Goal setting

The year's most impressive artistic festival subsumes multiple genres: drama, performance art, improvisatory dance, even reality TV. Currently taking place in Germany, it is, of course, the World Cup.

Those who can't get their fill watching ESPN2, Univision, and ABC might want to consider the (rather uneven) tradition of soccer on page and screen.

The soccer fan's bible is Nick Hornby's ``Fever Pitch." (Yes, through the miracle of Hollywood transformation it inspired last year's Red Sox movie.) But the foremost author with a soccer lineage is no less a figure than Vladimir Nabokov , who has a soccer match figure in his novel ``Glory ," and a soccer ball in his novel ``Pnin. " Nabokov came by his soccer the hard way: As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he played goalie for his Trinity College team.

``I was crazy about goal keeping," he wrote in his memoirs, ``Speak, Memory. " The goalie, he declared, ``is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender." He is also an ideal existential symbol, a fact Peter Handke exploited in his novel ``The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick ," which Wim Wenders made into a film.

It's the movies where futbol has flourished. Soccer meets martial arts in ``Shaolin Soccer" (below). Soccer meets Rodney Dangerfield (coaching a girls team!) in ``Ladybugs. " Soccer meets Mike Ditka in ``Kicking and Screaming. " Also in ``Kicking and Screaming" is Robert Duvall , who plays a Scottish soccer coach in ``A Shot at Glory ."

There's a mini-genre of straight-to-video soccer movies for kids: ``The Big Green "; ``Air Bud: World Pup "; ``Soccer Dog" and its sequel, ``Soccer Dog: European Cup. " There's a soccer movie about the legendary match where an amateur US team upset the English national team in 1950, ``The Game of Their Lives ." And in ``When Saturday Comes, " Sean Bean gets ready for ``The Fellowship of the King " with some fellowship of the pitch.

The best-known soccer movie is surely ``Bend It Like Beckham " (left), starring a pre-``Pirates of the Caribbean" Keira Knightley and pre-``ER" Parminder Nagra . But the best has to be Bill Forsyth's charming adolescent romance ``Gregory's Girl. " In a Group of Death unto itself is ``Victory ." It's about a group of Allied prisoners of war plotting an escape from the Nazis via a game against the German national team in occupied Paris. If that doesn't sound implausible enough, consider that John Huston directed and the stars are Sylvester Stallone , Michael Caine, and Pele . One guess who the best player is.

MARK FEENEY