Situating the Sport Documentary

Sport documentaries constitute a significant aspect of the documentary tradition. Yet they remain an underresearched area of critique in both documentary studies and sport studies. This article begins by exploring the reasons for the low status of the sport documentary before engaging in an analysis of range of recent and contemporary sport documentaries. The cinematic sport documentary is situated within the resurgence of the documentary form as the context for a critique of the contrasting political ethic and ideological underpinnings of Pumping Iron II: The Women , Hoop Dreams, and When We Were Kings, on one hand, and Dogtown and Z-Boys, Touching the Void, and Murderball on the other. Although the latter group of films have all enjoyed commercial success and have therefore succeeded as forms of entertainment, they reveal less about the relations of power circulating in their social and political environment than the former group of films.