This Sporting Life · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A tooth comes loose in a tackle, and the rest of the film pours out of the hole it leaves. This Sporting Life opens with Frank Machin face-up in a dentist's chair, anaesthetic flooding his skull, his mouth a ruin. From there the picture is no longer a story he is living but one he is going under — memories surfacing and sinking with the drug. Lindsay Anderson's first feature looks, at a glance, like the British New Wave doing what it did best: a hard man from a colliery town, real Yorkshire grain, a rugby club run by the local boss. But the chair changes everything. We are not watching a man act on the world. We are watching a man who can no longer reach the one thing he wants, replay the failure from inside an interrupted body.

That gap has a name in Deleuze. He called the engine of classical cinema the movement-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation. On the pitch, Frank is that engine at full power. The situation is force; the answer is more force; Richard Harris drives through bodies and the crowd noise breaks over him in waves. This is the action-image in its large form — a global pressure that calls out a decisive act — and Frank is brutally good at it. The trouble is that he tries to live the rest of his life the same way. He wants Mrs. Hammond, his widowed landlady, and he importunes, buys, looms, shoves a fur coat at her grief. Every move is a tackle. None of it lands. What Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image is exactly this: a man who can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. Frank perceives that she is closed to him with total clarity. He has no act that opens her. The sensory-motor circuit that wins matches dies the moment it crosses the threshold of the boarding house.

Anderson's real invention is to give that dead circuit a form. He borrows it, knowingly, from Resnais — the flashback architecture of Hiroshima Mon Amour, where the past erupts into the present without the old cushioning of dissolves. Editor Peter Taylor cuts hard and associatively, the way the anaesthetic actually moves, so the memories arrive as recollection-images (Deleuze's mnemosign): dated fragments of a former present that the mind reaches for because the present offers no action. But notice what they reach toward — not information, not a puzzle to solve. They reach toward a wound the man cannot name. The flashback here is not a device for suspense. It is the shape of a consciousness that can feel everything and process nothing.

Watch the faces and the rooms and you find the rest. Rachel Roberts plays Mrs. Hammond almost entirely through refusal — turned backs, suppressed expression, stillness held like a verdict. This is the affection-image: feeling registered on a face and deliberately not discharged into act or speech. Her stillness is the exact inverse of his motion, and the film stakes its tragedy on the fact that neither can convert into the other. Then the spaces. Anderson and DP Denys Coop shoot intimate domestic scenes in CinemaScope — an absurd width for two people in a terraced house — so that the frame itself becomes what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever: a setting drained of its function as a setting, here a room too wide for the two bodies stranded in its deep focus. Nearness only measures the distance. The widescreen, lifted from Antonioni's L'Avventura, stops describing a place and starts describing estrangement.

And the body. The match sequences slow now and then, and the violence turns ceremonial, almost liturgical, the impacts wet and total under Roberto Gerhard's atonal, dread-shaped score. Harris's whole performance is what Deleuze called the gest — a posture that exposes a social relation rather than expressing a private one. Frank's body is the only language his class and his hurt have left him. He says love by inflicting presence. The film's deepest cruelty is that it knows this is not his fault; it is what he was given to speak with.

Where the New Wave around it — Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving — kept faith with linear, observational realism and a little ironic upward mobility, Anderson fractured the form to match the man. He kept Bazin's contract with the real (the actual Wakefield Trinity players ringing Harris are pure De Sica) and ran it straight into European modernist time. That is the significance: he showed that social realism did not have to be sociological, that the kitchen sink could hold a mind coming apart. The participatory, camera-takes-the-hit style of his rugby pitch reads as a forecast of how sport would be filmed for decades.

Watch it again for the chair. Everything after it is a man trying to act his way back to a feeling, and a film honest enough to let him fail.