Directors Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno immediately establish the context of their film: Madrid, Saturday, April 23, 2005, “from the first kick of the ball until the final whistle.” They open with an establishing shot of the field, the 22 players positioned on their sides waiting for the kick-off. The image itself is grainy, similar to that of a television broadcast, and a commentator speaks in Spanish in the background; it's the typical view of a football [soccer] game. The camera then moves in, cutting closer to the field as the game begins. It follows the action at first, tracking the ball as it moves between the Villarreal players from the center spot to the backfield, and then to the far sideline. We watch the right-winger as he moves up field with the ball; in this moment though, our focus is no longer on the ball, where it is and who has possession, but instead on the figure of Zidane, the number 5, as he enters the center of the frame. He stands out immediately to the viewer, almost ascetic in his disposition; his monk-like bald spot and slouching frame, reserved and collected in his expression and movement. He closes off the midfield lane and a defender comes to his support to block the sideline to his left. The ball is passed forward off screen and the other two figures sprint out of frame after it. The camera doesn’t follow them or the ball though, choosing instead to sit on Zidane as he walks back into position; it will stay on him for the remainder of the film.
The image is then transformed, as the grain of the picture is broken into small, green, individual pixels. Gordon and Parreno redefine the pitch here, restructure it from the space in which the game takes place to a stage, a set, a canvas, a screen, the place in which Zidane will establish and express himself as a player-artist, an individual; it will become a space for him to be studied. The letters Z-I-D-A-N-E appear individually over the pixels, before being placed on top each other to form a single symbol, a hieroglyphic of his name. The camera zooms out slightly, the number of pixels multiplying, and the faint figure of Zidane once again becomes recognizable. Like the pitch, Zidane here is broken down into pixels, signifying that he too is to be looked at and examined differently, to be broken down and analyzed in a new way.
The pixilated image reforms back into the grainy television screen as the ball moves from the Villarreal half to the Madrid 18-yard box. A low cross cuts across the face of goal and Madrid are pushed onto the back foot. The left back, Roberto Carlos, takes the ball, fighting off a Villarreal striker and passes it forward to Zidane. The camera then cuts to the Frenchman just as he is about to receive the ball. The visual style changes here, as the blurry long shot of the field becomes a high definition medium of the player. The camera cuts back to the grainy image as Zidane takes the ball in stride, and we watch as he carries it forward, driving up field past a defender. He sends a pass low and cross field through the defense, ahead of a Madrid forward, pushing him and the flow of the game to the opposite end of the pitch. His genius, his artistry is established here; in less than six touches he has demonstrated his control, accuracy, reading of the game, his ability to turn defense almost instantly into attack, his ability to create, to transform and dictate the flow of the game.
Zidane is in many ways similar to a filmed poem, lyrical in its examination and use of rhythm, movement, space, and sound. German filmmaker Hellmuth Costard used a similar approach in his 1971 film Football as Never Before, in which he filmed George Best with eight 16mm cameras over the course of a game. What is interesting though is that Gordon and Parreno seem to share less in common with Costard as they do with French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. Whereas Costard focused more on capturing the balletic quality of Best and the footballer, Gordon and Parreno, like Clouzot in The Mystery of Picasso (his own examination of the artist), go beyond the medium they’re documenting and raise a deeper question of film as a medium, how we film the artist, and of the artist himself. Like the Mystery of Picasso, the film forces us to ask, what can we really learn about the artist from watching him work, about his “secret process” (as Clouzot calls it), about his internal world and what drives him. Unlike Clouzot though, who eliminates the face and figure of the artist, showing instead only the canvas and the work as it unfolds, Gordon and Parreno focus on Zidane, the artist, and not on what he produces. We are thus forced to try and understand Zidane not through his role on the field and what he contributes to the game, but instead on him, his movement, his behavior, and his interactions with others.
In the opening segment Gordon and Parreno tell us we will be “face to face,” with Zidane, “as close as [we] can.” We learn a number of different things about him through the film. We see his incredible touch, control, balance and technical ability. We’re able to notice the simple shifts in his movement, the subtle changes in his position as he receives and feeds the ball. He is a solitary figure, rarely interacting with any of the other players, and speaking only once (when he tells the referee he should “be ashamed” after awarding the other team an undeserved penalty). We watch as he wanders the pitch, roaming the field more as an observer than an active participant. He is reserved, economical in his play and movement, neutral in his expression. And yet he becomes the game’s central character, the protagonist to a narrative we can’t really see. He creates one goal with a brilliant run down the left wing past three defenders, sending a lofted cross to Ronaldo on the back post for an easy header (changing the flow of the game in Madrid’s favor), and he is issued a red card in the end after hitting a Villarreal player when a fight breaks out on the pitch (a strange foreshadowing of his exit from the World Cup final a year later after he head butted Italian defender Marco Materazzi).
The medium of film and the different techniques of the filmmakers also allow us to better understand Zidane and his internal world. The shifts in diegetic (the sounds from the pitch, the noise of the crowd around him) and non-diegetic sound (the soundtrack, the sounds of kids playing), and the text over the image (excerpts taken from an interview with the player) help bring us into his inner world. We learn what goes through his mind, his strange shifts in consciousness, his acute awareness of everything around him. But do we ever fully understand Zidane through filming him as he works? Do we understand or unravel his “mystery,” his internal workings. Through the 17 different camera angles, the use of text, the layered sound, through breaking his figure down into pixels, do we come to understand what drives him, what pushes him, what goes through his mind as he receives and passes the ball. He is a mobile character, constantly in motion, constantly forcing the camera (and us) to follow him, to readjust, to change focus. We never fully move into his inner world, never share that visual connection with him or seeing the field as he sees it; only once are we given a shot from his perspective, an eye line match of the scoreboard reading 0-1 in the second half. Even as we see him from 17 different angles, even as the text, his internal voice, hints at what he hears and experiences on the field, he remains elusive to us.
The filmmakers use the letters of Zidane’s name to form a symbol in the beginning of the film that they deconstruct in the end. This symbol, this hieroglyphic suggests that Zidane himself, as a player and artist, is a symbol, a hieroglyphic we try to understand. When this figure is dismantled, we are forced to question whether we have dismantled Zidane’s character, whether we have deciphered the hieroglyphic? By bringing us face to face with Zidane, as close as we can get, are Gordon and Parreno allowing us to better understand him or are they suggesting that no matter how close we get to him, we can never fully know what drives him, never know his “secret process.” What makes him play the way he plays, what makes him do the things he does? In the final scene, when Zidane rushes into a fight he’s seemingly uninvolved in and hits an opposing player in the face, we are left confused. How is this the same expressionless ascetic-like figure from before? We never learn why he hits the other player, or what drove him to enter the dispute in the first place. There was no provocation, no personal attack on him, nothing to justify this sudden burst of anger; instead, like his play, this act seems to be an instantaneous surge of energy and emotion that only he understands. In the moment after though, when Zidane has been shown the red card and given his marching orders, he calmly and collectedly untucks his shirt and leaves the pitch.
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