Preface : sport in film. Action and reaction

Sport in Film performs many useful intellectual functions. It tells us much about sport as culture, and film as medium. It explores how they come together in both predictable and unusual ways, always creating more than the sum of their parts. But, most importantly, the various chapters of this work connect sport film consistently to the world that has fashioned it reflecting and refracting its shiny surfaces and, at its best, penetrating them to reveal other phenomena and potential meanings. The book’s readers will have a most useful companion when pausing to reflect on sport film in tis many contemporary forms, from blockbuster release to fan-created online audio-visual content, from wide-screen television, reply ‘to mobile device download. Whenever sport is in film, its ensemble of symbols inevitably becomes part of the mediasport’ (Wenner 1998) that permeates so much of the lifeworlds of the 21st century’s global citizenry.