Les rendez-vous de l’été

Sport is perhaps cinema’s greatest lost subject. More and more, television took over, live broadcasts became the images and sound that mattered, often looking these days like clumsy imitations of blockbuster aesthetics that turn athletes into actors, teams into troupes. Television made sports ephemeral when once in cinema it felt eternal – offering lessons about space and grace.

For instance here, in these scenes from a summer of training and competition, of preparations and remembrances, of each athlete’s inviolable solitude and the unique communion between them and the spectators in the stadium. Only in sport can people be friends and rivals, and if they’re decent human beings, the rival will never betray the friend.

Jacques Ertaud, one of French cinema’s unsung geniuses, composed in tandem with Raymond Zumstein an anthropological paean to track and field as a shining example of human nobility – society at its best and brightest.