Winning Time and Losing Frames

Clashing Formats in the Post-Archive

Abstract

Marked by warring aspect ratios, resolutions, and frame rates, HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023) chronicles the L.A. Lakers basketball team in the 1980s. Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht’s series proves from the outset that much more than nostalgia is at stake in their television series, interrupting the opening by dissolving it into digital and analog static. Framed by technologic white noise, the opening sequence proposes it is not the Lakers, but the underlying clashes of film formats that lie at the show’s core. Grappling with the multitrack possibilities in film, it is in fluctuating image frames that the seam between visual technologies is articulated. While the inconstancy of the frame highlights the image’s ability to masquerade as historical footage, it also pulls focus away from the narrative and towards the material level of the show. The waning significance of the frame in the digital age, as discussed by Vivian Sobchack, thus enacts the flexibility and interactivity common in screens today, while also highlighting that the very material gap between the image and its border that refuses to align with digital cinema practices.