The Editor's Reflections and Reports

We of Film & History have been busy since the last issue of the journal and here are some of the highlights of the past few months.

This is the second issue of Film & History to complete our focus on Sports in Film. The topic has brought to our pages some impressive scholarship and quite a few readers worldwide who would not otherwise have taken an interest in our publication. Over the last six months, we have heard from new readers in Norway, Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Australasia. Film seems attracted to the athletic contest, whether it be by individuals against the limitations of time and space or the efforts of teams working toward a common goal. A geographer of sport, John Rooney, once observed to me that "sport is the best thing human beings do." It is not clear to me that I understand all of the implications of my friend's comment, but it has the ring of truth. Not only is sport important and beautiful, it says a lot about who we are and whom we aspire to become. Sports films capture clear, clean moments of human aspiration and success/defeat. An early classic, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938), interpreted the beauty and sublimity of the human form in motion. A very recent production, Cinderella Man (Dir. Ron Howard, 2005), conveys archetypal messages about human aspiration. Such important cinematic statements are the natural subjects of our journal since these messages inevitably reflect basic values and attitudes of both the time interpreted and the time in which the film is produced.