I caught a screening recently of Lovestruck: Wrestling’s No. 1 Fan, a new doco from Megan Spencer (filmmaker, film critic, and recently Artistic Director of the Revelation film festival in Perth). It’s an observational documentary about Sue Chuter, an aptly named Melbourne wrestling fan. Her house is covered in photos of her heroes with plenty of shots among them of her posing with the stars, she always has her camera to her eye at matches, and she is uninhibited about talking of her life both to Spencer’s camera and her own video diary. Not only does Sue call up Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler on his birthday (she seems to have memorized the overseas number), later on, Lawler singles out her out before a Melbourne bout to pay tribute to her.

It’s a film about an obsession, but also about community and identity. There’s some suggestion of an inadequate family life; a first marriage with someone who didn’t share the devotion, an estranged daughter who returns to contact (for a while). It’s clear that being a wrestling fan is a big part of who Sue is, and that the fellowship of other fans and the stars themselves provides a more certain set of relationships.

It’s a film made on a low budget, funded by the energy and devotion of Megan Spencer herself, who spent ten years on it (the handmade exuberance is reflected in the film’s homepage being on MySpace rather than a slicker official website). It’s a film that’s ultimately enabled by the subject herself. Sue Chuter is willing to be honest for the camera and is so loquacious that Spencer’s observational approach is never just that: as filmmaker she doesn’t simply follow Sue silently, she maintains a running conversation with her for most of the film. There is a sequence where Spencer simply watches, though: it’s at the 21st party Sue’s organised for her returned daughter. It’s a bit sentimental (as all such events are) but it’s a real gesture of connection.

I don’t know what sort of TV release Lovestruck might get, but there’s a DVD release in October. Share the obsession.

We’re familiar with the images of TV sport: live events, highlights, interviews, panels, replays. But there remain spaces not often touched by the cameras, which, when we encounter them, show us how limited this saturation coverage actually is. Hell on Wheels (Höllentour, Pepe Danquart, 2004) is a great example of this, a documentary that spends time with the Deutsche Telekom team in their 2003 Tour de France battle. With this film I felt like I was more in the Tour in a way that the regular broadcasts didn’t convey. More recently, Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle (Zidane, a 21C Portrait, Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno, 2006) spent nearly its entire 90 minutes on Zinédine Zidane from multiple camera angles. He’s shot in close up and medium close up the entire time. We catch glimpses of team mates like Beckham, but they are mere texture here behind the intense, sweating, concentrating Zidane. His is one contribution among many to the game at hand, but in looking just at him there’s a real sense of his work and dexterity.

A shorter film on football, which I caught last night on SBS TV’s Shorts on Screen slot, is Michael Koch’s Wir Sind dir Treu (We’re Faithful to You, 2005). It’s about 9 minutes long and uses two cameras, pointed only at a stand of FC Basel supporters. They have a cheerleader, a conductor: a sweaty and energetic twentysomething guy with a megaphone who gets them to shout louder, to raise their arms together, to sit down only to spring up again rousingly, to chant and clap. What I found fascinating was the range and complexity of the cheering repertoire, the complete unity with which they did it, and also the interplay between the self-generated performance and the rhythms of the game they were watching. There was real sense of watching a ritual, seeing something that even being there among them you wouldn’t catch in the same way, unless you were operating one of those cameras.

(Images: Wir sind dir treu, Michael Koch, 2006)

At the end, the conductor puts on his jacket, rolls up his flag and heads off like everyone else. The platform he’s been standing on is picked up by four younger fans (acolytes?) and carried away. I’m not sure, I think Basel beat Zurich 3-2. I don’t know who scored or how. But what a game.