Winning Culture

How can we push our limits? What do we need to sacrifice if we want to be the best? Does sport divide us, or bring us together? The answers to these questions reflect core aspects of human existence: the desire for self-improvement, recognition and achievement, as well as community, fulfilment and meaning.

Film and motion are closely intertwined. Sport has been a subject of interest for documenting cameras for over a century, and Muybridge’s studies of the movement of athletes contributed to the inception of moving pictures. Since then, sport has become a global industry, TV entertainment, as well as a common leisure activity, which hordes of enthusiasts indulge in every weekend. In this section, we will explore athletic performance and victory as a pervasive social ethos. We will try to show that sport is not just about exceptional individual achievements, but also a manifestation of collective effort and national identity. The selected films will look at sport from the perspective of many scientific disciplines – from mathematics, biology and neuroscience to sociology and the role of technological progress and knowledge about the trained human body.

Šimon Kulík, Zdeněk Rychtera