Seventeen ways to keep your eye on the ball

A new film, made by artists, follows French midfielder Zinedine Zidane through the course of a match. So what does it tell us about the player , asks Richard Williams.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there are many great films about football. The best of them, the occasionally indistinct black and white telecast of the 1960 European Cup final between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt, is a straightforward record of a complete match, from the first blast of the referee's whistle to the last, minus only a few minutes lost to a brief malfunction of the relatively primitive equipment available to the BBC at the time. There are no close-ups, no replays, no slow motion, yet in its absolute purity it remains a kind of sacred document, a permanent reminder of the artistry of which the game is capable, on full display in a match that ended in victory to the Spanish club by seven goals to three in front of 135,000 enthralled spectators packed into Hampden Park, Glasgow.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, made by the video artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, also captures the span of a single game (and one of the teams involved happens to be Real Madrid), but it attempts to capture that same artistry, and to achieve that purity of gaze, by very different means. This is the age of the superstar, and the aim of Gordon and Parreno was to follow Zinedine Zidane, the great French midfield player, through the entire 90 minutes of a match, in the process telling a more intimate kind of football story.

Their choice of match was incidental; their choice of player was not. Unlike many of his peers, Zidane speaks softly and lives a quiet life. Deeds rather than words made him a symbol of modern multicultural France. During the 1998 World Cup his image appeared on the side of 20-storey buildings, but his privacy was never invaded. His wealth is not flaunted, and no off-the-field scandal has diminished or distorted his reputation. This enigmatic figure would appear to be the perfect subject for the kind of visual inquiry proposed by Gordon and Parreno, which involved setting up 17 cameras - including a couple of high-definition jobs developed for the US army, whose use outside America for the first time required clearance from the Pentagon - to follow him throughout the course of a match.

SOME FOOTBALLERS MIGHT not have understood the directors' intentions. This one, however, seemed to get the point. When he was a boy, he told them, he had watched Olympique Marseille from the terraces, spending every match with his eyes locked unwaveringly on his personal hero, the Uruguayan forward Enzo Francescoli. With Zidane, there was no possibility that the film would become a vanity project.

Having secured his agreement, and organised their equipment and crew, the film-makers settled on a perfectly ordinary fixture in the Spanish league on April 23, 2005, when the Frenchman and his Madrid team-mates entertained Villarreal in the vast Estadio Santiago Bernabeu.

Any conventional film about Zidane would include the astonishing 20-yard volley that won Real the European Cup final on its return to Hampden in 2003, plus the two he scored with his head in the 1998 World Cup final. It would examine, through the use of super-slo-mo, the technical tricks that were particular to him, such as the roulette, in which he deceived a defender by turning his body through 360 degrees, dragging the ball forward with the sole of his boot while in mid-pirouette, facing the way he had come. It would analyse the gift of balance that enabled this heavy-set man to move with such lightness and grace. It would investigate his childhood among north African immigrants in a poor quarter of Marseille; it would catalogue the transfers that took him from Cannes to Bordeaux as a teenager, then to Juventus of Turin and finally to Madrid.

This new film does none of these things. Instead it attempts to persuade us that by dispensing with the priorities of the traditional documentary, it is seeking other, perhaps deeper truths. Having read much about it, however, what struck me was a relative absence of the kind of ascetic rigour I had been led to anticipate. Despite its indifference to the narrative of the actual match, this turns out to be a busy film, fully exploiting the variety offered by the 17 available points of view.

SOMETIMES WE SEE just Zidane's head, or his torso, or - often - his feet alone, as he jabs the toe of his right boot into the turf, a reflexive gesture like a trumpeter emptying his spit-valve between phrases. We see him from above, and from ground level; close enough to examine every bead of his profuse perspiration and every gobbet of spit, or from a distance, as a member of a corps de ballet in which others (David Beckham, Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos) are occasionally identifiable. His abrupt cries - "He!" "Va!" "Aiee!" - are embedded in and sometimes isolated against a wonderful sound design, featuring an atmospheric score by the Scottish band Mogwai.

THE EDITING IS restless, shuffling between the angles and wilfully confusing rather than clarifying individual passages of play in the cause of setting up internal rhythms that are entirely alien to the characteristics of a conventional Sky Sports live transmission, such as the widescreen format.

If this was intended to intensify the impact of Zidane's impassivity, it works. Virtually devoid of context, the economy of his movement and the sheer absence of fuss as he goes about his work are strikingly apparent, rendering the delicacy of his footwork even more moving as he tempts a defender towards him before swaying away and, with infinite gentleness, sending over the cross from which Ronaldo heads Madrid's equalising goal.

In that moment of shared triumph, he shows no emotion. Nor is he visibly moved when a team-mate scores the winner. Some time around the 80th minute, however, Roberto Carlos says something that amuses him and that imposing granite visage splits into a glorious smile that takes a long time to fade, even after the action has resumed. But then the eyes darken again, retreating into the vast twin pools of blackness beneath his brows, and within a couple of minutes he is involved in a brawl - we don't see the cause - from which Beckham tries to extract him but for which he is sent off, disappearing down the tunnel in a final shot of terrible and splendid isolation.

As the world knows, just over a year later Zidane made a remarkably similar exit from a much more significant match. Barely 10 minutes from the end of the World Cup final, and from the scheduled end of his great career, he was expelled from Berlin's Olympic stadium after butting an opponent who had deliberately provoked him by insulting his sister. France went on to lose that match, but Zidane's popularity among his compatriots, always great, simply took off. And if their film tell us nothing about football, at least Gordon and Parreno give us a compelling study of the stillness that erupted into an historic crime passionel.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait will open at the IFI on Friday, Sept 29