Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

Watched "the Zidane movie" today in the illuminating company of blazejowski (who, though very well-acquainted with my movie-going habits, was nonetheless horrified that I take notes in the dark - look, it's not that dorky, is it?!). Anyway, since I refused to show him my notes (primarily because they are completely illegible, even to myself), I had to promise him I would blog about the film. So here goes.

The premise of the film is so simple the first thing I did when the credits finished rolling was to turn to blazejowski and exclaim, "why didn't anyone think of that before??" The whole film essentially consists of footage from cameras trained entirely and solely on the forever great (no prizes for guessing whose fan club I belong to :-)) Zinedine Zidane throughout one football game (Real Madrid vs Villareal, 23 April 2005). Virtually all we see in the film is just Zidane - running; sweating; swearing; watching, chasing, passing, kicking the ball; Zidane being fouled; Zidane being booked; Zidane being pure Zidane after delivering an exquisite cross. Isn't there an "art installation" somewhere of Beckham sleeping? This is a similar piece on Zidane, playing football. Go figure.

I liked the film - there was alot which I thought about while I was watching it. (Blazejowski, still horrified: "doesn't taking notes remove you from the viewing experience? How can you immerse yourself in the film if you are scratching away in the dark?" (Ok, he didn't really say that; I'm paraphrasing - but he did more or less ask the first question verbatim)). Well, Garry Kasparov used to say, "there is no opponent. There is only you, the pieces and the clock." (Ok, I'm paraphrasing him too, but he did say something to that effect.) Yes, I want to be left alone when I watch a film - I really don't get the social viewing thing, sorry - but in that sense, too, there is no film. There is only me, the image and my thoughts.

Anyway, my point is, there was alot which went through my mind while watching Zidane, but I'll leave my ruminations aside for now. What I guess I would like to say, though, is this. The film opens with the words: "From the first kick... to the final whistle." This, of course, is a reference to the "real-time" effect of the film: the film follows the game in its 90-minute (well, close enough - until Zidane got sent off) "real-time", matching diegetic time with the audience's own 90-minute real-time (and even on that, we can say so much: how many levels of time are there? The real-time of the game. The real-time of the audience. The real-time of the film. The real-time of the making of the film. Time within time within time......).

But these words are also markers of duration. Bergson, comparing space and duration in "Matter and Memory", writes:

With duration it is quite otherwise. The parts of our duration are one with the successive moments of the act which divides it; if we distinguish in it so many instants, so many parts it indeed possesses; and if our consciousness can only distinguish in a given interval a definite number of elementary acts, if it terminates the division at a given point, there also terminates the divisibility. [Emphasis added.]

"From the first kick... to the final whistle" - the duration of the game. From those words to the end credits - the duration of the film. From the lights dimming at those words to the lights coming back on at the end credits - the duration of our time in the cinema theatre. And they are all the same magic number of 90 minutes.

Artificial pointers, you may say - random, haphazard, contingent signals, signifying nothing. But how else do we - may we - mark time? How else may we impose the divisibility, the distinguishing of each given interval? And this is where theme converges seamlessly with content: time and the spherical perfection of the football, its roundness standing for both zero and infinity. How do we mark the inconceivable vastness in between? How do we mark the immeasurability of life, between birth and death? How do we mark each traumatic exit out of childhood, each dream fallen by the wayside, each conclusion of one love story and each beginning of the next?