Ping-pong at the cinema: humor, love and more
Résumé
cinematic studies support that the fiction film, though distorted by a socially constructed point of view, can be used to extract the salient elements circulating in the collective imaginary. if analyses on sports movies have been prolific these last years, ping-pong has often been left out, considered in collective representations as a pleasant form of entertainment rather than a real sport. Based on a representative sample of twenty nine international films in which the ping-pong ball plays a key narrative role, this article aims to go beyond the common interpretation of ping-pong which is based on its asian background and comical nature, and to establish a more comprehensive cinematic cartography. We conclude that directors interested in social values often take ping-pong as a suggestive metaphor to illustrate life, particularly love in all its forms, humanity in relation to history, education and cultural diversity.