Valery's Ankle Essay

Caryn Rothbort
Valery’s Ankle
11/5/07

Hockey to many is a sport of passion and pride, while others who do not understand the entertainment and gratification see it as a form of legal violence unfit for recreational watching. Brett Kashmere uses the popular art form of documentary to express his audacious feelings towards the disintegration of the meaningful sport of hockey to an extreme violent one due to its tendencies. In his film Valery’s Ankle, he focuses on the idea that hockey has transformed to such a degree that is an endangerment to its players and a defamation of the game and the countries, such as Canada, which it represents. Documentaries are not the most desirable medium for understanding an aspect of a problem because of their bias view points. Kashmere is no stranger to this.

Valery’s Ankle focuses on the detriment of violence to the sport and the barbaric tendencies promoted by players, fan, and coaches. He bases his thesis around the 1972 hockey series between Canada and the Soviet Union. Canada, picked as the underdogs, as a desperate attempt to be victorious had one of their star players Bobby Clarke attack the Soviet’s Valery Kharlamov. From behind, Clarke slashed the ankle of Kharlamov injuring him so severely that it takes him out of the series and contributes an immeasurable amount to the accomplishment of Canada. He continues by showing some of professional hockey’s most brutal hits and explaining that violence has fixed itself as a central part to the game.

Hockey is an increasingly violent sport where each year more and more players receive life altering strikes. The sport is known for its violence and excitement of inducing fights as a fixed part of the game. Players are at times not idolized for their skill or role model features, but rather for their ability to initiate, react, and withstand a fight on the ice. In the book, Men at Play: A Working Understanding of Professional Hockey the author Michael Robidoux says “In the case of professional hockey, it is apparent that the heroic values placed upon players are largely superficial, and that the hockey player’s ability to physically dominate an opponent has little currency outside the sporting arena.” (Robidoux). Kashmere is angered by concepts like this. Hockey’s violence is accepted and isolated to the arena but Kashmere sees it as a form of brutality that needs to be viewed and handled just as social violence is. He says “…violence only begets more violence. I think that sports violence should be considered in the same terms, and prosecuted the same way, as social violence.”(Kashmere). By holding hockey players on pedestals for the sole purpose of their ability to fight and contribute a violent excitement to the game is like holding street fighters and gangs on the same type of level. Sport violence should be no more acceptable than social violence.

The art form that Brett Kashmere used as his medium is documentary. Documentaries are not always the most effective way to communicate one’s message because of the stigma of portraying bias that they inevitably depict. A documentary shows one side to an issue. It gives off the film maker’s point of view and forces people to look at an issue in a new light. This allows people to shed their ignorance and open them to a new point of view is they have a pervious notion on a topic, but if a person is undecided or unexposed to the issue will be persuaded to the film maker’s point of view. Documentaries take a subjective role in social aspects of life. “If the fundamental principle of conservative politics is to maintain order for the sake of economy, to complement the needs and desires of the economic elite, and to discourage social heterogeneity, then the documentary, as it now stands, is complicit in participating in that order...” (Critical Art Ensemble)

Although simply giving his point of view on the topic, Kashmere’s documentary acts as a blue guide to people’s views on hockey. In his essay the Blue Guide, Roland Barthes says “Generally speaking, the Blue Guide testifies to the futility of all analytical description, those which reject both explanations and phenomenology: it answers in fact none of the questions which a modern traveler can ask himself while crossing a countryside which is real and which exists in real time.” By this he means that people are unreasonably directed towards certain, more popular sites than the more valuable ones. He uses the example of the Roman churches and the Muslim mosques in Italy. The mosques are just as, if not more beautiful than the churches but because of the emphasis put on these attractions to tourists whether they are more beautiful or not. Kashmere’s essay acts in this way as well. Valery’s ankle acts as a Blue Guide for people’s views on hockey’s violence. By subjecting the audience strictly to major and severe hits, Kashmere leaves out all other aspects of hockey including the actual game. Rather, he guides people toward his opinions on the negatives of the sport and does not focus on other, more prominent figures. He makes it seem as though violence is the foremost aspect of the game just as the Blue Guide makes the Catholic Churches seem as the foremost aspect of Italy. Neither gives a fair representation of the idea it is trying to convey to its viewers or visitors.

No matter the violence it envelops, hockey is Canada’s national sport and their identifiable pride. Just as the all-American sport is baseball and countries around the worl recognize it with the United States, hockey is as unifying a feature of Canadian society if not more important. Canada even employed its professional hockey players as pawns to represent and promote the image of Canada around the world. In 1987, Joe Clark, Canada’s external affairs commissioner and Otto Jelinek, amateur sports minister sent players abroad to promote the nation’s image and it was “the first time that the Department of External Affairs had committed itself to the notion that sport could play a positive role in meeting the country’s diplomatic goals.” (Macintosh and Hames). As Kashmere says in Valery’s ankle, children grow up playing hockey, it becomes imbedded in a child since birth. The boys play hockey and the girls support it, there’s no way around growing up and involving hockey into one’s life in Canada. Violence is able to enter the game by toughening players and giving them the ability to play hard and get into fights while playing.

Violence, even though not an aspect of the game, it is a huge fan focal point and does encompass a great deal of the atmosphere of hockey. The game was not based around nor intended for violence to be an attraction for fans, it has developed into such a key factor into the game. Players are conditions to be tough to withstand the beating they receive. The joke is that a hockey player has no teeth because they are too often knocked out in games. They have experienced injuries from broken bones, to missing teeth, to gashes on the face and head, to concussions, to being paralyzed. But violence is not a necessary aspect of the sport. A great example of this is the National Hockey League and Canada’s own Wayne Gretzky. Known to hockey fans and people around the world as “the Great One”, Gretzky never fought in his career of twenty years of NHL hockey. (Turkington). Still, he was exciting to watch and because of his remarkable skill drew a great number of fans and viewer ship. He did not have to stoop to the level of violence is prevalent in the obtaining of fans and using cheap tricks to be entertaining. Rather, Gretzky followed what the game entailed and was established on the grounds of to raise his status, pure skill.

Violence in hockey is not the only aspect that is necessary for the game, although it is important to the overall experience of the game. Brett Kashmere’s documentary does not show violence integrated into the sport, rather he shows it as a solely negative aspect. It is clear from examples of players like Wayne Gretzky that violence is not needed for the sport to prevail or be exciting, but fighting has become a predominant feature nonetheless. Kashmere is able to show his views on this aggression in hockey and its reflection on Canadian culture and reputation through his documentary, but the form of art he chose is not the most respected. Documentaries are notorious for exerting a bias viewpoint on a subject and sometimes even distorting facts or using them out of context to fit the artist’s needs.