Sport in Films

<p>Sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains triumph and disaster achievement and despair tension and drama. Consequently sport makes for a compelling film narrative and films in turn are a vivid medium for sport.</p><p>Yet despite its regularity as a central theme in motion pictures constructions and representations of sport and athletes have been marginalised in terms of serious analysis within the longstanding academic study of films and documentaries.</p><p>In this collection it is the critical study of film and its connections to sport that are examined.</p><p>The collection is one of the first of its kind to examine the ways in which sport has been used in films as a metaphor for other areas of social life.</p><p>Among the themes and issues explored by the contributors are:</p><ul> <li>Morality tales in which good triumphs over evil</li> <li>The representation and ideological framing of social identities including class gender race and nationality</li> <li>The representation of key issues pertinent to sport including globalization politics commodification consumerism and violence</li> <li>The meanings ‘spoken’ by films – and the various ‘readings’ which audiences make of them</li> </ul><p>This is a timely collection that draws together a diverse range of accessible insightful and ground-breaking new essays.</p><p>This book was published as a special issue of <em>Sport in Society</em>.</p>