Fight Pictures (review)

Dan Streible achieved heroic status in the eyes of many film buffs and archivists when he launched his Orphan Film Symposium a decade ago. Because of his tireless efforts, preservationists, teachers, and film collectors joined together in a consciousness-raising event to embrace the areas of cinema that had been marginalized (or downright ignored) for years, ranging from home movies to educational and industrial films. The neglected stepchildren of history were moved to center stage.

Streible achieves a similar result in his long-awaited book Fight Pictures and in the process cements his reputation as a historian of the first order. As his mentor Charles Musser points out in a cogent Foreword, Streible first published a pioneering article on the subject of fight pictures twenty years ago. It served as the foundation for his subsequent dissertation, which he completed in 1994. It was always his intention to transform that paper into a book, but his attention was diverted by the enormous work that went into planning the Orphan Film events. Yet, as we all know, time can be an asset to any writer or scholar, allowing ideas to ferment and new information to surface. That fourteen-year gap was not time misspent.

In this impressive volume Streible explores film study, sports history, and social history all at once. That is no small feat, but having conducted prodigious research (going beyond film journals to include newspapers and periodicals of the day as well as various sports magazines and retrospective books), he is fully up to the task. One is left to wonder how earlier historians—not to mention film archivists—could have dismissed such a significant aspect of early cinema.

While conventional histories may credit Australia's The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) or possibly Italy's Dante's Inferno (1911) as the first feature-length film, that designation probably belongs to the Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight, produced in the United States in 1897 and running 100 minutes. (In my experience it's best never to call anything a "first," but I doubt if another title made in the nineteenth century is likely to be unearthed.) It may not be a narrative feature, but the fact that audiences in the late 1890s were willing to pay top dollar to see such a lengthy film is a milestone that should not be ignored. And, as Streible makes clear, the film's significance extends far beyond a mere statistic.

Prizefighting was considered disreputable at the time; in fact, it was outlawed in many states, forcing entrepreneurs to adopt a variety of schemes to stage such events, let alone photograph them. One promoter held a fight on a sandbar between the borders of Texas and Mexico, defying law enforcement on either side to shut him down. By booking a film of the popular match between James J. Corbett (widely known as Gentleman Jim) and Robert Fitzsimmons in opera houses and Academy of Music auditoriums, its backers sought to give boxing an air of respectability but brought that same legitimacy to motion pictures in the days preceding the birth of the nickelodeon.

As the author notes,

When historicizing nineteenth-century cinema, it is a fallacy to think of the film industry, boxing world, and theatrical business as autonomous entities. In the 1890s, they inhabited a common sociological world, where men (almost always) involved in all manner of amusement, entertainment, promotion, and popular presentation operated within and saw themselves as part of a shared endeavor. The cinema of the 1890s presented itself to fellow professionals not in film trade papers but in places such as the New York Clipper, which billed itself as "the oldest American theatrical and sporting journal." There the theater, circus, vaudeville, music, drama, minstrelsy, sports, games, magic, dance, mechanical amusements, novelties, and moving pictures all commingled.

This paragraph is emblematic of Streible's approach and indicates why his book is so valuable and far-reaching: he understands the larger context of every incident he discusses.

The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight was presented on a gigantic, rectangular screen on 65mm film that enabled audiences to...