The 1958 World Cup was something of a watershed for global football, being the moment when a team finally managed to win the championship outside of their own continent. Brazil changed football at a stroke that summer, introducing a 4-2-4 formation that ripped the rigid WM-playing Europeans to shreds, and gave the world its first sight of Pele and Garrincha - icons whose legend still burns brightly more than 60 years later.
Recording this spectacle is Hinein!, the second official FIFA World Cup film in the idiosyncratic series reaching back to 1954. Made by UFA (the same West German production company that gave us "German Giants" in 1954) this film is significantly easier to watch than its predecessor, given that the footage this time is far more professionally shot, and while we still get the constant crowd cutaways to emphasise every single piece of action, you can at least follow what is going on this time.
The excellent quality of the footage alone marks Hinein! out as a great historical document, and by sticking to the football as much as possible this time, there is much to be said for the skill of the production team, given the limitations they were clearly working to in 1958.
The huge, glaring problem is the new sound mix however, in particular the overdubbed English narration track and "sound effects" added in 1991 when FIFA updated the original films for a globalised TV audience. The credits name Andrew Hellens and Dave Skilton as responsible for this atrocious work, and while I hope I am not doing them a terrible disservice if they had nothing to do with it, whoever was responsible for this needs hounding out of the industry.
While the new "music" is bad enough, the awful "jet engine" sound effects are the most invasive, ruinous things I have ever heard in a professional feature. I understand that by removing the original soundtrack any crowd noise would have been lost, but who could have possibly thought that monotonous, white noise louder than the narration (for the most part) was a good idea? American torturers at Guantanamo Bay could use this soundtrack to make any poor soul incarcerated there crack in fifteen minutes - it is astonishingly bad. I genuinely had to watch with the sound muted and the subtitles on.
If you can take the continuous hissing, Hinein! offers you several typically mad interludes, as all the official World Cup films strive their hardest to contain. First up we follow the inept Mexican team in some detail - I can only imagine that the German producers saw them as "exotic" in some way, because we see them energetically shaking hands with restless Swedes, and also "playing" the most disjointed tennis imaginable. It seems as if the editor had a certain amount of time left to fill, so some of the shots repeat here, especially a scene of two smoking Mexican footballers berating their useless team-mates from a balcony.
The vignette with the Brazilian team relaxing at their hotel is equally nuts - they are playing darts using an archery target a good five metres away, and first up is Didi, the elegant midfielder. His dart technique is to hurl the oversized arrows aggressively, like a crazed Viking, totally oblivious to the young children sitting on the grass next to him. Even worse is a seventeen-year old Pele, who shows off for the camera, flinging his sharpened weapons over his shoulder and up into the air without looking, or caring about where they are going! Being Pele of course, he does all of this with a charm that matches his outstanding ability.
Other "highlights" that only these films can bring us include a Swedish administrator who appears to have to put his hat on every time he answers the telephone, an advert for Gunnar Gren's autobiography, and some truly appalling goalkeeping, coupled with constant, terribly brutal challenges on them. It is no wonder that as soon as anyone like Harry Gregg or Lev Yashin rose above the general mediocrity they shone so brightly.
Hinein! means "to go inside", and this film does take us inside an event that very few people can now remember. It also can stand as a metaphor for what not to do when "updating" an old production for a new audience. "Don't Hinein! the movie George, when you are messing with the audio mix" could become a valid meaning after being subjected to this aberration.
Recording this spectacle is Hinein!, the second official FIFA World Cup film in the idiosyncratic series reaching back to 1954. Made by UFA (the same West German production company that gave us "German Giants" in 1954) this film is significantly easier to watch than its predecessor, given that the footage this time is far more professionally shot, and while we still get the constant crowd cutaways to emphasise every single piece of action, you can at least follow what is going on this time.
The excellent quality of the footage alone marks Hinein! out as a great historical document, and by sticking to the football as much as possible this time, there is much to be said for the skill of the production team, given the limitations they were clearly working to in 1958.
The huge, glaring problem is the new sound mix however, in particular the overdubbed English narration track and "sound effects" added in 1991 when FIFA updated the original films for a globalised TV audience. The credits name Andrew Hellens and Dave Skilton as responsible for this atrocious work, and while I hope I am not doing them a terrible disservice if they had nothing to do with it, whoever was responsible for this needs hounding out of the industry.
While the new "music" is bad enough, the awful "jet engine" sound effects are the most invasive, ruinous things I have ever heard in a professional feature. I understand that by removing the original soundtrack any crowd noise would have been lost, but who could have possibly thought that monotonous, white noise louder than the narration (for the most part) was a good idea? American torturers at Guantanamo Bay could use this soundtrack to make any poor soul incarcerated there crack in fifteen minutes - it is astonishingly bad. I genuinely had to watch with the sound muted and the subtitles on.
If you can take the continuous hissing, Hinein! offers you several typically mad interludes, as all the official World Cup films strive their hardest to contain. First up we follow the inept Mexican team in some detail - I can only imagine that the German producers saw them as "exotic" in some way, because we see them energetically shaking hands with restless Swedes, and also "playing" the most disjointed tennis imaginable. It seems as if the editor had a certain amount of time left to fill, so some of the shots repeat here, especially a scene of two smoking Mexican footballers berating their useless team-mates from a balcony.
The vignette with the Brazilian team relaxing at their hotel is equally nuts - they are playing darts using an archery target a good five metres away, and first up is Didi, the elegant midfielder. His dart technique is to hurl the oversized arrows aggressively, like a crazed Viking, totally oblivious to the young children sitting on the grass next to him. Even worse is a seventeen-year old Pele, who shows off for the camera, flinging his sharpened weapons over his shoulder and up into the air without looking, or caring about where they are going! Being Pele of course, he does all of this with a charm that matches his outstanding ability.
Other "highlights" that only these films can bring us include a Swedish administrator who appears to have to put his hat on every time he answers the telephone, an advert for Gunnar Gren's autobiography, and some truly appalling goalkeeping, coupled with constant, terribly brutal challenges on them. It is no wonder that as soon as anyone like Harry Gregg or Lev Yashin rose above the general mediocrity they shone so brightly.
Hinein! means "to go inside", and this film does take us inside an event that very few people can now remember. It also can stand as a metaphor for what not to do when "updating" an old production for a new audience. "Don't Hinein! the movie George, when you are messing with the audio mix" could become a valid meaning after being subjected to this aberration.
