ABSTRACT
This chapter’s focus is on the way camera consciousness and the compositional structure of cinema yield insights into the politics of time and value. After surveying philosophical approaches to temporality and offering a historical sketch of the history of sport-in order to situate the time-value relationship that pertains to the present-the chapter’s analysis involves a comparative analysis of two films, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and Steve James’s Hoop Dreams. The films’ analyses emphasize the connection between the styles of the filming and the authoritative forces on the comportment of bodies in alternative historical periods: the portrayal of a static estate society in Barry Lyndon, in which the movement of bodies is constrained, versus the modern condition portrayed in Hoop Dreams, in which the bodies of aspiring basketball players are forced to level of the mobility needed to achieve success in educational and athletic arenas. Specifically, the analysis notes that the framing shots in Barry Lyndon are to the structure of power and authority in the eighteenth century as the tracking shots in Hoop Dreams are to that structure in modernity. Redmond Barry in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, a marginal Irishman without pedigree, is defeated by stasis, while the marginal black would-be basketball stars, Arthur and William, in James’s Hoop Dreams, without cultural and economic capital, are defeated by their inability to get up to speed in modernity’s implacable “obligation to mobility.” In terms of the comparison of the cinematic articulation of the way the respective centuries are to be politically thought, while the montage effects in Barry Lyndon are referential, serving to underscore the perseverance of static structures, the montage effects in Hoop Dreams provide a lesson in the political economy of modern sports. For example, a rapid cut from Arthur watching professional basketball on television to Arthur on the playground, seeking to mimic the movement he is seen, shows the way the exhibition of sports motivates and thereby mobilizes a would-be star.
