Dan Streible is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and Associate Director of its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master’s program. He is also director of the Orphan Film Symposium. In his recent book, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema, (UC Press, 2008), he examines how early prizefight films transformed the stigmatized sport into a popular American culture. Here’s an entry from Streible’s Orphan Film Symposium weblog, “Fight Pictures and Orphans at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.”
“The truism ‘silent films were never silent’ is of course correct – except for the peculiar genre of fight pictures. Their exhibitions virtually never had musical accompaniment. Instead of music, fight pictures had screen-side announcers telling spectators what to watch for – the knockout ‘solar-plexus punch’ in Veriscope’s Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897), the questionable performance of the old master Joe Gans (‘was he taking a dive, ladies and gentlemen?’) as filmed by Selig Polyscope in the McGovern-Gans Fight Pictures (1900), or the Australian constabulary stopping the Gaumont cameras as Jack Johnson’s finished off Tommy Burns in 1908.”
Note: Image from the Police Gazette, Dec. 9, 1899,
captioned: “Spectators Applaud
Sharkey.
Visitors at the New York Theatre Carried Away with His Work as Shown by the Biograph.” Tom Sharkey lost a brutal title fight to Jim Jeffries at Coney Island a month earlier.
