NFL Films and the Art of Selling Football

Abstract

National Football League (NFL) subsidiary film production company NFL Films has documented every NFL game since 1964. The company's formally distinctive made-for-television documentary films have built a consistent and durable mythology that represents NFL football as heroic, dramatic, and beautiful. Beyond creating, maintaining, and circulating a celebratory image for the league, NFL Films employs various textual and marketing strategies to cast its productions as artworks that are more refined than typical sports television, engage consecrated aesthetic traditions, reflect their producers' inspired creative visions, and are unmotivated by commercial interests-qualities that critical and audience discourses surrounding the company often reinforce. This article examines how NFL Films' aesthetic posturing builds distinction for the subsidiary film production company within the stereotypically lowbrow context of sports television. Moreover, it considers how NFL Films' attempts to situate itself as a site that produces art work to amplify the NFL's economic and cultural value. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.