Men Boxing

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.

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.

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.

There have been known to be various genres of film subjects from the silent era that were often copied or changed slightly in one way or another. The Serpentine Dance movies were often remade over and over again because of the negatives wearing out over time (not to mention everyone loved the beautiful color painting that was frequently accomplished on such films); the poultry-yard scenes were copied by other filmmakers because of they proved to be well received by audiences; and the boxing movies were done over and over again because, quite frankly, they were popular due to the controversy of the subject matter. It is the latter genre that I shall be discussing here.

First of all, let's face it: Edison was the dirtiest motion picture company in the United States of America--not to mention also being the first. Their films, with content ranging from animal cruelty to belly-dancing, were quite often frowned upon. We've got scenes of Eugene Sandow standing in underwear (well, not actual underwear), we've got Annabelle Moore showing her ankles and legs, and we've got half-naked men like Corbett and Courtney boxing with eachother. Boxing was very much looked down upon back all those years ago, was even censored in certain states: and it was Edison alone who publicized the sport with this very film.

From the start, "Men Boxing" was obviously not meant to be offensive. Back in 1891, Edison's motion picture business hadn't even taken off yet, and all of their films from 1890 to 1892 were merely camera experiments intended to test the invention. These men shown to be boxing (likely employees of the Edison Co.) are quite clearly amateurs doing a mock imitation. Being taken in the Black Maria Studio, the ring is fake; the 'boxer's' clothing is not realistic to what would've been used in the sport at that time. And yet it is these three seconds that started the boxing genre which would follow.

Like the other experiments from 1891, the lens filming the scene is circular and not square, making you feel as though you're watching it through a telescope. While it's true the first masked POV shots by George Albert Smith were made much later, this film should get credit for innovating a circular view of the action. I doubt you could really discredit Smith for being the first to do masking, however, since it probably couldn't have been helped that the view was taken this way.

Edison himself would also continue to craft the boxing genre as he went along, creating movies of actual boxers performing true feats of skill. This would ultimately result in the world's first feature length movie by Enoch Rector of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight from 1897, distributed by Veriscope. Still, at the moment they were continuing to experiment, as the first publicly-released film in the United States would not happen until "Horse Shoeing" of 1893.

During the years from 1890 to 1892, there was a period of constant experimenting in Thomas Alva Edison's headquarters, as the team led by Scottish inventor Williak K.L. Dickson was working constantly in an idea that would revolutionize entertainment. That idea was the Kinetoscope, a project that Dickson had been developing since Edison told him about the "motion pictures" that other pioneers had began to make (French inventor Louis Le Prince being the first in 1988). Dickson took Edison's ideas beyond and conceived a machine able to show motion pictures through a hole, the Kinetoscope. Many experiments were done in order to discover the best way to produce movies, and what started with the raw experiments codenamed "Monkeyshines", by 1891 it would be a reality: Dickson was now able to produce motion pictures. The tests continued, each time with better quality, and this short, "Men Boxing", is another of those early American films.

Directed by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise, "Men Boxing" shows a scene of a boxing match between two workers at Edison's laboratory. However, this is not a documentary movie like the ones Dickson would make for Edison in the future, the two fighters are only pretending to be boxing in a fake boxing ring (as usual, the movie was shot in Edison's laboratory), in order to test the camera. The scene allowed Dickson and Heise to test the amount of lighting necessary to achieve high quality images, as well as the recording speed the camera needed to capture the different movements of the boxers. While an entirely technical experiment (like most of the early films, this movie wasn't made to be shown to the public), it's interesting to see the two actors having fun in their roles of boxers, almost joking as the entire short seems to be done with a healthy dose of good humor.

When William K.L. Dickson showed his "Dickson Greeting" short to the world, Kinetoscope was born and the era of motion pictures as entertainment was inaugurated. Soon, the Kinetoscope (or "peepshow machine") became widely popular thanks to Dickson's short films that depicted vaudeville acts and folkloric dances from around the world, as well as the short documentaries done for the devise. Like "Monkeyshines" or "Newark Athlete", the short experiment titled "Men Boxing" was a key factor in the success of Dickson's Kinetoscope, as this movie almost has the quality that the inventors desired. Charming and fun, this little experiment, while still incomplete, already shows how fun and entertaining the new medium would be. 7/10