“Katharina Bonzel eloquently explores the complex intersections that exist between national identity and class, ethnicity, and gender in sports films. Her historically nuanced readings trace the complex ways in which sports films have sought to generate a sense of emotional authenticity that promotes audience engagement with their visions of the nation. . . . [This is] a valuable intervention both in film theory and in ongoing debates about national identity.”-Nicholas Chare, author of Sportswomen in Cinema

“Analyzing more than a dozen well-known films from the U.S., UK, and-importantly and unusually-Germany, Bonzel demonstrates how and why our sense of belonging to (or marginalization within) a nation morphs over time. This book is for anyone interested in national myths, dreams, anxieties, and nightmares, as conveyed through sports films. A welcome study of a burgeoning and influential film genre!”-Chris Holmlund, professor emerita of cinema studies, women/gender/sexuality studies, and French at the University of Tennessee

Sports have long fascinated filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond, from Bend It Like Beckham to Chariots of Fire to Rocky. Though sports films are diverse in their approach, style, and storytelling modes, National Pastimes discloses the common emotional and visual cues that belie each sports film’s underlying nationalistic impulses. Katharina Bonzel unravels the delicate matrix of national identity, sports, and emotion through the lens of popular sports films in comparative national contexts, demonstrating in the process how popular culture provides a powerful vehicle for the development and maintenance of identities of place across a range of national cinemas.

As films reflect the ways in which myths of nation and national belonging change over time, they are implicated in important historical moments, from Cold War America to the class dynamics of 1980s Thatcherite Britain to the fragmented sense of nation in post-unification Germany. Bonzel shows how sports films provide a means for renegotiating the boundaries of national identity in an accessible, engaging form. National Pastimes opens up new ways of understanding how films appeal to the emotions, using myth-like constructions of the past to cultivate spectators’ engagement with historical events.