Emily Barth
The Aesthetics of Football and Zhang Yimou�s Hero
Each fall the men in my family hold on a fantasy football tournament against each other. Ive tried very hard to never pay a great deal of attention before now football just isnt something that Ive ever even wanted to understand, though this isnt a very good starting point because already I cant explain why my position is what it is.
My brother-in-law gets great pleasure out of trying to explain to me what the beauty of football is. He says that it really is quite simple: its all about harmony. The beauty is that the players have to be aware of one another, coordinate with one another, and trust one another. Ive been able to understand this in other sports not baseball so much, as that one seems too regulated, but in soccer; this past summer I spent a great deal of my time abroad watching the World Cup in expat bars filled with de facto enthusiasts. The beauty of these games (the various footballs) is not just reliant on the coordination of the team, but on the coordination of individual players. You can see the physical grace and strength it takes a player (whose position and name I never know) when he sprints away from the mob of clashing teams with a football underarm.
This is the sort of grace and coordination that is present in Zhang Yimous films, and is particularly active in the Hero (2003). It is undeniable that the film is a beautiful work. The cinematography alone is a sort of visual poetry, owing much to traditional Chinese painting, poetry, and theater. The film is set during the Warring States Period, in 3rd Century BCE China and takes as its inspiration classic stories about assassination plots against Ying Zhen, who would go on to become Chinas first emperor. The main character, Nameless, sacrifices himself in the end for the greater good of the state, placing his country above himself and allowing the king to live.
The film has been read as Communist, Maoist, and even Hitlerist, but I believe such reviews miss the point. Hero was hugely successful in China; in fact, it was the most popular Chinese film ever released in that country, and of all films (Chinese and non-Chinese) is second only to Titanic. It was not successful because of some propagandist agenda; the movies success lies instead in something more basic. Our attachment to this sort of film, to its flashy action scenes and simply crafted stories, actually does have a lot to do with the beauty of football.
Much of the wuxia pian genre (usually translated as swordplay film or martial chivalry genre) relies on spectacle for its storytelling. There is even a formula for the wuxia film: hero defeating evil enemies must harness chii by mastering swordfighting and kung fu so that he may perform superhumanly in battles. The sort of spectacle that we see in Hero, where opponents literally fly into the air in the fervor of their battles, actually replace the story. Though the film is based on an original, very straightforward, story, Zhang creates a world in which the characters descriptions of events are mutually contradictory, the story is told and retold and percolated through personalities and loyalties, and repetition is par de cours. The viewer resorts to following the film more through action, therefore, than through narrative (at least in terms of finding the reality of event, it is impossible to rely on any one character). At the same time, the characters must rely on one another to determine their courses of action, their interpretations of events, and their justifications.
Aaron tells me that the beauty of football is in part a sort of harmony; it is harmony and trust. The tension between individual and society is much more palpable in Hero than it is in a football game, but is certainly present in both. The struggle for narrative control in the movie directly reflects a sense of the necessary sacrifice that Nameless acts out at the conclusion of the film, but the visual accompaniment also points out another dimension of the struggle: Nameless sacrifices himself less to another man than to an aesthetic ideal. The Qin King/Ying Zhen, in his love of calligraphy, swordsmanship, literature, music, and politics, and in his position to unify China and essentially create a country where there was none, is the aesthete of the film. He is the character around whom all of that beautiful movement, the vibrant color and inhuman action, revolves.
Football players reliance on one another can be seen in a similar set-up: it isnt just about the community, it is also about the individual. Here, though, each player can be the Qin King, as each players body becomes his struggle and his aesthetic accomplishment. I would speculate that we are as fascinated by the perfect mechanism of the human body on display as we are by the perfect mechanism of the team acting as a single organism. On film this is the dance of two female warriors stirring up eddies of leaves as the duel; on the field it is a beautiful pass or touchdown.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is heavily reliant on Kants aesthetic theory for his development of the aesthetics of athletic sports in In Praise of Athletic Beauty. It seems in the end that those principles of judgment that judgments be disinterested, that they be both universal and necessary, and that the objects following judgment appear purposive without purpose are in both cases criteria for our decisions about whether these things are beautiful, because in the end I do not think its really possible to explain why and how these things are beautiful as Kant would mandate, it is something intrinsic to the object (in this case, I think, the organism): Harmony and trust? Maybe. Though the universal nature of my judgment insists that there is some very important similarity between the football and the swordfight, this isnt anything that can be proved. It is, instead, just a judgment but obviously not one that is wholly individual.