In 2006 Universal Studios released Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait by visual artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno. The film uses seventeen movie cameras to capture an intimate portrait of the iconic Real Madrid footballer Zinédine Zidane as he performs his part in the drama of a match with Villarreal. Rather than set aside their art practice in favour of cinematic conventions, as other artists embarking on cinematic projects have done (e.g. Julian Schnabel, Steve McQueen), these artists’ incursion into the cinematic in fact draws heavily on an art sensibility, which has been the cause of much critical consternation.

This paper proposes to tease out the problems encountered when attempting to frame Zidane within media and generic categories as well as mapping the polarised reactions of critics and audience. It also suggests that a focus on the film’s generic slipperiness sits uncomfortably with its designation as portrait; a designation announced by its subtitle. Far from being an aberrant cinematic object, judged solely by its failure to adhere to cinematic conventions, this paper argues that Zidane has great resonance with the durational film portraiture of Andy Warhol and is more productively considered from within an expanding concept of the portrait. It is a modern portrait, one that celebrates and is situated within popular culture while simultaneously updating art historical representations of heroic masculinity. Art critic Michael Fried appropriately positions it at the interstice between the “representation of absorption and the apparent consciousness of being beheld,” which acknowledges one advancement of this most ancient of genres in its fusion of traditionally differentiated approaches to portraiture.