Fight Pictures A History of Boxing and Early Cinema

by Dan Streible (Author), Charles Musser (Foreword)
April 2008
First Edition
Paperback
$34.95, £30.00 eBook
$34.95, £30.00
Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide
Pages: 424
ISBN: 9780520250758
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 54 b/w photographs

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About the Book About the Author Reviews Awards Related Books

About the Book

The first filmed prizefight, Veriscope's Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) became one of cinema's first major attractions, ushering in an era in which hugely successful boxing films helped transform a stigmatized sport into legitimate entertainment. Exploring a significant and fascinating period in the development of modern sports and media, Fight Pictures is the first work to chronicle the mostly forgotten story of how legitimate bouts, fake fights, comic sparring matches, and more came to silent-era screens and became part of American popular culture.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

“A valuable social document as well as a groundbreaking volume of early film history. It offers the casual or academic reader the thrill of discovery, an opportunity to learn often-startling new information about aspects of American history and popular culture that have been too-long ignored. It is in every way a masterful piece of work.”—Leonard Maltin The Moving Image

“Rigorously researched.”—Sight & Sound Magazine

“A truly excellent recently published piece of scholarly film history. . . . Meticulously researched and highly illuminating.”—Dave Kehr Davekehr.com

“The history of boxing and early cinema is now to be given its first thorough history with the publication of Dan Streible’s long awaited Fight Pictures.”—Bioscope

“An important contribution to American film studies.”—David A. Gerstner American Historical Review

“Authoritative.”—Travis Vogan Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film

“Written in a straightforward, sometimes punchy style. . . . Anyone interested in cinema, in boxing, or in the development of modern American society really should seek it out.”—Tribune (Uk)

“Chronicles the near forgotten story of how fights, fake bouts, sparring matches and silent era pictures became ingrained in American popular culture.”—Little White Lies

“’Fight Pictures’ is an important contribution to the history of early cinema, and the history of boxing.”—Evan Rhodes Modernism/Modernity

“This book is the result of several years of research and provides a rich account of fight films within the context of complex interactions among personalities and of the rapidly changing technological, economic, social, and legal landscapes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the best and most complete account on the subject.”—The Journal Of American History

"This compelling book forces us to rethink the history of cinema. Dan Streible's thought-provoking rediscovery of an entire lost genre of hundreds of early films reminds us how much we still do not know about the development of American movie culture. The fact that only a fraction of these forgotten films survive, and those mostly in fragments, makes this historical account of them all the more valuable."—Martin Scorsese

"Men in skimpy clothing engaged in the manly art of beating on each other became the cinema's very first movie stars. With masterful historical research in both film and sport history, Dan Streible's book provides the definitive account of the complex fascination these first films exerted, as prizefighting collided with early cinema and staged new battles over gender, race and class."—Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, and The Films of Fritz Lang

"'Sporting' men and curious women, slumming elites and working-class laborers, nativists and European immigrants, Great White Hopes and insurgent African Americans—Dan Streible's meticulous research brings to life the dynamic, overlapping, and often contentious public spheres that fight films pull into focus. Written in smart and straightforward prose, Fight Pictures combines new critical insights about early cinema's aesthetics of display and struggles for cultural legitimacy with the social histories of boxing and American modernity.”—Jacqueline Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity