Synopsis
Beginning in the late 19th century, the history of baseball tells the story of the transformation of pastures and mindsets in North America. Slow and repetitive, the game makes ample room for daydreaming and boasting. Full-bodied and mannered, it evokes the vastness of a new continent while also recalling its British origins. Filmed at the Victoria Stadium in Quebec and developed with the collaboration of sports columnist Jean Dion, Idle Times wanders in order to better examine the state of baseball in French-speaking America—its particularities, rules, and rituals.
A word from Tënk
Idle Times is a quasi-philosophical and political reflection on Time through the customs, rules, and jurisprudence of baseball. Beneath the guise of a detached and half-mocking tone¹ in its voiceover, the film displays a keen focus on capturing the ceremonial nature of this magnificent game with its seemingly contradictory demands. It unfolds with a sort of laid-back alertness, where "nothing appears to be happening, yet something is always on the verge of happening." A "team sport played one-on-one," where the pitcher simultaneously embodies both the musician and the conductor, facing a "defensive attacker."
Throughout the film, considerations of "being" and "appearances" (in its own words) are front and center, guiding us through the formal sophistications and theoretical abstractions of the sport. Meanwhile, on screen, the players scratch themselves and "spit on the grass," releasing slow, heavy spits that convey neither insult, contempt, nor ingratitude, but rather serve as a punctuation—both sacred (like a sort of inverted baptism) and somatic triviality. In baseball, even the phlegm that regularly escapes the players' mouths in a semi-conscious, bovine-like gesture, has its own rhythm and function (different from the nervous, jerky, out-of-breath spitting in hockey, for example).
Amid this "liquid liturgy," through the half-thug, half-monastic poses of the players and referees, there is the slow marination of time that is the game itself, composed of long stretches of dilation interrupted by sudden breaks, restarts, recaps, and moments of suspended and rediscovered time. Somewhere above the field, the organized chaos is recorded by the "scorer," an isolated statistician or scribe perched on his satellite platform, meticulously archiving the narrative and poetry of each game in their mathematical expression. The whole creates a sort of collective microcosm in weightlessness within the universe, teetering on the abyssal possibility of a "never-ending game" (particularly the "foul balls," which suspend the elimination of both pitcher and batter and, in principle, could make the game last forever "if both sides held their ground"), where the absurdity of the condition is eternally staged and replayed through the scrupulous application of its ritual precepts.
With the placid tone of its narration, its beautiful 16 mm images brimming with the atmosphere of summer and the suspended humidity of freshly cut lawns—whose scent one imagines mixed with the whiffs of $3.50 poutines—the film stands proudly in the tradition of Gilles Groulx's Such a Simple Game and the finest sports documentaries.
Simon Galiero
Director, screenwriter and editor
of the documentary journal Communs.site
1. Perhaps this mirrors the overall work of David Nadeau-Bernatchez, with its multiple registers, double meanings, and unexpected twists that the curious would do well to explore whenever such rare opportunities arise.
