Zooming in on Zizou

>> Experimental soccer documentary Zidane,
un portrait du 21e siècle should appeal to
both sports nuts and art fans

INTIMATE INTENSITY: Zidane

by MARK SLUTSKY

An experimental art film, a documentary and a captivating sports film all in one, Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle is an exhilaratingly strange and hypnotic film. Directors Douglas Gordon, the Scottish artist who slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho for his self-explanatory 24 Hour Psycho installation, and French-Algerian artist and filmmaker Philippe Parreno used 17 cameras (a mix of 35mm film and hi-def) to track the titular French soccer star over the course of one game, Real Madrid vs. Villarreal, which took place on April 23, 2005, at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in Spain.

The film is assembled from that footage, as well as some shots from the TV feed, and it takes place more or less in real time. The thing is, it by no means purports to be a record of the game itself, but rather of Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane’s experience playing it. Shot a year before he retired (and the notorious headbutting of Marco Materazzi), it’s an amazingly intimate portrait of this very intense man. In addition to being followed by multiple cameras, Zidane was also mic’ed, so you can hear him breathing, grunting and muttering to fellow players: “Va, va...”

Watching a match on TV, your eye (and the camera) follows the action, so it’s fascinating to see what it’s like from the player’s point of view—long stretches of intense watchfulness and observation punctuated by moments of thrilling motion that seem to manifest out of nowhere (when Zidane assists a goal and the crowd goes wild, it’s a spectacular, thrilling moment).

The film’s sound design is artful, mixing between Zidane’s mics, the crowd noise and music by atmospheric surge-rockers Mogwai. There are barely any words spoken save for Zidane’s brief utterances, although extracts from interviews with the man, which appear as text on the screen during a couple of key moments in the game.

The movie’s title sequence should be mentioned too. It’s like a short self-contained art film, composed almost entirely of extremely low-res TV footage blown up until the individual pixels are visible. It’s a gorgeously glowing collage that really revels in the abstraction of the TV image. It’s the perfect way to open a film that should appeal equally to art fans and soccer nuts.

Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle
screens (for free!) at the Cinéma Imperial
this Thursday, March 29 at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

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