Of Sport and Men
1961 · 58m · Canada
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Five major sporting events, from the Tour de France and the Sebring car race to Spanish bullfighting, British soccer and Canadian hockey, are presented as displays of courage, discipline and beauty.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A mid-century NFB documentary that treats bullfighting and hockey with the same mythic weight? Bold, but it's playing it respectably straight—five noble pursuits, five tidy thesis statements. I wanted it to interrogate why we *need* these rituals, not just genuflect before them.
This is exactly the kind of formally rigorous essay-film that defined the NFB's golden age: five discrete sporting worlds held up against each other as mirrors of human aspiration, bound together by meditative pacing and a humanist philosophy that feels earned, not imposed. The architecture of comparison—from the Tour's endurance to the bullfight's ritualized danger—reveals itself as a serious formal argument about what sport means.
What makes this work isn't the sweeping premise but the decision to let each sport breathe in its own visual language; the bullfight footage has a weight and stillness the hockey rink never touches, and that tonal restraint—refusing to smooth them all into a single aesthetic—is what gives the whole thing weight.