In an age of replays, one viewing enough

Oh happy day, curled up with a hitherto unread David Thomson film book.

Thomson’s How To Watch A Movie is characteristically sharp: the great man dissects not only how films are consumed - on Youtube, through your phone, all of that - but drills deeply into what it means to consume.

What exactly do you take in when you watch?

His lessons about movies have a resonance when it comes to watching sport also, and in particular for those of us who can remember a time when accessing full-scale coverage of games you weren’t at yourself wasn’t challenging as much as impossible.

Thomson talks about being able to see a film once, when it came out on its original release run - and then not seeing it for years, and therefore basing your opinions and theories about the actors and directors, the script and the camera angles, on a single viewing.

How similar is our experience of the sports events which preceded the all-seeing eye of the internet, or more accurately, social media? The incredible displays of days long past - in all sports - remain unstained by dry detail as a result.

So far so historical. But is there a deeper application? Many a sports fan is addicted to replaying games onscreen, breaking down moves, working out who played that ball where - and taking the time to try to sift out the hidden patterns.

Anyone with eyes to see can benefit from rerunning a game or event he or she saw in the flesh, because the attendant details - all of them - are never available in the moment. There’s a place for the data, the yards and tackles and percentages. Absolutely.

There’s a parallel place for the immediate impact, though. The event flash, the shock of realisation, the jolt of recognition: like a good film, a sports event can be reduced to a handful of images, a few conversation-starters, the spectators exchanging their partial truths after the fact - that first impression.

True, those impressions may be contaminated by your idées fixes about certain players, venues, officials, teams, even entire sports. You have your own morality when it comes to your sport of choice, beliefs you retain and refuse to abandon? Retain them. So what?

This last paragraph is best imagined in a Richard Roma accent from Glengarry Glen Ross for the full effect, which is probably inevitable given my recent reading matter.

What interested me in parallel was Thomson’s own ambiguity about revisiting movies. He cites the example of an illustrious predecessor, Pauline Kael, who claimed she wrote her searching examinations of movies based on a single viewing.

Her rationale, as explained by Thomson: “She said movies were and ought to be sensational, immediate and so compelling that one had to rely on the first viewing.”

Sensational, immediate and compelling are the kinds of qualities you’d love to see in any athletic contest.

True, you could say that discerning the meaning behind plot devices is different to establishing the reason for supremacy in the half-back line, but is it that different? You can contrast the granular examination of yards and angles with the electricity generated by a single catch: both are valid to this observer, and the objective data in the former don’t undercut the value in the latter - the dazzle of directly experiencing the event.

“One viewing is enough,” says Thomson, “If one is all you get.” True.

You may have said to yourself at any number of sports events that you’d love to be able to see a particular passage or play again, but isn’t that what makes you remember it all the more?