“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 football game 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
FOOTBALL AS NEVER BEFORE (Fußball wie noch nie) – 1970 I Hellmuth Costard I Germany I 105mins – is legendary among soccer aficionados and one of the great works of post-WWII German cinema.
This hypnotic portrait of Man U 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.
It’s hard to imagine a filmmaker focusing on a single player for an entire game or match, but that’s just what German filmmaker Hellmuth Costard did in 1970 – filmed Manchester United star George Best for an entire match (long before British artist Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno made their 2006 variant Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait).
This month sees the film presented at The National Concert Hall with a live musical accompaniment created by Matthew Nolan and Bryan O’Connell in collaboration with some of the finest musicians from the contemporary music scene in Ireland. This special event marks the 20th anniversary of Best’s passing. Introduced by Connell Vaughan & Mick O’Hara, School of Art and Design, at TU Dublin.
Presented with the support of Bohemians F.C. and ITV Sport. Presented by Homebeat in association with NCH
