Men Boxing

Newark Athlete (1891)

Men Boxing (1891)

Newark Athlete is just a brief fragment from the Edison studio, which was apparently just a set up test to check the conditions on the camera. The thing only lasts a few seconds so needless to say the studio wasn't trying to make anything special out of it but thankfully the thing survives so film buffs such as myself can view the early history of film. Men Boxing on the other hand seems to be the studio actually trying to put something fun on film. Two men, both wearing boxing gloves, throw a few punches at one another while smiling for the camera. Some think this once again was just testing the camera but since it contains a tad bit more I'm going to guess the men making it thought this could be something real.

This hotly anticipated film fails to deliver. The special effects are spectacular, but the real action is lacking. The characters aren't defined at all, you simply don't identify with them in any way. The dialog has it moments to be sure, but subtitles just can't convey the idiosyncrasies of the human voice. The direction is pedestrian, at times I wondered if anyone was at the helm at all. It is a lengthy tome to be sure, but not overlong given the subject matter. The cinematography is rather good, and the decision to go monochromatic was a masterstroke. No sequels were planned or made, though many iterations have followed. This is not on the par with Rocky, and doesn't even come close to the sparkling, violent energy of Raging Bull, with which is shares a common theme (and common color - B&W). There is some very deep subliminal ideology, on several levels at work here. However, I think it will be many years before many of them are recognized and appreciated by the savvy filmgoer. All in all this is a masterpiece, even if the technical aspects, and certain performances lack the power of the subject matter and denouement.

Boxing is first sport ever shown in movie history. This film is not long, nor have quality like Rocky. There are two mens who are boxing and feeling happy about that. They have smile on their faces and I think that they want to film 12 rounds, not just few seconds.

But purpose of this movie is not to make injuries one to another, or became professional boxer. Real purpose is to test camera and show to world that you can record sport events too, not just traffic which is crossing bridge's or people who are moving around their gardens.

Short question, did you notice that ring is fake one? I haven't.

And one fact, first real boxing match was filmed 3 years after this one.

The Wizard of Menlo Park and the inventor of the electric light bulb, Thomas Alva Edison, moved his laboratory facilities (in late 1877) to a new location in West Orange, New Jersey. At about this same time he completed work on his invention of the phonograph. Beginning in 1878, Edison marketed the phonograph as an "entertainment novelty" and soon turned it into a popular consumer product.

At this new facility, Edison started a lucrative project (he thought) to automatically extract the metal from iron ore during the milling process - he would loose his shirt on this project which never was successful.

Encouraged by the work of others, particularly Eadward Muybridge (Muybridge had developed a method of taking pictures in quick succession, with multiple cameras, and then projecting them rapidly to simulate motion), Edison notified the U.S. Patent Office that he was: "experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear..." Initial experiments involved micro-photographs wrapped around a drum - after all, the photographs were intended to provide a visual stimulus to accompany the sound which would be played by a phonograph using a cylinder as its source. This system did not work.

By mid-1889, Edison turned the project over to an assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. Dickson was a natural for the job since besides being a chief experimenter, he was the plant photographer at West Orange. Dickson continued with the film-on-a-drum theme with limited success. Edison was touring Europe to bask in the warm glow of adulation for his electric-light invention. While in Paris, he was influenced by Dr. Etienne Jules Marey and his invention of a camera gun which shot pictures at a rapid rate and recorded the results on a band of film. Meanwhile Dickson had built a studio at West Orange. The Black Maria was a strange building; mounted on a railroad-turntable type of mechanism, coated in tar paper, and with a roof that opened to allow the sunlight to enter and fall on a small stage that had a black backdrop. When Edison returned from Europe he shifted Dickson's effort to focus on developing a method to advance a roll of film rapidly but intermittently past a single lens.

Other work interfered with motion picture experimentation until 1891 when Dickson, and another Edison man - William Heise, developed a method of running 3/4 inch film strips horizontally past a lens. The camera was dubbed a Kinetograph. By late 1892, an improved Kinetograph with a vertical feed system and using 1-1/2-inch-wide film (35mm) was developed; and used to take this movie of men boxing. They are on the stage-with-the-black-backdrop in the Black Maria.

This experimental Edison Company movie also contains a touch of good humor. It is one of a number of surviving examples of the camera tests that followed the well-known "Dickson Greeting" film, designed to see, among other things, how well the new motion picture camera could capture movements of various kinds. It accomplishes this, and it adds a brief suggestion of wit at the same time.

The footage shows two men in a boxing ring, but they actually do little serious boxing. The purpose was not entertainment, but rather to test the camera, by taking footage of different movements and then also playing it at different speeds in the completed film. The simulated boxing ring in the Edison studio, the contrast between dark and light areas in the camera field, and the different behavior of the boxers, are all part of the camera test.

Nevertheless, the early Edison film crews seemed to have had a sense of humor, and the contrast between the serious-looking boxer on the left and the very non-serious cutup on the right makes it more interesting to look at than a mere technical shot would have been.