REVIEW – POWER PLAYS (CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART FILM SERIES)

by Adam Arthur

Power Plays, the first installment of the Carnegie Museum of Art’s two-part 2024 film series, was shown on July 27, 2024. The program featured a lineup of short films. Most (though not all) of these films served the purpose of addressing the ways in which sports culture reflects discourses of militarism and colonialism.

The opening remarks were presented by Zoe Samudzi, the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at Clark University. The general idea of Professor Samudzi’s opening remarks was, simply, that the films could be viewed through a lens of deconstructing popular narratives. This take, though an interesting perspective, was accentuated by tired buzzwords like “hegemonic masculinity” at which any viewer jaded by years in academia would surely roll their eyes. The films themselves, however, were not without objective artistic strengths.

The first film, The Nation’s Finest, was a 1990 piece that prominently featured a muscular black female athlete posing in front of the British flag, while a monotone female voice speaking in a posh accent provided a pep talk presented as though it were intended to hype up a team of soldiers. The film was pointed in its simultaneous political critique and aesthetic admiration of propaganda, taking a page out of mid-twentieth-century film reels meant to encourage soldiers going off to fight in the Second World War.

The second film, Sondra Perry’s It’s in the Game, was aesthetically vibrant, utilizing a post-modern, Vaporwave aesthetic heavy on CGI. As with the other films in the series, the intent of this piece was to juxtapose portrayals of athleticism and sports culture against artifacts of colonialism. The film dealt with the parallels between portrayals of African-American college athletes whose likenesses were featured in a video game without their consent and the collections of indigenous cultural artifacts found in institutions such as the British Museum and The Met.  

While visually striking, the premise of comparison proved, at best, a stretch. If the audience is building on the notion of athletes as warriors, then athletes might be seen not as possessions or curiosities collected in the name of colonialism, but rather as an elite martial caste – in the same way that well-heeled and well-educated castes in contemporary American and British society can be seen as western Brahmins, athletes may be viewed as an elite warrior class akin to the Kshatriya caste of India. Yet, to its detriment, this film does not deal with the idea that a video game depicting the likenesses of athletes – even without their express permission – may be seen as a sort of modern-day warrior legend that mythologizes those it features as heroes. The film’s failure to engage with this alternate interpretation was, without a doubt, its greatest flaw.

More pointed in its critique of colonialism was the 2022 film The Same Track, which intersperses archival footage of Britain’s Commonwealth games – played by athletes from Britain’s colonial possessions – with footage of protests for the rights of indigenous peoples who once lived under British colonial rule. In terms of messaging, this was the strongest film of the bunch, and the one that provided the least to criticize.

The screening concluded with 2019’s Prometheus, the longest of the short films in the series. The film portrays the NBA Dream Team in the 1992 Olympics juxtaposed against footage of U.S. involvement in Iraq during the administration of George H.W. Bush. While the military metaphor rings true, presenting U.S. involvement in the First Gulf War as representative of colonialism proves intellectually dishonest. While the same can not be said for the second war in Iraq, this military intervention took place with the approval of U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Furthermore, this campaign was aimed at countering and limiting Saddam Hussein’s desire for territorial expansion, with no desire on the behalf of the U.S. to enact a long-term occupation or promote a particular ideology or economic system abroad.

While the use of CGI graphics in Prometheus is clever, it often fails to present a message that is not at least ambivalent. Anyone familiar with the politics of the 1990s will remember it (or have read about it) as a time of optimism in the U.S., when hopes for the independent flourishing of democracy abroad were high. So, too, was the U.S. able, for a time, to ride the waves of global confidence in its foreign policy, prior to the ill-fated post-9/11 military campaigns of the second George Bush. Anyone with an understanding of the 1990s will not be swayed by director Haig Aivazian’s attempt to decontextualize the era and in so doing to position it as an era of colonial hubris.

While visually striking, with its usage of news footage, computer graphics, and animated portrayals of Middle Eastern culture in western media, there is not much meaningful to take away from this peace. Furthermore, any solidarity the viewer might feel with the film’s intent to portray the First Gulf War as an expression of colonialism is undermined by a solid understanding of geopolitics, international relations theory, and military history.

One of the more curious choices in this set of films was the positioning of 2019’s Youthupia: An Algerian Tale as a piece played on loop prior to Professor Samudzi’s opening remarks. The viewer gets the impression that this is because the intent of the program may have undermined the film’s message. It is, specifically, a celebration of protests against Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 2019, with many of the protestors drawn from the country’s football (Soccer) culture. The film celebrates the activities of the protestors and their rootedness in sports culture. This in turn contradicts the other film’s critical intentions: of portraying sports as an expression of nationalism, militarism, and colonialism.

Yet if viewed with healthy skepticism, the film has darker implications that it is likely this screening did not wish to draw attention to. Specifically, the protest, like the other aspects of sports culture discussed, is rife with martial implications. The protestors in the film are portrayed as marching in an intimidating fashion and chanting slogans in a military cadence. The naïve celebration of protest in the film is undercut by an awareness of the tendency of protests, particularly against an established regime, to turn violent. At worst, such movements, like revolutionary movements, can be exploited from within by what the political theorist Michael Walzer refers to as a Maximal Leader (in other words, a dictator-in-waiting). The threat of implied violence inherent in these protests is not addressed, and it remains open to question whether the film was deliberately positioned before the opening remarks to avoid any hint of such implications.

Aside from these flaws, however, Power Plays provided an intriguing aesthetic experience. However, for several films the strength of their messaging was defeated both by their curation and by comprehension of the broader contexts they sought to address. It remains to be seen what impression the forthcoming second installment of the Carnegie Museum of Art 2024 Film Series will provide.

Adam Arthur holds a graduate degree from Florida State University. He is the author of two poetry collections, Levers of Power and Sound and Substance.  A transplant to Pittsburgh, he has lived in the area for three years and takes inspiration from his surroundings in his written work.