Guggenheim Re-Screens Zidane: Soccer Without the Ball
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's "Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait" was re-screened at New York's Guggenheim Museum this summer, roughly 20 years after the experimental film was first made.
- The film deployed 17 cameras around Madrid's Bernabéu stadium during an April 2005 Real Madrid–Villarreal match, tracking only Zinedine Zidane and deliberately ignoring the ball.
- The split-screen work cuts between blurred and crisp footage, crowd chants, and a Mogwai soundtrack to defamiliarize televised soccer spectacle into something the reviewer compares to a Cubist painting or a Francis Bacon portrait.
- The film ends with Zidane running into a sideline scuffle and receiving a red card — footage shot more than a year before his actual headbutt of Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final against Italy, his final match as a player.
- Zidane, ranked alongside Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi, grew up in the La Castellane housing project in Marseilles, later played for Juventus and Real Madrid, and coached Real Madrid to three UEFA Champions League titles.
Why it matters: The Guggenheim's re-screening offers a fresh audience a roughly 20-year-old art film that uses 17 cameras to follow one man through a Real Madrid–Villarreal match while ignoring the ball — collapsing the boundary between athletic spectacle and ordinary humanity. For film and art audiences, it positions the work as a Camus-tinged existential portrait that also serves as an eerily literal preview of Zidane's actual 2006 World Cup Final red card.
