The Hollywood Sports Film – Visualizing Hidden and Familiar Aspects of American Culture

2018/01/01 by Barbara Englert, Englert, Barbara
Social Sciences · #American history #Hollywood sport films #North Dallas Forty #Psychoanalysis and Social Critique #Semi-Tough #Social and Cultural Studies #Sociology and Education Studies #The Bad News Bears #US sports #identity issues #pop culture

paper · pdf · doi:10.12759/hsr.43.2018.2.165-180

openalex publication_date 2018/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

This essay highlights a number of Hollywood sport films from the 1970s focusing on national and personal identity issues. Against the backdrop of contemporary history, the meaning of sports and film, and its pop cultural intertwinement becomes transparent revealing a basic pattern. Aspects come into the picture which from a European perspective seem both familiar and, in a way, hidden. Besides being great entertainment, sport films like North Dallas Forty (1979), Semi-Tough (1977) or The Bad News Bears (1976) have the quality to serve as a rich and meaningful archive of visual sources for research in the humanities.

Related

• Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Photography and the Visual Representation of Sport
• ‘It's in the game’: sport fans, film and digital gaming
• Depicting Sporting Bodies – Visual Sources in the Writing of Sport History. An Introduction
• The Many Levels of Sports Narration
• The Assertive Image: Referentiality and Reflexivity in Sports Photography