Football as Never Before / Fußball wie noch nie
with David Stalling, Bryan O’Connell, Seán Mac Erlaine, Mary Barnecutt and Kevin Murphy
1970 I Hellmuth Costard I Germany I 105mins
1970 I Hellmuth Costard I Germany I 105mins
This hypnotic portrait of Man United legend George Best trains multiple cameras on the revered footballer over the complete course of a match against Coventry City. Made at the height of Best’s fame and tabloid notoriety, Costard’s film focuses insistently on Best—warming up, looking restless and bored, waiting tactically to unleash his genius—rather than the on-pitch action to arrive at a sublime and revealing rumination on celebrity and a tantalizing glimpse of the man behind the myth.
“Football is working-class ballet. It’s an experience of enchantment. For an hour and a half, a different order of time unfolds and one submits oneself to it. A footballgame is a temporal rupture with the routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. At times, it’s like Spinoza on maximizing intensities of existence. At other times, it’s more like Beckett’s Godot, where nothing happens twice.”
Simon Critchley
Supported by the Goethe Institut