Parallel World Cups

View Refait here

"Refait" is the title of a film about the last 15 minutes of the World cup match between France and Germany, in Seville, Spain 1982. The short film is shot by Pied La Biche in Villeurbanne in France, and he reconstructed players, positions, gestures, intensity, drama, etc. The film shifts the traditional game into the urban environment. Each sequence takes place in one or several locations. The city becomes a laboratory for experiments; context, storyboard, shifts, repetition.

The soundtrack is made up of the original commentaries mixed with interviews of the audience recorded during the shooting.

The idea is simple but the effect of the film is quite amazing. The aspects that I find interesting in the film are the many locations used in one scene or sequence. Spatially it becomes very effective in the way that a game, originally played in a very defined square, is unfolded into the whole city. You see it sometimes in the film where a player is preparing to kick the ball and runs towards it in an open parking lot, when the scene suddenly changes location to a bridge over a motorway where the player stops abruptly. In the original game the player stopped because he kicked the ball towards the goal.

Other aspects are the gestures and mimics. You don't have any idea of what the players are talking with each other about in the original game, because the game was filmed from a certain distance. In “Refait” the players must have focused on reconstructing the gestures and the mimics of the original players instead of what they said to each other. That aspect is also an interesting technique which could be used more as another acting technique: The separation of sounds and visuals, text and gestures.

Finally the way “Refait is constructed by portraying exactly the same positions of the players, but with two different motivations and focuses, is spot on.
In that way the repetition aspect becomes an important device. The new players are emptied of meaning and reasons and only choreography the movements of the players by means of the techniques of the camera, and in that way a new game is created.