The ball is rarely shown, and Best’s body is frequently fragmented into close-ups, sometimes of his face but just as often of other body parts. When he is presented in a long or medium shot, the frame is still generally so tight as to exclude all other players. The depth of field is frequently shallow. When he stands still or moves slowly, the background often appears flat, depthless, and abstract, effectively silhouetting Best against a field of green or sea of faces. The editing pattern is generally slow, with long takes that underscore the film’s refusal to broaden its perspective.

This contradiction of the established norms of televised soccer raises questions about the nature of the sporting event and the ideological power of representation. The decontextualization of Best calls attention to the narrative that television works to impose on the game, and challenges both the realism of television’s representation and the entertainment value of the spectacle. As Jan Dawson (1979) put it,

Costard’s film is not exactly Match of the Day. He rarely shows either the whole field or the ball unless—which it does relatively seldom in this match—it happens to come Best’s way. What he shows is a man running purposefully over grass to no apparent destination, walking disconsolately back, signaling to players we rarely see, striving time after time to obtain possession of a small sphere which he kicks away as soon as he reaches it. (pp. 13-14)

Here, Dawson describes the link between the film’s distinction from mainstream soccer coverage and its existential challenge to the very notion of soccer as spectacle. The emblem of the game as meaningful contest—the ball—is transformed into an abstraction, and, stripped of television’s imposed narrative, the game itself becomes a kind of nihilist enterprise. In this regard, Dawson’s reading of the film anticipates Beugnet and Ezra’s and captures the film’s critique of television’s imposition of “entertainment” values onto the sporting event.

Costard’s film intervened into what was, in 1971, a restricted but still contested aesthetic field. Differences in national televisual style became an obstacle as television began transforming football into an increasingly global spectacle in the late 1960s. As Whannel pointed out, while the international reception to the BBC/ITV consortium’s coverage of the 1966 World Cup largely marveled at the technical excellence of the broadcast, critics outside Britain also contested the legitimacy and superiority of English style, which they saw as disruptive rather than transparent. Notably, Whannel (1992) cited Buscombe’s (1975) observation of distinctive differences between English and West German coverage, with the latter more “neutral,” with fewer close-ups (p. 36). The televisuality of soccer was at once well established and still contested when 250 million TV viewers watched George Best lead Manchester United to victory over Portuguese club Benfica in the European Cup Winners’ Cup final of 1968, just two years before the game that Costard filmed in Football as never before.

As Whannel (2009) went on to argue in “Television and the Transformation of Sport,” the codification of soccer coverage was more than just an ideological restriction of television’s stylistic and narrative possibilities. As this technological innovation and developments in soccer coverage were a chief selling point for television sets, the emergence of a dominant aesthetic formula on television signified the rise of a new form of soccer spectatorship that rivaled and even claimed to surpass all other modes: Television offered consumers “the best seat in the house” (Whannel, 2009, p. 209; Spigel, 1992). This new form of spectatorship facilitated new forms of stardom: Close-ups made top performers broadly recognizable, while commercials expanded their opportunities for endorsement revenue. George Best, whose stardom peaked following his standout performance in the game against Benfica, was among the first of these new soccer celebrities (Whannel, 2009).

Best’s stardom is the focal point of Football As Never Before. Because of its observational structure (I. McDonald, 2007), the film cannot help but capture some of his incredible appeal even as it decontextualizes his performance. When Best receives the ball from a teammate, makes a pass or a tackle, or even simply runs, his speed and technique are made visible. As he runs, the cameras capture him in sharp focus, but the rest of the field, players, and crowd that surround him are often transformed into a blur, highlighting his pace. Best’s ability is showcased most clearly when, in the second half, he bursts through the defense, latches onto a through-ball, dribbles around the goalkeeper, and rolls the ball into the net for the first goal of the game. Without replay, context in the build-up, or the tracking of ball into the net, the moment is brief and Best’s movements appear incredibly simple, but his talent is on full display and the moment is so spectacular the camera cannot help but follow the ball into the net before panning quickly back to Best. For as much as Football As Never Before’s distinctive style marginalizes the traditional narrative of the game, Costard’s focus on Best not only highlights his talent but emphasizes the growing centrality of stardom to soccer as spectacle.

Even while the film acknowledges and exploits Best’s star quality, however, it also questions the nature of the spectatorship that underpins his celebrity. Early in the second half, for example, the camera lingers over extreme close-ups of Best’s crotch and buttocks as he runs around the pitch. These shots expose the latent voyeurism of spectatorship and are a reminder of the marginalized erotics of sport. The film questions spectatorship even more explicitly during the halftime sequence, when Best, in close-up and sporting a full, dark beard he clearly does not have during the game, stares silently directly into the camera. Best’s return of the camera’s gaze foregrounds his awareness of his own status as a performer and as an object of spectatorial attention.

This halftime sequence encapsulates much of Football As Never Before’s poetic analysis and anticipates the themes that Zidane and Kobe Doin’ Work will expand on. The sequence begins with Best walking out of a facilities manager’s office, located in a garage outside Old Trafford Stadium. He beckons the camera to follow him down the hallway and enters into a workshop before turning and staring into the camera. The industrial setting underscores the fact that Best’s play is also his labor and that his performance as star is at the center of a complex economy, themes that will become the major focus of Kobe Doin’ Work. Best’s enigmatic gaze into the camera raises questions about the relationship between the star and his public, questions that Zidane will pose and complicate significantly. And finally, the sudden appearance of Best’s beard foregrounds the illusory “realism” of the film’s temporality, offering yet another implicit comment on the artifice of representation that the dominant aesthetic of televised soccer works hard to conceal.

Football As Never Before is a document of the limits of Best’s stardom. The film was not well received, never released theatrically, and has largely been forgotten (Bouwes, 2006). In an interview accompanying the DVD of the film, Producer Werner Grassmann (2006) recalled that after it was finished, the members of FC Köln, a nearby soccer team, were given an exclusive preview screening of the film at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) studio. Almost all of the players walked out after 20 minutes, out of either boredom or embarrassment over the film’s documentation of how much time highly paid players spent standing around doing nothing (Grassmann, 2006). While the film has received some attention in the wake of Zidane and Kobe, and even a new score to accompany a theatrical release commemorating the 10th anniversary of Best’s death, Football As Never Before remains primarily an obscure cult object without a significant audience (H. McDonald, 2015).

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

In a filmed interview accompanying the DVD of Zidane, Philippe Parreno acknowledges having seen Costard’s film but minimizes the connection between the two films, calling Football As Never Before a “bad artwork” (Interview with Directors Phillippe Parreno & Douglas Gordon, 2006). While I disagree with Parreno’s judgment and think the similar structures of the two films cannot be ignored, Zidane adopts a significantly different perspective on its subject and explores a different set of questions about the nature of mediated sport than its predecessor. Costard analyzed the sporting performance at a moment when television was transforming its value; Gordon and Parreno focus on the nature of our mediated relationship with a global celebrity. Where Football As Never Before interrogated the ideological nature of televised soccer coverage, A 21st Century Portrait is, according to Beugnet and Ezra (2009), “ an experiment in the redemptive capacity of images” (p. 78). This poetic experiment has two dimensions: First, the film tests the capacity of cutting-edge recording technology (the cinematographers used superpowered zoom lenses developed by the U.S. military that had never before been used commercially) to reconstruct Zidane’s experience and allow the viewer to share his perception of the game event. Second, Zidane examines the limits of sports media’s capacity to build on shared perception and promote identification.

Like Football As Never Before, Zidane establishes a sharp contrast between its representation of the sporting event and standard television soccer coverage. Unlike in Costard’s film, however, this contrast is made explicit in the film rather than left implicit in the framing choices. Televisual images, including replays of goals, recur throughout the film, which also uses replay for important events. The film’s relationship to television is established at the beginning of the film, before the opening credits, through low-resolution images and partially audible play-by-play commentary that invoke the standard presentation of the start of the match. A slogan appears over these images that introduces the themes of identification and connection through media that defines the film: “FACE/TO/FACE/AS/CLOSE/AS YOU CAN/FOR AS LONG AS IT LASTS/FOR AS LONG AS IT TAKES” (Gordon & Parreno, 2006). At the end of this sequence, the Mogwaï soundtrack and Spanish language commentary become distorted, and as the screen behind the white text goes dark, the camera appears to push in to an abstract close-up, into an expanding, pixilated field, as if the film’s gaze were penetrating the surface of the televisual image.

The contrast between the blurry long shots and muffled play-by-play commentary of the “televisual” image with the visual and aural clarity of the images that follow is striking, and signals that the film is immersing the viewer in Zidane’s experience. Unlike Football As Never Before, Zidane offers a shift in perception instead of a challenge to the legitimacy of television’s representation of the game. As Gordon put it, “We wanted [the film] to seem as if the viewers were behind the eyes of Zidane . . . That was our existential conceit: you are Zidane” (Sandomir, 2009) This is a radically different understanding of the relationship between star and spectator than Costard’s film imagines. Where Football As Never Before’s relentless gaze bracketed what took place around Best, Zidane attempts to share “Zizou’s” perception and experience of the offscreen world.

This shift in focus is evident in the film’s incorporation of close-ups of the ball, which are completely absent from Football As Never Before. Twice in the film, the ball is shown in close-up, soaring through the air, while close-ups of the ball at Zidane’s feet appear multiple times in the film These images not only showcase Zidane’s incredible ball control and technical ability but substitute for point-of-view shots indicating the object of Zidane’s attention. This construction complicates the film’s documentary status: Zidane is less interested than Football As Never Before in objectivity. Instead, the film takes its cue from an aphorism taken from an interview with Zidane that appears as one of the film’s subtitles: “THE GAME, THE EVENT, IS NOT NECESSARILY EXPERIENCED OR REMEMBERED IN ‘REAL TIME’” (Gordon & Parreno, 2006). A 21st Century Portrait is not interested in reconstructing the event “as it happened.” Instead, the film uses Zidane’s interview as a guide and attempts to reconstruct his subjective experience. As a result, it is the least observational and most purely “poetic” of the three documentaries (I. McDonald, 2007, p. 211).

The film’s audio track is crucial in establishing the sense of Zidane’s perception. Zidane’s breathing and the sound of his feet on the turf of the Bernabéu Stadium are crisply audible, as is the fuzzy rumble of the ball rolling over the immaculately clipped grass. Crowd noise is also audible as a complexly textured layer; drums beat out an intermittent rhythm, and at one point in the film a cell phone rings. The subtitles highlight the importance of sound: Zidane describes being simultaneously conscious and oblivious to the existence of the massive crowd, able to both block out the roar and pick out minute noises like the ticking of a watch. In a film without traditional point-of-view shots, sound is the primary mechanism through which the film recreates Zidane’s perception and promotes the illusion that the viewer is sharing his experience.

The aural reconstruction of Zidane’s perception helps link together the shots of the ball and the wider shots of Zidane running with the close-ups of his face that dominate the film. A 21st Century Portrait follows Football As Never Before in examining a star created by television, but Gordon and Parreno’s film goes further in exploring the cinematic potential of the close-up. Unlike Costard’s film, Zidane was produced for exhibition in theatrical and gallery spaces that permit large-scale images, and the film tests the theoretical power of the close-up to promote identification and reveal the interiority of the face it magnifies (Bálazs, 2003; Deleuze, 2003; Epstein, 1988).

The experimental nature of the film’s use of close-ups is foregrounded in the film’s “halftime” sequence, which consists of a montage of images seemingly unconnected to the game and not shot by Gordon and Parreno’s team of photographers. Among this footage is a short clip from the 1979 ITV series The Quartermass Experiment, starring Sir John Mills; subtitles inform the viewer that Mills died on the day Zidane was photographed. The clip is a key moment in The Quartermass Experiment when the title character, played by Mills, goes on television to plead for help finding his missing daughter. In the clip, Mills (as the eponymous Quartermass) holds a photograph of his daughter up to a TV camera, stating, “that’s all I’m interested in now . . . a human face.” Even without the context of the original series, the image of Mills surrounded by the technological apparatus of television and then showing his face and the photograph in close-up poses an open-ended question about the power of media to promote identification and empathy.

As was the case in Football As Never Before, Zidane’s halftime sequence connects the isolation of Zidane to a set of broader questions. The subtitled montage begins as a narration of other events around the world that took place on Sunday April 23, 2005, the day the film was photographed. The events range from the trivial (a Bob Marley puppet show), to the bizarre (toads swelling up and exploding near a lake), to the political (Elian Gonzalez addressing a Cuban television audience). At first glance, this montage might seem a straightforward questioning the importance of the attention paid to sport, particularly when the montage slows and then freezes news footage of a car bombing in Najaf. But the elements in the montage are disconnected, which makes the sequence more complicated than a simple critique of sports as distracting spectacle. The “trivial” and “serious” events are not simply juxtaposed but intermingled in the montage, which suggests an ambiguity to these categories. This ambiguity is underscored in the montage through “captions” consisting of first-person statements unrelated to the images that accompany them. The caption “MY SON HAD A FEVER THIS MORNING,” for example, appears below footage of a mine rescue operation in Turkey. The inclusion of these statements and seemingly unimportant events implies the relative and personal nature of importance as a category. Consequently, the halftime montage frames the ambiguity of Zidane’s importance as a manifestation of a larger philosophical problem.

Gordon and Parreno make it clear that they are interested in something more than a simple critique of sports by following the frozen video of the Najaf bombing with a lingering hold over the only still photograph in the film: Jason Howe’s image of the aftermath to a suicide bombing of a Baghdad hotel. In this photo, a man carries a young girl away from the smoldering wreckage in the background. To his right, in the foreground, another man walks away from the camera toward the crowd near the fire: He is wearing a Real Madrid jersey with Zidane’s name and number on it. This image highlights the global reach of Zidane’s celebrity and the limits of its power. The suicide bombing is an eruption of a conflict caused by the intersection of multiple interests—commercial, religious, and ethnic—operating on various scales—local, national, regional, and international. The presence of his name in this image suggests both the transcendent appeal of sport and limited ability to mediate the differences that lead to social conflict. We may all be able to put ourselves in Zidane’s shoes, both literally and figuratively, but even his mediating power is limited.

This nuanced understanding of the power of sports media is the context for Gordon and Parreno’s poetic “experiment in the redemptive capacity of images” (Beugnet & Ezra, 2009, p. 78). Immediately after the still-image of the aftermath to the suicide bombing, Gordon and Parreno cut to the clip from The Quartermass Experiment, underscoring the film’s interest in portraiture’s capacity to promote empathy and understanding. This juxtaposition suggests that the attempted reconstruction of Zidane’s experience should be read as a test of aesthetic power, and the film as an attempted extension of sports media rather than a critique of its dominance. The film frames media’s capacity to enhance memory and share experience as a political potential to promote collective identification.

Zidane is not naïve about the limits of this technological potential, however. As the directors note in the DVD interview, Zidane remains an enigma at the end of the film. The viewer is given an experience of Zidane’s sensory perception, but his psychological interiority remains opaque, right up until he gets himself sent off for shoving an opponent who fouled his teammate at the end of the film. The irreducibility of social difference is foregrounded by the open-ended epigraph that introduces the first and second halves of the game: “WHO COULD HAVE IMAGINED THAT IN THE FUTURE AN ORDINARY DAY LIKE THIS MIGHT BE FORGOTTEN OR REMEMBERED AS ANYTHING MORE OR LESS SIGNIFICANT THAN A WALK IN THE PARK.” This epigraph acknowledges both the impossibility of universal understanding and the possibility for transcendence. The film as a whole is an analysis of the aesthetic space within these limits.

Kobe Doin’ Work

All three of these films operate on the conceptual boundary between traditional television sports coverage and documentary cinema. Their existence depends on established forms of spectacle, and part of their attraction is their promise of an alternative perspective on the sporting event. Like Football As Never Before and Zidane, Spike Lee’s Kobe Doin’ Work is poetic because it brackets the familiar narrative of the game to create space for analysis of a sporting performance as an aesthetic object. What distinguishes Lee’s film from its predecessors, however, is that in both style and perspective, it is far less distant from the dominant narrative and aesthetic norms of the spectacle it documents. As you would expect from a film coproduced by ESPN, Kobe Doin’ Work offers no critique of the aesthetics of televised basketball, nor does the film attempt a radical recreation of Bryant’s experience. Instead, Lee’s film takes advantage of ESPN’s cooperation to give fans privileged access to Bryant. As Lee boasts in the film’s introduction, this includes access the Lakers’s “sacred” locker room at halftime. The difference between the disjunctive halftime sequences in Football and Zidane and the spatiotemporal continuity of Lee’s film speaks volumes about the distinction between the films’ perspectives. Where the earlier films use the halftime break to raise questions about the broader social context of the game, Lee’s halftime takes them deeper inside the spectacle.

The interview with Bryant that serves as voice-over to the film also offers increased access and gives the film’s poetic analysis an expository dimension that is absent from either of the previous documentaries (I. McDonald, 2007; Nichols, 1991). In his commentary, Bryant discusses tactics, his psychology, and his relationship with the other players on the court. As a result, the narrative of the film touches on the same basic issues as standard basketball coverage and commentary. The film allows Bryant to share his insight into the game, and offers fans an intimate view of his performance. Ultimately, though, like Inside the NBA (TNT, 1983-present) or NBA Shootaround (ESPN, 2002-present), Kobe Doin’ Work offers fans a deeper understanding of Kobe the athlete rather than a radical new perspective on either the player or the sport.

Lee’s film does follow its predecessors by breaking with the dominant grammar of televised sport to reconsider the structure and value of Kobe’s style of play. Standard televised basketball coverage, like soccer coverage, is oriented around an establishing wide shot from a mid-court camera and is largely dictated by the movement of the ball. As with soccer, reframing and replays are timed to coincide with stoppages in play so as to minimize intrusiveness and maximize entertainment. Lee’s film diverges from this formula and follows Bryant around the court almost exclusively, even to the bench when he is doing nothing. There are occasional shots of other players making plays that place Bryant in the background, but, by and large, the film follows the formula and sticks to Kobe. With 30 cameras trained on Bryant, Lee had a wealth of perspectives to choose from, and editing pace of the film is extremely rapid, faster than either Football or Zidane. The film frequently violates the 180-degree line and fragments Bryant’s body through close-ups that highlight distinctive parts of his body (his shoes, the tape on his fingers, etc.), and the effect is disorienting.

Despite this break with the traditional grammar of basketball, Kobe Doin’ Work nevertheless resembles standard basketball coverage more than either of the other two films resembles a typical soccer telecast. This is in part because of the production: Lee used footage from the same cameras that were shooting the live telecast, so the film is in part literally identical to the television version. But the greater variety of shots and quick cutting are also products of the aesthetic complexity of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the 21st century. Basketball telecasts feature a greater variety of shots than soccer telecasts, and far more close-ups. This is in part because there are far more stoppages in play, including not only time-outs but also fouls, out-of-bounds plays, substitutions, and made baskets. These stoppages make it easier for producers to cut without missing key action or disorienting the viewer. Furthermore, the relatively small size of the basketball court allows for a far tighter frame than in soccer. Producers are able to keep almost all the players in focus without losing track of the ball. As a result, players spend far less time “offscreen” during a standard basketball telecast than is the case in other sports.

This narrow frame contributes to the star-driven culture of the NBA. In part, Lee’s film resembles a standard telecast simply because NBA coverage is already heavily focused on star players like Kobe Bryant. Not only are stars identified in the build-up to coverage, but because star players touch the ball more often than role players, they receive the majority of close-ups and replays during a game. Replay montages of a particular star’s performance up to that point in the game are common, and stars are frequently interviewed by on-court reporters at halftime and/or at the end of the game, giving them the opportunity to comment on the game in a manner not dissimilar to Bryant’s voice-over commentary. As a result, watching an NBA game is already not that dissimilar from a film that follows one player around the court.

In fact, one of Kobe Doin’ Work most distinctive elements is its careful crafting moments showcasing Bryant’s superstar talent. These moments are built on familiar editing techniques common to all replays: Rapidly unfolding action slows and expands through montage, repetition, and/or slow motion. But the film does develop one unique pattern to highlight Kobe’s special ability. In these moments, as Kobe prepares to go one-on-one or drain a jumper over the outstretched fingers of a defender, a tinkling jazz piano from Bruce Hornsby’s score becomes audible. A rapidly edited sequence follows, mixing black and white stills of Bryant exerting himself with quick, blurred color footage of the athlete in motion. The result is a staccato stop motion effect that captures the lightning speed of the action without sacrificing the intricacies of Bryant’s effort. The black and white footage and unusual editing pace set these sequences apart from standard coverage, but they serve the same basic function as a standard telecast replay.

I do not wish to overstate the similarity between Kobe Doin’ Work and a standard telecast; nor do I mean to imply that the film in no way offers an alternative understanding of the game. What the film does offer, as its title suggests, is a poetic analysis of Bryant’s play that identifies the structural importance of style to the NBA’s spectacular economy. Kobe Doin’ Work positions Bryant as a basketball auteur whose style dictates not only what happens on the court but also the mediation of the game, up to and including the form of Kobe Doin’ Work itself. The film foregrounds the relationship between style and economics with its “one day on the job” setup, which figures Bryant’s play as both creative expression and routine physical labor: Kobe arrives, gets dressed, plays basketball spectacularly, then goes home with his family. As the film documents Bryant’s style and allows him to reflect upon his own performance, it suggests that style is not only integral and inextricable from his athletic ability but also the mechanism through which his performance is commodified.

This emphasis on the value of style is consistent with the culture of basketball. The NBA is the most style and image-conscious of the professional sports organizations in the United States. Dunking the basketball by leaping over or otherwise overpowering an opponent, for example, is called “posterizing” the unfortunate player, freezing them forever as an unwilling participant in someone else’s moment of glory. Displays of flair and skill are celebrated as much as victories in highlight packages. There is also economic motivation for this attention to style: NBA players are also fashion icons. Sneaker contracts often exceed player salaries and are the real prize of stardom. Aesthetics are central to the NBA, and players are aware that their performances are judged on style as well as statistics.

Kobe Doin’ Work goes further to suggest that style is at the heart of the play that is his labor. At one point in the film, Bryant turns on his defender and uses the backboard to bank in a shot from a sharp angle. In a voice-over, Bryant explains that this particular type of bank shot is a major weapon in the offensive arsenal of his rival on the Spurs, Tim Duncan, who has indeed made that shot his personal signature. As the shot goes in, Bryant says that he has “swaggerjacked” Duncan, copied his signature move, and appropriated it into his own game in a move that is at once homage, plagiarism, and competitive one-upmanship. This act of loving theft suggests that style is the basis of technique rather than superfluous flourish: The general form is only possible because of the specific manner in which it is executed. In this context, Kobe becomes a basketball auteur, creating his own unique form of the game within its generic boundaries.

This sense of Bryant’s style as a dialectic of improvisation and execution is reinforced by his discussion of the triangle offense in the voice-over track. For Bryant, the essence of the triangle offense is that it does not involve having entirely preprogrammed plays but rather what he calls “sequences of options,” structured situations in which players can decide between a number of potential ways to attack the defense and the basket. For Bryant, the triangle’s virtues are its flexibility and unpredictability, the freedom it allows for individual expression within generic structures. Bruce Hornsby’s jazz score seems a calculated choice for a film that repeatedly emphasizes the importance of executing a basic, repetitive structure in combination with improvisation to the game of basketball.

Kobe Doin’ Work thus establishes a homology between Bryant’s career as a player and Lee’s as a filmmaker. This sense of Kobe as auteur bled into the film’s reception. Multiple critics intimated that Kobe might have been playing up to the cameras in this particular game (Paulsen, 2009; Sandomir, 2009), and popular press stories about the film indicated that there was a conflict between Kobe and Spike Lee over the film’s final cut (Derakhshani, 2009). These challenges to the film’s documentary authenticity are consistent with an NBA culture that grants stars ample opportunity to express—and control—their personalities.

All three of these films highlight their stars’ distinctive style of playing the game, but Kobe Doin’ Work goes further. Lee’s film presents Kobe’s unique manner of play as an aesthetic attraction, and casts him as an auteur of the spectacle. And while the film’s form brackets most social context, the film’s focus on style as key to the NBA’s economy points to the larger history of Black performance in the United States and the problematic but socially and commercially valuable construction of Blackness as a style in and of itself (Lott, 1993). Black performance and black identity are explicit themes in most of Lee’s films, and Lee himself is responsible for promoting blackness as the NBA’s style through his work on Wieden + Kennedy’s famous “It’s gotta be the shoes” Nike advertisements, featuring Michael Jordan and Lee’s alter-ego “Mars Blackmon” (Andrews, 2001). Lee’s film does not foreground this complex history but it forms the ever-present subtext of his poetic analysis of Bryant’s performance. Kobe Doin’ Work’s exploration of the NBA’s commodification of style locates professional basketball in a larger economy that privileges black performance over other forms of black labor.

Conclusion

Kobe Doin’ Work marks the incorporation of an experimental tradition into the sports-media complex. Lee’s film, which was directly inspired by Zidane, promotes Bryant’s stardom and the NBA even as it complicates our understanding of their aesthetics. ESPN’s embrace of this poetic strategy has played an important role in the recent history of sports documentary. As Josh Malitsky (2014) has argued, sports documentary has exploded over the last decased, led largely by the emergence of of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. As both Malitsky and Travis Vogan (2015) have described, ESPN has used 30 for 30 to enhance their brand by exploiting the “cultural cachet” of documentary in general and of specific auteur filmmakers (Malitsky, pp. 205-206). Kobe Doin’ Work was an important predecessor to the 30 for 30 series, which built on the template set by Spike Lee’s film (Vogan, 2015). Lee’s film played a critical role in expanding the aesthetics of sports media.

It makes sense that Kobe Doin’ Work launched a new wave of sports documentary because, like its predecessors, it plays on the boundary between standard television coverage of sport and documentary. The power of these three films’ distinction is rooted in their fundamental closeness to the dominant aesthetic. In both the dominant and experimental context, the technical problem is the same: track the unpredictablwe movement of bodies across a given field for a certain period of time. The distinction lies in the framing and organization of images. Sports coverage is already a form of documentary. At the same time, the defamiliarization that characterizes these films also exposes the spaces between these genres and the successful naturalization of the sports-media complex’s aesthetic.

In “Towards a Poetics of Documentary,” Renov (1993) argued that a poetics should be judged on the basis of its ability to rigorously interrogate the composition, function, and affect of aesthetic forms without closing itself off to historical and political contingencies. The films discussed here meet Renov’s criteria by exposing the depth and complexity of sports through their deceptively simple formal logic. By foregrounding the aesthetic character of a live sporting performance—one of the most valuable commodities in the world (Hutchins & Rowe, 2009)—these films call attention to the many forces that create the sports-media event: the commercial interests that sponsor the spectacles, for example, or the history of sporting tactics that enabled certain players to become celebrities, or the fan culture that coalesces around a given team or player. Any documentary, however, could call attention to these contextual forces. What links these films together is the way they illustrate how these complexities are embedded in sport by its fundamentally aesthetic character but marginalized by the dominant norms that govern its coverage and narrow our understanding.