Sport, Film, and the Cultural Imaginary

Abstract

Codified sport and the cinema emerged contemporaneously in the second half of the 19th century, and from the earliest film productions, sport was prominently featured and contributed significantly to the new art form’s growing popularity. Sport would subsequently become one of commercial cinema’s most enduring and popular topics, though scholarship of the area (and identification of a specific genre) was slower to develop. While identifying salient aspects of depictions of sport’s fiction on film, this chapter examines the development of the relevant critical discourse and the major foci therein, including sport cinema’s role in articulating and influencing understandings of broader sociocultural themes such as race, social class, gender, and nationalism.