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The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image

A gymnast poses in a room with graphic shapes on the floor and wall, in black, pink, blue, and red with white lines.
Macon Reed, Gymnasts, 2014. Image courtesy the artist.

No time for winners (or losers)! Spanning 13 decades of filmmaking, from pre-cinema to post-internet, guest curators Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere’s six-part screening and performance series challenges the idea that the worlds of sports and art are mutually exclusive. The Game is Not the Thing offers an antidote to commercial documentary and mainstream feature film narratives, looking instead to the creative and critical approaches that artists and amateurs bring to the “sports film.”

Read Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere’s discussion of the series and the paradoxical nature of sports and fandom in their essay on the Walker Reader.

Power Plays
A pair of white Nikes on fire in the grass, blurred slightly from movement and smoke.

Fri, Oct 11, 2024

Screenings

Power Plays

World/AntiWorld: On Seeing Double, a lecture performance by Haig Aivazian
Digital rendering of birds-eye view of crowds

Sat, Oct 12, 2024

Screenings

World/AntiWorld: On Seeing Double, a lecture performance by Haig Aivazian

Aesthetic Athletics
Cut out images of a man holding up and kissing trophies, over a blue to green gradient background.

Fri, Oct 18, 2024

Screenings

Aesthetic Athletics

All Eyes on Me
Film strip still of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, shown from the waist up, shirtless and flexing his arm.

Thu, Oct 24, 2024

Screenings

All Eyes on Me

Olympic Efforts
wo men wrestling each other on a sandy beach. A boat on the shore with four others watches on.

Fri, Nov 1, 2024

Screenings

Olympic Efforts

No Goal
Black and white image of a boy smiling holding a skateboard over his shoulder.

Fri, Nov 8, 2024

Screenings

No Goal