LET RIP: THE BEAUTIFUL GAME: POEM VERSION

'From the live euphoria of football, to homosexual desire and the macho body in action, Lee Campbell explores “Balls and sports, men in shorts. Football with Dad both happy and sad. Dad watching one way, me quite the other”. The pitch is a patchwork of memory. The Beautiful Game is beginning. Roll up and take your seats.'Ink, Sweat and Tears

'A highly experimental film focusing on the director's look back at time spent with his father while watching past sports matches, particularly those that illuminated the director's burgeoning sexuality’

‘Oh my god, that sound (football) when I first came to live in the UK - Saturday afternoons in the living room – the sound of the commentators’

‘The green screen with the football players is genius, all the layers, very Busby Berkeley’

'A layering of different images mixed with the memories of a father/son bonding moments - and then kind of leaving us with the homoerotic imagery of the rugby players'

'Brought back my childhood watching rugby league games in Sydney with my father in the 80s. You both liked the tackles you had that in common. Maybe not the same definition of tackle. confusing but I definitely knew I loved looking at them.'

'A Dad and Son conversation exploring what one is seeing and what the other is seeing about the same action of men in football with one person viewing it one way and the other a different way'

SUMMARY: As a gay teenager growing up in 1990s suburban Britain, I had to come to terms with my homosexuality and the realisation of finding men attractive. Whilst Dad could be open back then about how he experienced us enjoying football together, it is only now, as this film reveals, can I be honest and open about my preoccupations; that I found football a means to explore homosexual desire in secret.

This film was made with vintage footage of a 1996/1997 football match between Coventry City and Aston Villa, vintage footage of rugby matches in 1999, sound and moving image recordings made on a Sony Ericsson Cybershoot K800i mobile phone between 2005-2006, drawings and paintings made between 2005-2007 and 2018-2020 and photographic stills and moving image recordings made between 2011-2020 on various iPhones

Made shortly after Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing (2019), this film continues the tradition of employing rips and ripping and employed an arguably more complex narrative structure by incorporating two voices in its storytelling, that of mine and that of my dad’s.

Football is often called ‘The Beautiful Game’. Football players are seen as the epitome of male body beautiful. The ‘beauty’ of the game could be described as these physical demonstrations of the macho body in action. Juxtaposing my experience with my dad’s, this short film speaks about huge differences in memory about one or more football matches that me and my dad watched live in a stadium/listened to live on the radio whilst driving in the 1990s. Not overly confessional but relaying frank autobiographic details of me and my dad’s actual lived shared experience, the film reveals how our own versions of events are so contrasting. The ‘rip’ in this film could also be said to be in effect in two ways; me not just using my own personal archival material (a cassette tape recording of a radio broadcast I made that me and my Dad listened to in the car of a 1996/1997 football match between Coventry City and Aston Villa) but me ‘ripping’ someone else’s archival video footage of the same match I found on YouTube, plus vintage footage of rugby matches in 1999. Conceiving of a rip as a form of disruption relates to my continued interest in both theory and practice (mine and that of others) of the power of interruption/interruptive processes within art and performance . A disruption takes place at the start of the film. The film begins with footage I shot on my mobile phone of a car journey with my dad in 1996/1997 listening to aforementioned Coventry City and Aston Villa match. Green screen effect employed shows football players running across the screen. Everything gets flipped upside down, turned on its head, presented sideways suggesting another (non-conventional) narrative or point of view in operation (mine, as being different to that of my dad). Whilst the many upside-down and sideway angles draw particularly inspiration from my love of the work Georg Baselitz, the German Abstract Expressionist painter who painted bodies upside down, these specifically reference my love of the work of François Truffaut and particularly the scene in Truffaut’s Les Quatre Centre Coups (1959) where the main character Antoine Doinel experiences a human version of a zoetrope known as a Rotora at a Parisian amusement park. The upside-down and sideway angles in The Beautiful Game draw upon Truffaut’s ability to use the camera in this scene to take both the character and viewer through a bodily disorientation, in most dramatic effect when he films the spectators peering into the amusement ride and seeing the riders (Antoine included) upside down. Throughout the film, ‘interruption’ can be characterised by disruption in terms of action related to the production of stops, pauses and breaks within the otherwise smooth running operations of an event or action in motion at the time of the interruption. Defining these stops, pauses and breaks as surprise moments that derail expectation in terms of what is pre-supposed to occur in the logical narrative of something, word play puns and double-entendres i.e. in my humorous usage of the term ‘tackle’, ‘rip’ into my Dad’s version of events but more importantly rip into not just the climate of homophobia that I was living in in 1990s Britain at the time but also what remains taboo even now, 30 plus years later, that the homosexuality of the homosociality of football is writ large. As I say in the film, ‘Balls and sports, men in shorts. Football with Dad both happy and sad. Dad watching one way, me quite the other …’

Compositionally, the roads create a cross and grid effect reminiscent of a football pitch. This compositional mask remains the constant; it is something quite neat and ordered within the chaos. The road looks like a tear but then the rip was also like the St. George’s Cross eluding to nationalism and religion. In another version of the film, I would look to include a rip sideways to further complexify the composition.