Corps de l’article

This essay considers the construction and historical specificity of the term “real time” and its various definitions in the documentary film experiment Zidane: A 21stCentury Portrait (Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle, 2006) by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon and Algerian-born French artist Philippe Parreno. In many ways, this work can be seen as a manifestation or culmination of early video art’s critique of the immediacy and simultaneity associated with television’s real time aesthetics. In a 2012 interview for Vice Media,[1] Gordon describes being at art school in Glasgow and purposely missing his video class because of his dislike of the experience of watching video: “I don’t really like information to be shot straight into my eye.” With celluloid, the image is experienced “third hand,” from film to screen to spectator. It has a “softer landing” and provides a more mediated interface. The difference between film and video will be explored in what follows as a means to unpack historical and contemporary understandings of real time, and with this, notions of “liveness” which Gordon has explored extensively through diverse media.

Zidane was shot with seventeen different cameras fixed on one single player, Zinédine Zidane, during a soccer match. These different camera views were edited down into sequences by the renowned editor Hervé Schneid (Amélie, 2001) to create a portrait of the player during the game. Staged live as an experiment, “captured” by both film and video cameras to reflect on the limits of reproducing the live event, of capturing the unscripted moment of the sporting match, Zidane is a perfect work to guide us through the complex landscape of early twenty-first-century mediation.

Real Time as Ideology

In “The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics,” written in 1978, Herbert Zettl pointed out the differences between film and television as media:

While in film each frame is actually a static image, the television image is continually moving, very much in the manner of the Bergsonian durée. The scanning beam is constantly trying to complete an always-incomplete image. Even if the image on the screen seems at rest, it is structurally in motion. Each television frame is always in a state of becoming. While the film frame is a concrete record of the past, the television frame (when live) is a reflection of the living, constantly changing present.

Zettl 1978, 5

The invention of videotape enabled producers to create a record of live television that far surpassed the film images of the kinescope, one which involved literally filming off of the face of the monitor and reproducing what Zettl defines above as the “static image” (Martin 2005, 46). While videotape helped to capture television’s “state of becoming,” however, from the start the problem with videotape was editing. As Jerry Zaludek recounts in SMPTE Journal, during the introduction of videotape into the early broadcast environment in the summer of 1959, the editor rather than the director was all-important because of the extensively complex and unwieldy nature of early video editing systems:

Everyone stood respectfully silent, fingers crossed, while the tape editor developed the field/frame pulses on the edge of the tape, read these pulses under the microscope, and with all the solemn dignity of a diamond cutter, brought down the blade and made the cut. Repeat for the other half of the cut. Then the two halves were taped together with the silver tape. A good edit was one that played back without rolling or losing sync. If the action happened to match, then that was a bonus. One had to be a combination of surgeon and film editor to make physical splices.

Zaludek 1982, 357

Zaludek likens the video editor’s skill to those of a “diamond cutter” and a “surgeon.” These comparisons call to mind the multifaceted nature of television’s “becoming” as well as the overall difficulty of the task of cutting into a fragile gem or body. Zaludek’s comments further underscore the technical (material) differences between film and video, and suggest how the cumbersome nature of the early technology may have had an impact on aesthetics, on the use of long takes over montage—montage being a strategy developed for the film medium. Also, at that time, video as a medium was being used by artists as a time-based art form, as something that unfolds in time in an environment. One of the first artworks to incorporate a television monitor and video into a visual collage was by the German artist Wolf Vostell (1932-98) in his 1958-59 assemblage Deutscher Ausblick. As noted above, however, video editing was a difficult and onerous ordeal as opposed to cinematic montage and continuity editing using celluloid. As Stephen Partridge has pointed out in his essay “Video Incorporeal, Incorporated”:

Most of the video specificity therefore being articulated in the late sixties and seventies was tied to the particular technologies of those years: the vidicon tube in early cameras, and open reel-to-reel video tape recorders—associated with this was the virtual impossibility of editing with the early VTR (videotape recorder), which drove artistic interest and experiment away from filmic conventions such as montage, towards the performative and particularly the use of closed-circuit systems (installations) and instant playback.

Partridge 2006, 184

Endemic to this, Partridge continues, “was the notion of intervention into a process, manipulation of the video plane in time or space. The intrinsic properties were emphasized [in these early works]: immediacy; transmission; the ‘live’; the closed circuit; record-replay with time delay; feedback oddities; synthesizer manipulations; and synchronicity with sound” (184).

As the American painter and video artist Hermine Freed put it, the sense of “now” had radically altered since the 1950s—air travel, space travel, phones, computers, satellites, radar, sonar, etc. transformed the experience of time in the globalizing world of the 1960s (Marchessault 2017). McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man explored this new sense of time in the post-war period. Famously, the book opens with a declaration that media abolish both space and time:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

McLuhan 1964, 3

In particular, McLuhan maintained that television contributed to this “global embrace,” the experience of simultaneity which artists engaged and materialized. For example, Yoko Ono created an installation called Sky TV in 1966, a closed-circuit TV set up in the gallery pointing to the sky outside the Indica Gallery. Television here becomes an opening to some phenomenal outside world mediated through technology. The live transmission in 1966 was typical of television at the time, reflecting upon the medium’s capacity to broadcast images around the world (satellite television experiments date from 1962). Sky TV, Ono’s only video work, expands the intimate televisual ontology of the living room to the skies above and beyond the viewer. Ono[2] says of the work, which has been restaged numerous times over the years featuring different skies (the latest installation was in Hokkaido 2005 with an installation of fifteen TV monitors that “air the Hokkaido sky”), that: “The sky shines equally to us so it doesn’t care who is rich. Everyone can share the sky all the time.” She plays with the same utopian elements of connectivity that McLuhan celebrated. Real time expands to become an airing (a precursor to streaming) “all of the time” and the distinction between the real sky and Sky TV collapses as the television set becomes a portal through which to “share” the natural elements of the planet. It is important to underline that video art was developed by performance, dance, sound, and visual artists as a new medium that would extend the boundaries of traditional art forms (Kurtz 1973, 37).

Vertical Roll (Joan Jonas, U.S.A., 1972) and Monitor (Steve Partridge, U.K., 1974) are early examples of what have been called “real time” video experiments that play with the illusion of immediacy, feedback, and instant playback through a reflexive focus on the video monitor. Both are performance pieces[3] that undercut the notion of simultaneity and the closed circuit. Real time video can be defined by the fact that video can record and transmit simultaneously. An action can be viewed on a monitor at the same time that it is being viewed in the physical world. Both Vertical Roll and Monitor depend on editing to create the illusion of the spatial temporal continuity of the closed circuit television, fashioning in their works a highly sophisticated remediation of real time transmission. That is, the constructed and mediated nature of real time video becomes visible as ideology and is foregrounded as a mythology.

The term “real time” derives from informatic sciences, where “real time data” is taken to mean “media time,” time experienced through media. It is certainly this scientific approach to media that Jonas and Partridge were deconstructing through their reflexive videos. As “An Historical Survey of Early Real Time Computing Developments in the U.S.” explains, the term “real time” was coined during the late 1940s during the development of Whirlwind I, a post-World War II flight simulator (Laplante, Rose, and Gracia-Watson 1995, 200). Developed by MIT researchers from 1944 to 1959, Whirlwind I was the first digital computer to operate in real time processing.[4] Definitions of “real time” were then found in the 1950s, and the term became commonplace in computing by the 1960s (199). James Martin’s 1965 Programming Real-Time Computer Systems provides the most-often quoted early definition of a real time computer system: “one which controls an environment by receiving data, processing them and returning the results sufficiently quickly to affect the functioning of the environment at that time” (1965, 200).

We can see in both Jonas’ and Partridge’s works that the loss of control and unpredictability which they bring in through invisible montage (manipulation of time) work against the notion of real time simultaneity. There is, however, a tension in Jonas’ work between the figure of Honey being subjugated to the electronic medium and the spoon she is banging in time to the roll. Still, the vertical roll of the monitor continuously erases her figure in electronic waves. As has been remarked upon by many, the vertical hold function on the monitor can be seen to mirror the movement of celluloid film through a projector. Indeed, the video is a highly constructed montage of temporalities and body positions even though it appears to be continuous.

In Monitor, Partridge makes a video about video itself by turning the camera in on itself and pointing it at the monitor to create the phenomenon of feedback, which John Calcutt[5] has noted resembles “an infinite series of repeated images, each nestled within the other like Chinese Boxes.” As the video unfolds, repetition seems to come unhinged as we “see that the effect of feedback has actually been ‘faked.’” Monitor sets up the illusion of a feedback image that begins to lose synch with each successive frame within the frame. Partridge has deconstructed and reconstituted the content of each image, which no longer mirrors the previous image but creates a dynamic and unpredictable kaleidoscope. Through carefully concealed montage, each frame takes on a rhythm and a frame of its own.

Both videos break down the distinctions between film and video that Herbert Zettl describes above, and we can see how these early video artists were playing with the idea of time-based media as simply transparent renderings with no human intervention. Marita Sturken has maintained that the history of video art cannot be separated from the history of rapid technological change between 1967 and 1982 with the development of “digital imaging and frame- accurate rapid editing[, which] replaced real time as the most prevalent aesthetic styles” (1990, 103). Real-time aesthetic style being defined by the long take, she writes that “whereas in 1975 it was still standard fare to produce a tape in real time, by 1982 it had become a formal statement” (103). The problematic of real time explored by artists in the history of video art develops directly out of the cumbersome experiences of editing framed by conceptual artists as an approach to art making (Gale 1995, 8-9); it later became a deeply reflexive engagement with the video medium, real time and the capacity for simultaneity and instant playback, which we will explore in the next section. For some artists, real time was a highly constructed term while for others—Ono and those inspired by McLuhan—it continued to be an electronic common world.

We should be mindful not to separate the histories of film and video when it comes to the concept of real time. In his catalogue essay written for the exhibition Making Time: Constructing Time as Material in Contemporary Video & Film[6] Peter Wollen explored how avant-garde filmmakers and video artists alike were fascinated by this concept in the 1960s and 70s (2000, 8). Many artists looked to early cinema as a source for real time aesthetics. The films of the Lumière brothers, such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), where events were staged for the camera, were particularly pertinent. Wollen notes that these early films were made before the advent of editing and simply presented one continuous action. Events were sometimes choreographed to coincide with their filming or cameras were set up to capture a scheduled movement. As André Gaudreault (1990, 69) put it, “the film opens, presents one action through to its conclusion, and then ends.” Experimental film artists such as Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969) remediated the original, reshooting the 1905 film of the same title off the screen, reframing it, and extending it to create “a dream within a dream.” Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974) has done this with a continuous view of 1903 San Francisco as seen from a trolley. Gehr interrupts the continuous real time movement of the original to generate a series of freeze frames which allow greater contemplation of the original documentary scene.

Wollen also draws attention to Andy Warhol’s real time films such as Sleep (1963), Empire (1964) and most especially Eat (1964). The highly constructed set-up of Eat had an influence on video artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is especially important for our discussion of Zidane because it features a time-based performance by Robert Indiana that defined the duration of the film—one actor directed by Warhol to eat a mushroom[7] very slowly over twenty-seven minutes—the film was then projected at 16 fps for a duration of thirty-nine minutes. This performance and its filming were not meant to be seen in public, but the presentation of the film was created as a performance (Wollen 2000, 9). That is, the projection of the film was an expanded time-based performance, time slowed down in real time that Warhol planned as part of the whole production.

The definition and concept of real time has continued to develop alongside technology. According to Esther Weltevrede, Anne Helmond and Carolin Gerlitz in their essay “The Politics of Real Time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines” (2014, 126), real time is “used to describe media characterized by fresh, dynamic or continuously processed content in opposition to static or archival media.” The term “real time web” became popular in the late 2000s as live streaming of social activities was promoted on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Periscope. The authors apply a medium-specific and socio-technical approach, arguing that devices do not operate in real time, but rather devices and their cultures “operate as pacers of real time” (126) and produce it in their technicity. In complicating the relation between the technical/computational and the experienced real time, the authors move away from real time as a universal temporal frame or simply as an ideological construct masking human control, and introduce an approach that considers the pace and culture of each specific device’s distinct fabrication of forms of “realtimeness” (125).

In a similar vein, Karin van Es describes in her essay “Liveness Redux: on media and their claim to be live” (2017, 1247) how “realtime” often refers to technical performance, which “is seemingly devoid of the ‘sociality’ . . . inherent to the live.” In examining broadcast media, social media, and their intersections, van Es proposes the concept of live as a product constructed by interactions between institutions, technologies, and user/viewers—“constellations of liveness” that encompass ontological, phenomenological and rhetorical approaches (1249).

Gordon and Parreno

We can see aesthetic precursors to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait in the early artistic experiments carried out separately by Gordon and Parreno. Gordon’s art practice has explicitly been influenced by Warhol’s experiments with real time. His Turner award-winning 24 Hour Psycho (1993) is a meditation on expanded time as a formal statement. Psycho’s (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) original 109 minutes was expanded and slowed down to approximately two frames per second, making its duration twenty-four hours—a nod to the “real time” of early video art where duration becomes sculpted into blocks of time, and to the 24/7 world of television. We should not forget that Psycho was imbued with a televisual veneer—shot with the television crew from Hitchcock Presents in black and white, its transmedia aesthetic was produced to build onto the sprawling mediatic void of network television in 1960s America.

In his 2003 installation Play Dead; Real Time, Gordon had a circus elephant transported to the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. The elephant was recorded following a trainer’s commands (lying down, playing dead, getting back up). The installation features three films (shot on 35mm transferred to video) projected on three screens spatially distributed in the gallery. Gordon portrays the situation simultaneously in front and rear projections as well as on a monitor, inviting the viewer to walk around to get a fuller picture of the elephant playing dead in the white space of the gallery and captured through a slow tracking shot. The work has been productively read as the culmination of one of Edison’s most visceral actualities—Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), made one hundred years earlier. Matthew Noble-Olson (2017, 84-104) sees Gordon’s “post-cinematic” installation as an answer to the harsh objectivity and violent spectacle of Edison’s film through an expansion and excess of cinematic time.

Parreno’s own work is committed to “the exhibition as medium.” A site-specific happening at the Tate, Anywhen (2016-17) evolved and changed from day to day during the six-month period of the exhibition. The exhibition was conceived as “an automaton which guides the public through a constantly changing play of moving growing organic elements, light configurations and sound environments”[8] with the audience central to the entire situational process of becoming. Indeed, with this focus on the art of environment, we can see how both artists and their aesthetic concerns with temporality came together with Zidane. Let me describe the Gordon/Parreno experiment. Originally the directors had wanted 1,000 cameras to be distributed to spectators in the stands, but that proved too difficult, so they settled for seventeen synchronized cameras (both high definition digital and 35mm film) and some of the best sports and live-action camera operators in the world, who worked under the supervision of acclaimed cinematographer Darius Khondji.

The film follows the legendary French soccer player Zinédine Zidane throughout an entire Real Madrid vs. Villarreal match in front of 80,000 fans at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. Two of the cameras were borrowed from the U.S. army and have the largest zoom available on the planet. The camera operators were instructed to track Zidane’s every move, in the thick of the action but most often not in the thick of the action. The film includes an original score by the Scottish band Mogwai. The sound was extensively recorded during and after the game, and is filled with sonic layers and acoustic detail: Zidane’s voice, the voices of the spectators, children yelling, dogs barking, feet dragging on the turf, the ball being kicked, breathing, the music. This was put together by the French sound designer Selim Azzazi.

Gordon and Parreno sat in a trailer outside the stadium looking at live images from the seventeen cameras on seventeen monitors, giving the operators instructions to move in for close-ups, or pull back and reframe, etc. Later they worked, as it was noted earlier, with the acclaimed editor Hervé Schneid, who edited raw takes to create sequences, mixing the footage from the seventeen cameras. This was also mixed with excerpts from the Spanish TV broadcast to make a single temporal flow mirroring the game’s linear unfolding. Thus, the materials that Schneid had to work with were: the game recorded by seventeen different cameras focused on Zidane as well as the game aired on television in Spanish—making eighteen different versions of the game, each version presenting different lenses, frames and movements amounting to over twenty-seven hours of recorded material not including the additional sound recordings. The rule of the editing was that it needed to follow the temporal progression of the game.

In the 2012 Vice Media interview, Gordon recounts being asked by the producers from Universal Studios for a storyboard to share with the camera operators. Not being able to provide one because of the unscripted nature of the live event, he and Parreno brought the group of about 150 operators and assistants to visit the portrait gallery at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. In looking down a corridor devoted to the portraits by Goya, they asked the operators to understand each portrait as a film still, and to frame Zidane with the same amount of energy and creative detail: to think about the complexity of the portraits conveyed through painting. Gordon highlighted two portraits of the same woman in nearly the same reclining position, one with clothes, the other without, that were hung side by side at the Prado (Goya’s La majadesnuda, c. 1797–1800, and La majavestida, c. 1803). As has been analyzed by art historians such as Janis Tomlinson (1991), besides the clothing or lack of clothing, the differences between the portraits are to be found in the way the female figure occupies the frame. While the figure in the nude portrait maintains a similar steadfast and direct gaze outward to the viewer, she does not occupy the frame in the same manner; rather her body recedes in the frame, giving her less command over the overall surface. For Gordon, these are important details to which he wanted to draw attention. In this sense also we are reminded of Stanley Cavell’s statement in The World Viewed (1971, 24) that a “painting is a world; a photograph is of the world.” One might surmise that the camera operators were being instructed to photograph a closed world in the painterly sense.

In its conceptualization, Zidane does resemble an earlier documentary about Manchester footballer George Best, Fußball wie noch nie by Hellmuth Costard (Football As Never Before, 1970). Costard employed eight 16mm film cameras which recorded Best in situ in real time, and like Zidane mirrored the running time of the game. But the major differences between the two films lie quite precisely in the representation of real time, which in Zidane is both contracted (the concentration solely on Zidane’s experience of the game and his subjective recollections conveyed through subtitles) and expanded (a focus on the global context of the game’s temporality—at that precise moment around the world), which occurs in a three-minute sequence at half time. Let me discuss these temporal elements in more detail.

We need to think about Zidane in terms of two events—the event of the game which the seventeen cameras recorded in its entire duration without ellipses or additions, and later, after all the editing, the event of the film which was released as a feature in theatres as well as an installation of images, sometimes on two screens, sometimes on multiple screens, sometimes on a wall and sometimes on the floor. I will only tackle the single screen event because it effectively creates a connection between the seated viewers watching the game and the cinema spectators. We also need to make a distinction between the art gallery and the film theatre in terms of the spectatorial experience, because they are essentially different. Yet importantly they are also deeply interconnected and entangled works—the installations keep the film alive by adding another temporality which further expands Zidane’s meditation on time.[9]

The fact that Gordon and Parreno chose a sporting event, an event whose outcome was unknown, is central to their experiment with real time. A 2007 TV Guide Network report declared sports programming as “the most sought after genre, surpassing serialized drama, reality competition and comedy in terms of demand” (Gantz et al. 2008, 63). Soccer is the most popular team sport around the world. Sports spending is projected by Forbes to reach $75.7 billion yearly by 2020—tied mostly to media rights deals rather than gate revenue. The sports business is media business, and fandom and spectatorship are growing exponentially globally.[10] Indeed, sports represent the last vestige of real time available through broadcast television; and this is also true for electronic sports (esports), a massive gaming phenomenon in the multi-billion-dollar online gaming industry (Hamari and Sjöblom, 2017).

In Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television, Richard Dienst explains the complex relays which make up the register of liveness and real time, which involves what he calls “automatic time.” Automatic time is endemic to a “televisual epistemology”—something akin to a “pure event” which “speaks for itself” (1994, 163). Very much like Van Es’ “constellations of liveness” (2017, 1249) in relation to streaming social media, automatic time is what makes possible the “live event” and any sense of real time: automatic time “maintains its own consistency and control by limiting when and where internal switches can occur” (Dienst 1994, 163-64). The “live effect,” Dienst argues, is created “by a certain pattern of switching away from and into automatic time, often using two series of images that confront each other as ‘simultaneous’” (164). He maintains that the “presentation of ‘presence’ always refers elsewhere for confirmation, even if it is nothing more than the little word ‘LIVE’ electronically pasted over an image” (164). Zidane works against this sense of automatic time in the game, and instead articulates a kind of suspended time, the closed world of the player, by focussing on elements of inaction rather than action in the film. Let me explore this idea further by bringing another artist into this analysis.

Although Gordon and Parreno were influenced by painters like Goya and Velázquez and artists like Warhol, I want to bring in the American writer Gertrude Stein, who understood much about the presentation of presence. This is nicely illustrated in the portrait she created of her friend Picasso (a response to his portrait of her) in her 1924 poem If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.[11] Here is an excerpt:

As presently.

As as presently.

He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.

Jennifer Ashton has argued that Stein’s entire oeuvre can be read as a meditation on “wholeness.” She maintains that Stein’s work entails both the “ontological question of what makes something whole and the epistemological question of how we know that something is a whole” (Ashton 1997, 289). Both these questions are central to Stein’s lifelong project to interrogate the whole in and through writing. Through Stein’s writing we experience the whole as a continuum—a progressive movement, “a space of time” (298) in which nothing repeats itself but all is connected through the whole which emerges through repetition that produces difference rather than sameness. Stein’s use of repetition as a means to figure the whole is complex and something that cannot be explored with any depth here. But her groundbreaking use of repetition might shed light on the editing in Zidane, which cuts between seventeen views of the same person involved in an event unfolding in time.

The editing in the documentary is sometimes classical-style continuity editing of sequences culled from the seventeen different cameras, or disorienting close-ups and camera pans breaking the 180-degree rule. The “live effect,” the pattern of relays that Dienst refers to that would create a linear rendering of the game’s different actions, cannot find images that are “simultaneous,” even though the film will sometimes cut to an extreme long shot of the field, or briefly interject Zidane’s POV of the stadium lights or sequences seen through a television monitor airing the live game. At other times the editor inserts a brief replay on television. The creation of simultaneity, which would support the sense of “automatic time,” is thwarted by the fact that, for the most part, there is no cutting away from Zidane, who appears mostly still throughout the game, with short interludes of action when he runs, passes or kicks the ball; at other times he waits, watches, shuffles (Fig. 1). We hear his breathing, his mumbling and his silence. There is a distinct lack of progress in this anti-sport, counter-action film. There is no team but a single player who provides the fulcrum for the disjointed movements of the collective. Very little happens in the space and time in which we are caught. The game unfolds elsewhere, off-screen, which is why those who love soccer do not watch this film for the game.

In the space of Zidane, we are given what the video artist Davidson Gigliotti calls “compressed time,” which involves the subjective experience of memory (Westgeest 2015, 27). With compressed time we get access to Zidane’s reflections on playing soccer and memories through subtitles on the bottom of the screen. He recollects his experience of the game being mediated through television as a child and the voice in his head as he plays is that of television announcer Pierre Cangioni. He also describes his relation to the spectators in the stadium and his ability to hone in on sonic details during a game, like the ticking of a watch. Most importantly, he says that he never experiences a game in real time but as fragments. Sometimes he has the sensation of a pre-scripted scenario. He recalls one time when he knew the outcome of the game—he knew he would score the winning goal before it happened. His experience of playing the game has an intensity and a non-linearity that are temporally differentiated from his ordinary experience. In this sense, we are experiencing the game through Zidane’s sensory (especially acoustic) perspective.

Figure 1

Figure 1 (suite)

Figure 1 (suite)

Editing sequence of Zidane’s inaction, working against continuity and simultaneity.

Zidane: A 21stCentury Portrait, Gordon and Parreno, 2006

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In a very Deleuzian manner, with compressed time consciousness rather than technology provides the mediation. That is, time is mediated through consciousness in a way that makes it totally singular to the individual body rather than something constructed and objective. The film moves inside and outside of Zidane’s psyche, through past and present tenses, through text and, as I noted earlier, through soundscapes interfusing children playing, a dog barking, passing conversations, and the sounds of crowds cheering. All these elements create layers of temporalities, mixing sonic memories with the disconnected bits of game play. This works against any sense of continuity in the traditional cinematic sense, even though the film is unfolding in the temporal context of the game.

If the first half of the film problematizes an aesthetics of simultaneity or “automatic time” through an excessive focus on Zidane, the three-minute interlude at half time moves into a montage of global and planetary simultaneities, creating an extraordinary montage of fragments that transforms the film into an archive of the moment as experienced in different places around the world and beyond. Taken from news stories which expand Zidane’s spatial-temporality, the film’s “space of time,” to bring Stein back into our discussion, is expanded to include the global context. The interlude juxtaposes and intermixes places and stories selected from over a dozen different television and Internet news items collected on the 23rd of April 2005. We see and read about a plurality of stories conveyed through text over a montage of mostly silent images (photographs and video) punctuated by Mogwai’s penetrating soundtrack: “puppeteer brings Bob Marley back to life in Panema beach puppet show”; “hundreds of homes destroyed in Serbia Montenegro during the worst floods in forty years”; the child “Elian Gonzalez speaking on Cuban National TV” after a bitter custody dispute in Miami; tarmac completed for A380 Airbus, the largest superjumbo airliner in history; a forty-eight hour reading of Don Quixote to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ book; new video games are released on eBay; NASA’s “spacecraft Voyager records plasma wave sounds at the solar wind termination shock boundary”; “hundreds of toads swell to three times their normal size and explode in a fresh water pond in Germany”; “a car bomb in Najaf Iraq kills nine in a wave of escalating attacks”; the death of British actor Sir John Mills; a specialist team is sent in to rescue trapped miners in Turkey; “the Ivory Billed Woodpecker believed to have been extinct since 1920 has been spotted in North America”; “the Asian-African summit comes to a close in Jakarta.” In this litany of stories collected on the same day, Gordon and Parreno interject their own personal stories via text: “My son had a fever this morning” and “I had something to do today. . .” The heterogeneous montage is anything but random, moving from video games to air travel to space travel, from puppet shows to literature, from war and terror to ecological disasters, from human compassion to new biodiversities. Each fragment is a piece of mediated time woven together to convey the plurality of spaces that make up the whole. The sequence concludes with the text: “Who would have imagined that in the future, an ordinary day like this might be forgotten or remembered as anything more or less significant than a walk in the park.”

Importantly, there are no newscasters in this montage. For Dienst, televisual time is always “mixed time”—the ur-form for this is the newscaster, who offers the most immediate and disjointed production of a world assembled, “where all rays of representation leave and return to a single point—the newscaster’s face. . .” He goes on: “instead of multiplying relations between images, television news disconnects and abandons them” (1994, 164). The montage of news stories in Zidane does indeed multiply relations between images. Over the montage of dislocated fragments which move from the human to the more than human, one image stands out. It is a photograph of a youth after a car bomb in Iraq wearing a Zidane jersey (Fig. 2). One of the reasons Gordon and Parreno chose to create a portrait of Zidane is because of his “chimeric” existence in the media—he exists only from “the kick of the ball to the final whistle” in the game. In this sense, “Zidane is everyone”[12] and the car bomb image becomes even more poignant in this context. This reverse shot to Zidane’s world opens it up to provide the simultaneity that was missing in the rendering of the game during the first half of the film. But what is created during this three-minute cutaway is not the “automatic time” of real time as Dienst describes it. Rather, the “space of time” of the game is expanded to become planetary time through these global images, which are presented as a kind of dynamic historical archive of the day.

Figure 2

Car bomb in Iraq, half-time sequence

Zidane: A 21stCentury Portrait, Gordon and Parreno, 2006

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Zidane is a film about mediation which enables us to reflect on these global images “like a walk in the park.” The Zidane we see is a mediated, commodified image, and his story, that of a young working-class boy of Algerian descent who grew up on the streets of Marseille, is legendary and beloved around the globe. His own jersey is plastered with logos, he is surrounded by advertisements in the stadium and, as noted earlier, sports media is a multi-billion-dollar business with a huge reach. He is an integral part of the “media machine.” Zidane the film is drenched in a deep melancholy and the last image is a close-up of the plasma screen after Zidane is expelled from the game for fighting—a premonition of things to come a year later.

Yet the film is also more than a critique of commodification, globalization and mediation. It offers up a deeply humanistic reflection on mediation and the real time of media by staging this collaborative performance “in real time.[13]” It is this performative aspect of the Gordon-Parreno experiment that ultimately makes a space for reflection on the experience of real time, just as Stein’s poetry creates the space between words for the reader to experience reading. Here is the conclusion of Stein’s portrait of Picasso, with which I would like to conclude, because tellingly it culminates with play and history:

Miracles play.

Play fairly.

Play fairly well.

A well.

As well.

As or as presently.

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.