Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (review)

Dan Streible's Fight Pictures examines the conditions of production and reception surrounding early boxing films, and their impact on the social institutions of early cinema. Fight Pictures squares an established critical conversation about early film with a more nascent one about the sport of boxing, arguing that the episodic, spectacular nature of boxing lent themselves to the form. Scholars such as Tom Gunning have already shown that early cinema privileged spectacle over narrative, and observation over technical manipulation. A kind of so called "orphan film genre" because undesired by film archivists for years, fight films were an integral, Streible argues the integral, force behind the development and popularization of early cinema and flmic techniques. Fight Pictures shows how at the turn of the 20^th century, the distinction between prizefighting and early cinema was productively fuzzy, both being firmly entrenched in an urban, male milieu which Streible terms the "sporting and theatrical world." Periodicals such as The National Police Gazette and The New York Clipper covered both sporting and theatrical societies, and Harry Hill's concert saloon and similar establishments in New York provided a de facto meeting ground on which luminaries of the sporting and theatrical worlds intermingled. In doing so, Streible restores not only an essential piece of film history with Fight Pictures, but speaks as well to an emerging conversation about the cultural capital of boxing in modernity by scholars such as Kasia Boddy and David Scott.

Beyond the historical dialectic between prizefighting and cinema, Streible shows how the formal features of early film were both conducive to and developed by their overlap with boxing circles. Since early film struggled with the problem of developing reels that could record longer stretches of time, boxing's discreet three minute rounds with breaks in between lent itself to the medium's ability to record short events. Profits from fight pictures, moreover, could be maximized by selling the fight per round. Likewise, filmic representations of boxing were integral in the sport's increasing popularity and legitimation during the early 20^th century, providing a "mediating institution. Spectators could see fights without entering the dubious cultural milieu of the ring. Movie shows gave access to a wider general audience of men who could not afford to attend the big bouts sponsored by clubs" (7). Fight Pictures is at its best in these moments of Janus-faced insight: illuminating the ways in which the formal mediations of film and boxing technology (for what is boxing if not the formal mediation of violence?) were brought to bear on one other's historical development. At times, the electricity of this stitch between the formal aesthetics of each spectacle warranted more reflection than it receives in this book. But Streible has provided an impregnable materialist case for further scholarship on the questions of film's formal affinities with other kinds of popular spectacle, and boxing's way of informing the arts.

To the extent that Fight Films attempts to explore a thematic in the fight film genre—its focus is more decidedly socio-historical—it might be said to be the legacy of boxing's pivoting of early film from displays of technology to displays of content. Streible argues that the Corbett-Fizsimmons Fight (1897) by Veriscope was the first film designed to showcase subject matter rather than machinery. Later in the book, Streible explains in impeccable detail how the fight film genre, as it became more popular, included a high number of "prizefight reenactments," produced primarily by Siegmund Lubin. "If we rehistoricize the faked prizefight film as a hybrid of early cinema," Streible argues, "the role of 'reproductions' becomes clearer. Reenactments of topical events were tolerated, at times welcomed, because there was no expectation of actuality footage" (163). The case, clearly, is made for the ways that prizefight reenactments open up onto early cinema's reflection of a filmic ethos which challenges taut distinctions between authentic and fake, presentation and representation. But Streible...