Many critics and cinephiles predictably lament the dearth of “quality” films in the American marketplace, instead hurling cheap insults at weekly big-budget garbage. Beyond the uncreative obviousness of this cheap, and often unfounded, complaint lies a more compelling argument – that some of the best cinematic art in our world is completely mainstream and available Saturday and Sunday, absolutely free.

There are a number of old, tired cliches about football. Something about pageantry, about pride, about passion: all these things clash on the gridiron, a word that’s very structure and sound suggests a grinding significance, an almost prison-like intensity. Yet football on TV becomes something delicate and poetic, like if Terrence Malick made a war film-

Of all the sports to watch on television, the football broadcasts have become the most sophisticated and complex. The NFL continues its reign as the most popular major sporting league, largely because baseball is too rigid and slow to be made into a dramatic episode. And soccer just sucks.

NFL Films, the outfit founded in 1962 by Ed Sabol (his son Steve is the company’s current president and spokesman of sorts; he always looked to me like he had just finished quarterbacking the Jets to a tight victory), has a lot to do with the development of football as an art film. NFL Films is, in and of itself, a pretty amazing company. Besides being film purists on par with Scorsese – no football game has ever been shot on video by NFL Films – they have an actual functioning “studio” in the old Hollywood sense, with a self-contained building that probably has a commissary and a roster of hilarious monkeys that don football helmets and run around causing problems.

But NFL Films is perhaps most famous for developing, and exploiting, the use of the slow-motion capabilities of 16mm film. A great catch is that much better in half-speed. A player spitting on the ground is somehow imbued with the utmost importance. Consider: A busted dive play at 72 frames per second contains 22 principal characters, each with a different motivation, a different drive, and a different personality. Covered from several angles and impeccably edited, it becomes a model of the most basic attraction of sports – watching people more talented than us kick ass. NFL Films was always interested in the on-field dynamics between the players and personnel, and as the pioneers of microphoning coaches and players, allowed for uncommonly personal access into the workings of these superhuman athletes.

But forget the technical workings of a game – a good game comes around about as often as a good movie, and it’s usually an emotional powerhouse on par with the best tearjerker. The sports world has its own term for this – “instant classic” – that was officially coined by ESPN Classic, a relatively recent and impossibly brilliant invention by those fun-loving maniacs in Bristol.

I saw an Instant Classic in person once – my lowly Missouri Tigers against the top-ranked Nebraska Cornhuskers, on Nov. 8, 1997. Thinking about the game makes me get too worked up to think clearly, kind of like the first time I saw An American Tail. In junior high, I wrote a poem – “The Ballad of November 8” – about the game that was published in a Missouri journal of student poetry. I’m not sure if that speaks more to my limited writing talents or the fact that the Show-Me State probably spent most of its poetic capital on Mark Twain and Langston Hughes.

Later that week, ESPN Classic broadcast the game again as an Instant Classic, complete and uncut – a director’s cut, if you will. It was magnificent. I was glued to the screen for four hours, watching a terrible, predetermined outcome I’d seen in person.

Football broadcasts weave obvious storylines -the transfer player, the coach who was spurned by another program only to have future success, the cocky future NFLer – but intricate ones form within the chaos of the game. Watch the coach yell into his headset, see the offensive coordinator shielded behind a Plexiglas window. The tackle who commits his second false start penalty saunters to the huddle to be lambasted by his teammates. The power of these moments cannot be understated.

And don’t even get me started on that story about Charlie Weis and Montana Mazurkiewicz.

A football game is TV made real – life happening as cinematic event. It’s impeccably documented and given stylistic elements that make it more than simply life filmed. A football game is a perfect world unto itself for four hours on leafy autumn afternoons, an experience somehow enhanced by slow-motion replays of huge men slamming into one another.4

Communication senior Kyle Smith is the PLAY film columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]