Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema

By Dan Streible

(University of California Press, 2008)

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. In Fight Pictures, Dan Streible, associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts and associate director of the department’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Master’s Program, explores a significant period in the development of modern sports and media.

      Since 1989, Streible has been recognized as an authority on boxing films. 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 and the history of early cinema.

      Academy Award-winning film director Martin Scorsese (WSC’64, Steinhardt’68) writes: “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 survives, and those mostly in fragments, makes this historical account of them all the more valuable.”