Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema

Dan Streible's book is a landmark publication, not just on early American cinema but on film theory and cultural history in general, and one can only regret that it has been published only now. There has been indeed a time span of some two decades between the author's dissertation and the publication of this book, which of course had become much more than the initial research. This unusual delay is due to various reasons: first the honesty and the scholarly drive of the author, who did not stop adding new material and new insights to his corpus and his thinking; second the reluctance of the publishing establishment to open the field of 'primitive cinema studies' to the subgenre of the fight film; finally the very material difficulty of unearthing and accessing the films themselves that Streible defines as being part of an 'orphan' genre, i.e. a genre whose material survival in official archives is problematic, given the many prejudices that lead to rapid oblivion and careless conservation (specialists of culturally comparable genres such as the photonovel will understand perfectly what it means to study this type of cultural production).

Yet now that Streible's book is here, our vision of the early cinema will never be the same again. Of course, Streible does not claim that these fight films -which include, roughly speaking, actual recordings, re-enactments, documentaries, and various types of fakes- question the aesthetics of what we have learnt on early cinema, which was not a narrative cinema but a cinema of attractions and whose treatment of time and space was quite different from what the narrative normalization and streamlining of Hollywood cinema have imposed as its 'universal' norm ('continuity editing'). From an aesthetic point of view, these films were rather poor. Nevertheless, from a cultural-historical perspective, the very existence and the many faces of the fighting films represent so crucial a contribution to our knowledge of the past that it is difficult to grasp the almost systematic omission of the genre even in the period in which film theory has been moving from the exclusive study of narrative cinema to the new fields of early cinema and, more recently, reception studies.

Streible rightfully underlines that there is more than just a family resemblance between the emergent medium of cinema and the (then illegal) practice of prize fighting. Both cinema and prize fighting 'made' each other, and if this mutual reinforcement is clear in the case of boxing, which has become a (legalized) mass cultural phenomenon thanks to the fight film, welcomed by women as well as by non working class audiences, the benefits for the film industry have been no less important. From a technical point of view, prize fighting, which did not yet obey the rules and protocols that characterize modern boxing (the use of gloves, the restriction to fifteen 3 minutes rounds, the clear distinction of weight categories, etc), was a perfect object to record on film tape, since it "could be structured around the kinetoscope's formal constraints" (p. 30). It was possible to create a coincidence between the length of the first moving pictures (more or less one minute) and the length of a prize fight round (which could be manipulated in order to have a cliff-hanger at the end of each film strip or a final knock out at the precise end of the last film strip), but also between the division of a film in separate units and the exhibition formula of the peephole slot cinema (before the era of the collective film projection, films were seen by individual spectators who had to pay for each unit shown in machines juxtaposed in bars, lobbies, arcades, and so on). Yet fight films did play also a crucial role in the later evolution of cinema, from the first peephole attractions to the standard of the feature film that emerged during the nickelodeon era. The very first feature film, with a duration of approximately one hour and a half, was a prize fight film, appeared already before the turn of the 20 th century, i.e. much earlier than the period in which film historians tend to situate the gradual transformation of single-reel in multi-reel stories. Moreover, and this is course key in the very survival and development of film, fight pictures proved to be extremely profitable in box-office terms. Without the genre of the prizefight film, the rapid industrialization of cinema would not have been possible. Streible documents the history of the many exchanges between cinema and prize fighting in an exemplary way. The material gathered in the book is breath taking, yet never presented in a purely quantitative or descriptive way. The author demonstrates very convincingly that we can now add a totally new perspective on the history of early cinema -and of the history of cinema tout court, for Streible studies also the role and the position of the genre in the later silent era and in the subsequent periods in which the monopoly of film in the transmission of prize fights was challenged by newer media as radio and television.

Yet the ambitions of Streible's book go beyond the sole question of relationships between the film industry on the hand and one of its genres on the other hand. An exceptionally gifted representative of social and cultural history, the author (re)constructs the context in which these interactions took place. Issues such as the (il)legal status of prize fighting and, most crucially, race, complete very usefully the internal analysis of the film industry and one of its favourite genres. Concerning race, for instance, Fight Pictures scrutinizes the influence of the colour line at all levels: the boxing ring itself (the first heavy-weight world champions refused for many years to fight coloured boxers and after the triumph of the first African-American champion, Jack Johnson, there has been a 'white hope' movement to find a successful white challenger), the theatre and all that happened within and outside its walls (the projection of fight-films with interracial boxers produced many accidents and riots), the legal position of the fight films (in order to reduce the social impact of the Jack Johnson films, the US authorities introduced a ban on the interstate transportation of fight films, which killed the genre, for there could be no return on investment without the national box-office), the internal structure of the movie industry, which had to fight illegal copies, bootlegging, and all kinds of fakes . Many prizefight films could not be filmed in a commercially satisfying way, either for filmic or for boxing reasons. In the beginning, it was very difficult to film indoor fights, and outdoor fights could only be recorded in atmospherically perfect conditions; and the nightmare of all those who invested in the very expensive recording of prize fights was to see one of the boxers knocked out after one round, for the public was expecting 'long' films -hence the permanent suspicion on 'fixed fights'; hence also the flourishing of re-enactments -often by the boxers themselves! - who remade the fight one or two days later, but in such a way that the fight obeyed more closely the already mentioned 'constraints' of the film industry; hence also the success of fakes, which curiously enough the public did not reject at all (prize fight films should become a case study in all reflections on the blurred boundaries between documentary and fiction).

In short: a great and important book, and an essential contribution to a better knowledge of early cinema and the social and cultural life of progressive era America.