sunday, july 30, 9 pm: deep play (harun farocki)

[pirate cinema berlin]

Among cinephiles, the 2006 World Cup Final was probably one of the most highly 
anticipated events in the history of football -- given that André Heller, 
cultural coordinator of the 2006 World Cup, had been touting for years he'd 
hire Jean-Luc Godard to direct a live TV broadcast. That didn't happen, but 
luckily, Roger Buergel, artistic director of Documenta 12, invited Harun 
Farocki to present the match as a 24-channel video installation. This could 
have failed just as easily (Farocki's production journal (1) lists countless 
financial and technical obstacles, most of which appear structural or systemic 
rather than just accidental), but in the end, even though both the budget and 
the number of video channels had to be halved, the work actually materialized.
Sadly, those who saw it in Kassel in 2007 most likely never saw it again.

"Deep Play" serves as a reminder how sports television -- usually a confused 
mishmash of replay, close-up, slow motion and ornamental CGI -- makes even the 
most exciting football match look boring, and how exciting even the most boring 
match could become if anyone had the slightest idea about composition, montage 
or duration. Farocki's approach is simple, but effective: he constructs a 
panoramic view of football as big data, a parallel arrangement of statistics, 
heat maps, tactical overlays, movement tracking, computer simulations and 
surveillance footage. Thankfully, the one aspect of sports television that 
normally renders it unwatchable -- the most incompetent commentary track 
allowed in any type of professional mass media -- is entirely absent, and we 
can only hear the voice of the official broadcast's technical coordinator, a 
variety of ambient sounds, some computer voices, and occasional police chatter.

The match itself turned out to be rather forgettable: not the most boring World 
Cup Final in history, but with a stretch of 100 goalless minutes, it's a close 
contender. If it will always be remembered, then for its famous anticlimax in 
minute 110: Zinedine Zidane's iconic headbutt against Marco Materazzi. For 
certain cinephiles, Zidane's dismissal must have come as a bizarre déjà-vu: The 
only other truly groundbreaking football artwork of the 21st century, Douglas 
Gordon's and Philippe Parreno's film about Zidane's performance in the 2005 
Spanish league match between Real Madrid and Villareal (2), happens to end 
with the exact same scene. Which is a remarkable coincidence, and even though 
it reveals nothing about Zidane, it illustrates one of the most fundamental 
tensions in contemporary football: a board game with human pieces that is about 
to be "solved" by computer-aided analytics, but whose history will always be 
remembered and celebrated as an ongoing series of absurd statistical anomalies.

(1) http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-12/auf-zwolf-flachen-schirmen/
(2) https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20061217

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                                                                          sunday
                                                                         july 30
                                                                            9 pm

                                                                       deep play
                                                             harun farocki, 2007
                                                         120 minutes + penalties

                                                            pirate cinema berlin
                                                                u kottbusser tor
                                                           e-mail for directions

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