The technology that allowed this is known as the Latham loop. Rector claimed to have invented the device, but its invention is disputed. He used three such equipped cameras placed adjacently and filming on 63mm nitrate film. Only fragments of the film survive. The known fragments were transferred in the 1980s from a print owned by Jean A. LeRoy of New York City, the transfer done on a specially built optical printer to convert the film to 35mm film. The film was also the first to be shot in widescreen, with an aspect ratio of about 1.65:1. According to Dan Streible, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight is "one of the earliest individual productions to sustain public commentary on the cinema."[1] The film is so important to film history that Luke McKernan declared, "it was boxing that created the cinema."[2]
As noted by Seth Abraham, the president of Time Warner Sports, it was the first motion picture to ever depict the championship prizefight.[3] Its nationwide screenings can be regarded as the first pay-per-view media event in boxing history, for the fight produced more income in box office than in live gate receipts, it was immensely profitable and the picture served as a long-standing model for future amusement entrepreneurs.[4] Prizefighting was illegal in 21 states and many cities and states tried to ban the film, but their efforts to ban fight films were mostly unsuccessful.[5]
The film no longer exists in its entirety; however, it is known from contemporary sources that the film included all fourteen rounds of the event, each round lasting three minutes. This was not unusual for a boxing film, although each round would previously have been presented as a separate attraction. What made this film exceptional is a five-minute introduction that showed former champion John L. Sullivan (whom Corbett defeated in 1892) and his manager, Billy Madden, introducing the event, the introduction of referee George Siler, and both boxers entering the ring in their robes.[1]:22
The one-minute rests between each round were captured on film and when it was reissued it included a ten-minute epilogue of the empty ring at the end of the fight, into which members of the audience eventually stormed. Even with these approximate timings, the film ran a minimum of 71 minutes, and sources generally report that it exceeded 90 or 100 minutes. The film climaxes with Fitzsimmons hitting Corbett in the solar plexus for a knockout and Corbett crawling outside the space of the camera so that he is not visible above the waist.[1]:22
Production
Enoch J. Rector had been an employee of the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company, which filmed Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph (1894) in six one minute rounds, each exhibited via the EdisonKinetoscope as a separate peep show for a separate fee.[9]:194 Some time after leaving the company, Rector arranged for the film with boxing promoter Dan Stuart.[10]:137 Stuart offered $10,000 to the winner of the bout in an agreement signed by both boxers on 4 January 1897. Corbett, along with his fans, was eager to win back the title he had vacated to Peter Maher, who then lost it to Fitzsimmons in Mexico.[11]:285 Producer William Aloysius Brady got an agreement from Rector that 25% of the proceeds of the film would go to him and Corbett; Fitzsimmons and his manager, Martin Julian, would receive $13,000. Fitzsimmons was outraged upon learning of the deal, and the terms were renegotiated. Under the new terms, each boxer and his manager would take 25%, with Rector, Stuart, and Samuel J. Tilden Jr (who had left Kinetoscope with Rector in a battle over who invented the Latham loop) dividing the remaining 50%.[11]:281,286
Birt Acres, a British cinematographist of Barnet, England, who shot footage of the 1896 Henley Royal Regatta on 70mm film using a ratio wider than 1.33 x 1, sought an opportunity and sent a cameraman to the United States to cover the event, but Rector had already secured an exclusive right to picture the event.[12]
The film was shot in widescreen format on 2 3/16 gauge film stock.[13] Rector brought 48,000 feet of film stock, the largest amount that had ever been brought on location, and exposed 11,000 feet of it.[11]:286 The night before the match, Stuart cut the ring down from 24 feet to 22 feet for the sake of the camera, but the referee noticed this and Stuart was forced to change it back.[14][15]
Wyatt Earp was a reporter for The New York World at the time, which published his commentaries on the fight on March 14 and March 18.[9] He disagreed with referee George Siler's decision when Fitzsimmons allegedly hit Corbett in the jaw, which should have resulted in a foul, coming after a knockout blow to Corbett's solar plexus. The World heavily promoted the film, and the day after the film's release, printed a statement from Fitzsimmons, "I don't believe there is a single picture in it that will substantiate those [claims] published in The World."[16]
Exhibition
"Corbett and Fitzsimmons" "ONLY REPRODUCTION OF THE GREAT FIGHT AT CARSON CITY, NEV. MARCH 17, 1897" 1898 ad in the Police Gazette Sporting Annual
The film premiered on May 22 at the New York Academy of Music and played into June, where it was presented with live running commentary.[9]:195 In total, eleven companies toured with the film.[9]:199
When the film was shown in Coney Island, it was advertised under the title Corbett's Last Fight.[9]:199
Reception
Brady estimated the film's net profit at $750,000.[18] Film scholar Charles Musser claims that the film made a more modest $100,000.[9]:193
The film is also notable because, at the time, women were essentially prohibited from viewing boxing matches which were seen as a "stag" activity, but they were not prohibited from viewing this film. Much attention was given to the fact that Rose Julian Fitzsimmons, Bob's wife, viewed the live match from a box with other female companions, such as dancers Loïe Eiler and Ida Eiler, while women otherwise did not mix with the crowd. As much as 60% of the Chicago audience was composed of women.[9] As Miriam Hansen put it, "it afforded women the forbidden sight of male bodies in seminudity, engaged in intimate and intense physical action."[19] She argues a connection between the female reception of this film and the large female audience for Rudolph Valentino two decades later, who was typically shown stripped to the waist and beaten in his films.
Streible calls this into debate, and suggests that the size of the female audience is predominantly self-generated boilerplate. The film had been strongly opposed by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which tried to get legislation passed to prevent the film's transmission by mail.[20] Their protests of fight films were second only to suffrage on their national agenda.[21][1]:30 Several state and local authorities tried to ban the reproduction of pugilist films, but this did not come to a vote.[22][23][1]:22 An editorial in The New York Times declared, "It is not very creditable to our civilization perhaps that an achievement of what is now called the 'veriscope' that has attracted and will attract the widest attention should be the representation of a prizefight."[24] Rector claimed that the film had "every defect known to photography" in the San Francisco Examiner in attempt to quell the protests against a film falsely deemed unusable.[25][1]:24 Because the audience for prizefighting was "perceived to be a rowdy, less desirable class of patron[,] Veriscope recruited more genteel audiences. Ladies were officially invited."[1]:24 Promotion for the film avoided the term "prizefight" with its connotations of violence, and promoted it as a "sparring contest."[1]:26 Veriscope was trying to run counter to press that had presented the story as feminine resistance to "stag" entertainment.[1]:30
Corbett and Brady had toured as fictionalized versions of themselves in a play by Charles T. Vincent called Gentleman Jack, which contributed to Corbett's reputation as a matinee idol for women, as the play was presented to mixed audiences. Brady had honed Corbett's image as an educated gentleman in order to improve his appeal to bourgeois audiences.[26][10]:140 Streible notes that this reputation as a matinee idol and "ladies' man image," in addition to the bare-gluteus trunks, about which he could find no contemporary commentary, may have drawn women audiences to the film.[1]:35
Streible found two contemporary accounts of the film that were written by women. One of these was by "Matinee Girl," a reporter for the New York Dramatic Mirror (who may or may not have been a real woman), who reported in the June 12, 1897 issue viewing the film with some shame, admiration for Corbett, and disappointment at his loss. He points out that she name-drops Brady, which identifies her as an "insider."[1]:34 The other article he found by a woman was "Alice Rix at the Veriscope" from the Examiner Sunday Magazine.[27]Alice Rix, known for a particular brand of "sob sister" journalism (along with Nellie Bly and Dorothy Dix), claimed that when she viewed the film at the Olympia Theatre, she counted only sixty women in an audience of a thousand, and found the dress circle empty. She observed that they were mostly "dressed down," and that all were escorted by men and appeared uninterestedly watching a bloodless spectacle. She proceeded to describe the entire medium of motion pictures as "awful."[1]:36–37
Streible reproduces a drawing that accompanied Rix's article depicting two women in attendance of the film. One appears to be younger and leaning forward, watching the film with interest, while the other, apparently an older woman acting as chaperon, is turned away from the screen and uninterested in the film, even dismayed at the younger woman's interest. He notes that "respectable women" had been allowed to attend theater for only about a generation, and that Broadway did not actively court women or families as audience members until 1865.[1]:38 The pre-war audience had primarily been men and prostitutes.[28][1]:33 By 1897, women were only beginning to see theater as a legitimate social space. Musser notes that The Boston Herald went so far as to call the film the "proper" thing for ladies to see.[9]:200 Streible, citing the research of Antonia Lant, contrasts paintings of women in theater audiences by Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot with this drawing by making it appear that the fact that women were allowed to look was more important than that the act of looking being allowed to them.[1]:46 That the younger woman is leaning indicates that what she is looking at is, in fact, what is important to her rather than the simple privilege of looking.[1]:39
Streible also touches on potential homoerotic interest in the film, citing work on strongman photos by Thomas Waugh. He concludes that prizefighting, as opposed to physical culture, was not associated with aesthetics or male beauty, Corbett excepted. The aesthetics of the boxing scene were better known for broken jaws and cauliflower ears, such that one's sexual orientation probably had little bearing on one's appreciation of the film, and of a sport surrounded by homophobic press.[1]:41
Musser, in his discussion of subsequent feature-length fight films, that subsequent to The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, no boxing film drew comparable audience numbers and that women stopped attending in significant numbers.,[9]:208 reinforcing Streible's theories of hype and female interest in Corbett the matinee idol.
Denis Condon discusses how class, rather than gender, affected audience response to the film in Dublin.[10] The significance of the film's reception in Ireland derives from the fact that Corbett was Irish by birth and often contrasted to the English-born Fitzsimmons, who himself was the son of an Irish blacksmith, a fact that no newspaper noted at the time. He notes a surprising absence, in response to the film, of ethnic partisanship, in spite of the St. Patrick's Day day of the fight, the Irish-English tension of 1898, and heavy antagonism of the Irish-American Corbett and the English Fitzsimmons, who is elsewhere described as Anglo-Australian. Audiences put aside political fervors and suspended their knowledge, pretending that they were watching a live performance.[10]:144 Irish women did not attend, possibly because The Lyric Hall, where the film was shown, often featured live boxing and sexually risqué material, and thus considered an inappropriate place for a respectable woman, while another theatre nearby was regarded as more family-friendly.[10]:141
Legacy
Quick to compete, Siegmund Lubin created a film the same year known as Reproduction of the Corbett and Fitzsimmons Fight, staged on a rooftop with two freight handlers from the Pennsylvania Railroad. Each round was shot on only 50 feet of 35 millimeter film stock at a very slow speed. Veriscope threatened to sue, but there was no law broken.[11]:288 Audiences did not appreciate the facsimile, even though it was advertised as such. The Arkansas Vitascope Company showed the film. The June 1897 issue of Phonoscope reprinted an article from The Little Rock Gazette that stated that the audience was so angered by Lubin's film that it was turned off after the third round for lack of an audience.[29] The August–September issue of Phonoscope noted that the manager of the opera house turned over his $253 profits to a state senator who, after time to deliberate, eventually refunded the patrons' money.[30]
Ramsaye notes that The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was the singular film that pushed the social status of film, then uncertain, into the low-brow.[11]:289 This is not consistent with the admission prices. Prices for reserved seats ranged from twenty-five cents up to one dollar, assuring middle and upper class attendance.[1]:26
Rector intended to go into long form dramatic films, but was dismissed as a crank, although he continued to be involved in the technical side of motion picture production.[11]:288–289
The Corbett Dollar commemorative coin was issued, which is now very rare, made from brass, with Corbett's bust facing right with 13 stars around it on the obverse, and wreath of leaves and berries, tied to a bottom with ribbon "For the Championship of the World. Carson City Nev. March 17, 1897." on the reverse.[31]
The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière, were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was a British inventor who devised an early motion picture camera under the employment of Thomas Edison.
Robert James Fitzsimmons was a British professional boxer who was the sport's first three-division world champion. He also achieved fame for beating Gentleman Jim Corbett, and he is in The Guinness Book of World Records as the lightest heavyweight champion, weighing just 165 pounds when he won the title. Nicknamed Ruby Robert and The Freckled Wonder, he took pride in his lack of scars and appeared in the ring wearing heavy woollen underwear to conceal the disparity between his trunk and leg-development.
The following is an overview of the events of 1894 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
The following is an overview of the events of 1897 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video: it created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. First described in conceptual terms by U.S. inventor Thomas Edison in 1888, it was largely developed by his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892. Dickson and his team at the Edison lab in New Jersey also devised the Kinetograph, an innovative motion picture camera with rapid intermittent, or stop-and-go, film movement, to photograph movies for in-house experiments and, eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations.
A feature film or feature-length film is a narrative film with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole presentation in a commercial entertainment program. The term feature film originally referred to the main, full-length film in a cinema program that included a short film and often a newsreel. Matinee programs, especially in the US and Canada, in general, also included cartoons, at least one weekly serial and, typically, a second feature-length film on weekends.
James John Corbett was an American professional boxer and a World Heavyweight Champion, best known as the only man who ever defeated John L. Sullivan. Despite a career spanning only 20 bouts, Corbett faced the best competition his era had to offer, squaring off with a total of nine fighters who would later be enshrined alongside him in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Corbett introduced a truly scientific approach to boxing, in which technique triumphed over brute force. He pioneered the daily boxing training routine and regimen, which was adopted by other boxers elsewhere and has survived to modern days almost intact. A "big-money fighter," Corbett was one of the first athletes whose showmanship in and out of the ring was just as good as his boxing abilities. He was also arguably the first sports sex symbol of the modern era after the worldwide airing of his championship prizefight against Robert Fitzsimmons popularized boxing immensely among the female audience. He did so in an era in which prizefighting was illegal in 21 states and was still considered among the most infamous crimes against morality.
Major Woodville Latham (1837–1911) was an ordnance officer of the Confederacy during the American Civil War and professor of chemistry at West Virginia University. He was significant in the development of early film technology.
Eugène Augustin Lauste was a French inventor instrumental in the technological development of the history of cinema.
Vitascope was an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. They had made modifications to Jenkins' patented Phantoscope, which cast images via film and electric light onto a wall or screen. The Vitascope is a large electrically-powered projector that uses light to cast images. The images being cast are originally taken by a kinetoscope mechanism onto gelatin film. Using an intermittent mechanism, the film negatives produced up to fifty frames per second. The shutter opens and closes to reveal new images. This device can produce up to 3,000 negatives per minute. With the original Phantoscope and before he partnered with Armat, Jenkins displayed the earliest documented projection of a filmed motion picture in June 1894 in Richmond, Indiana.
Actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that, like documentary film, uses footage of real events, places, and things. Unlike documentaries, actuality films are not structured into a larger narrative or coherent whole. In practice, actuality films preceded the emergence of the documentary. During the era of early cinema, actualities—usually lasting no more than a minute or two and usually assembled together into a program by an exhibitor—were just as popular and prominent as their fictional counterparts. The line between "fact" and "fiction" was not as sharply drawn in early cinema as it would be after documentaries came to serve as the predominant non-fiction filmmaking form. Actuality is a film genre that remains related to still photography.
The Eidoloscope was an early motion picture system created by Eugene Augustin Lauste, Woodville Latham and his two sons through their business, the Lambda Company, in New York City in 1894 and 1895. The Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members of the press on April 21, 1895, and opened to the paying public on Broadway on May 20.
Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph is an 1894 American short black-and-white silent film produced by William K.L. Dickson and starring James J. Corbett. It was only the second boxing match to be filmed following The Leonard-Cushing Fight which had been filmed by Dickson on June 14, 1894.
Enoch J. Rector was an American boxing film promoter and early cinema technician. He was a partner in Woodville Latham's Kinetoscope Exhibition Company during the mid-1890s, working with Latham and his sons Otway and Grey, as well as fellow cinema technicians William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Eugene Lauste.
The Latham Loop is used in film projection and image capture. It isolates the filmstrip from vibration and tension, allowing movies to be continuously shot and projected for extended periods.
Veriscope was an early film studio which produced The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897), directed by Enoch J. Rector.
The Monroe Doctrine, also known as The Venezuela Case,:52 is an 1896 American propaganda film. It features an allegorical fight over national determinism between the British Empire, the United States and Venezuela.
The Leonard-Cushing Fight is an 1894 American short black-and-white silent film produced by William K.L. Dickson, starring Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing. Leonard and Cushing participate in a six round boxing match under special conditions that allow for it to be filmed and displayed on a Kinetograph. The film was shot on an uncertain date between May 24 and June 14, 1894, in an specially configurated ring in Edison's Black Maria film studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Premiered on August 4, 1894 in Manhattan, the movie is the first sports film ever released. As of 2023, no full print of the film is known to have survived, making it a partially lost film. A 23 second fragment is available at the Library of Congress.
↑ McKernan, Luke (1996). "Sport and the First Films". In Williams, Christopher (ed.). Cinema: The Beginnings and the Future. London: University of Westminster Press. p.107. ISBN1859190073.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Condon, Dennis (2009). "Irish Audiences Watch Their First US Feature: The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897)". In Barton, Ruth (ed.). Screening Irish-America: A Reader. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. pp.135–147. ISBN9780716529910.
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