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Creating a Cinema of Boxing in Day of the Fight (Stanley Kubrick, 1951)

Myriam Mellouli

Résumés

Le premier film de Stanley Kubrick est un film de boxe. Il s’agit de Day of the Fight, un court métrage documentaire de 1951 sur le boxeur et acteur irlando-américain William Walter Cartier. Auparavant photographe chez Look Magazine (1945-1950), Stanley Kubrick développe dans le film son style esquissé dans un reportage journalistique pour lequel il a pris plus de 1 200 photos de Walter Cartier. Ce film de boxe contribue alors à la construction de son statut d’auteur et Day of the Fight donne le coup d’envoi à son esthétique singulière de la violence. Œuvre de transition entre deux formes d’art, la photographie et le cinéma, le film de boxe permet le déploiement de la fascination de Stanley Kubrick pour la confrontation physique. Le jeune réalisateur influencé par le film noir exploite la nature transgressive du sport présente dès les débuts du cinéma. Au-delà de la supposée violence de la boxe, Day of the Fight capture l’intimité du boxeur grâce à un regard homoérotique anticonformiste.

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  • 1 From Raff https://www.loc.gov/item/00694121

1The fight sequence relies on a preexistent spectacle with established codes – the fight show. Since the first films of primitive cinema, the fight show has been a recurrent feature in various genres and has even given rise to the boxing film. The Edison studios produced movies that not only represented actual contests or trainings in documentary-like shorts (Corbett and Courtney before the Kinetograph, 1894), but also parodied the boxing moves during fights in very short slapstick comedy films that depicted animals or “farcical pugilists1 (The Boxing Cats, 1894; Glenroy Bros., 1894). Daniel Streible called these first pictures of boxing “fight pictures” and defined the genre by answering the following question:

  • 2 Daniel Streible, Fight Pictures, University of California Press, 2008, p. 6.

What did fight pictures show? The genre consisted of several variations – shots of men sparring for the camera, celebrity pugilists enacting a bout, boxing burlesques, reenactments of popular fights, and films of real prizefights. Genre lines often blurred, especially in the 1890’s, when there was no coherent set of expectations about what made a fight or a film ‘authentic.’2

  • 3 Leger Grindon, “Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema”, University Press of Mississippi (...)
  • 4 Rick Altman, American Film Musical, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 334. Quoted by (...)

2That said, the boxing film is about boxing and boxers. This definition of the boxing film might appear simplistic, even tautological. However, Leger Grindon defines the boxing film from the 1930s to our days as a distinct genre by identifying two elements that are instrumental to his critical study of the genre: “First, the protagonist is a boxer, a part of a boxer’s entourage, such as the manager, trainer, or publicist, or a former boxer. Second, boxing is an important element in the plot and key to the motivation of the protagonist.”3 In this genre, the fight sequence constitutes a climactic moment which provides “a symbolic solution”4 (Altman 1987, 334) to the dramatic conflicts of the movie.

3 Stanley Kubrick’s filmmaking explores the imagery of boxing through the elaboration of narrative and aesthetic forms that will influence his subsequent films (Baxter 1997, 35). His very first film is a documentary short devoted to the Irish-American boxer and actor William Walter Cartier. Day of the Fight (1951) is about a decisive day in the middleweight boxer’s career who was due to fight Bobby James on Monday, April 17, 1950. The film expands a picture story (Luc Sante, 2018, 162) he had published in Look Magazine (January 18, 1949) and entitled “Prizefighter: Walter Cartier is a young, strong middleweight struggling along in sport’s toughest business.” There are two versions of this film: the first one lasts 12 minutes whereas the second version is 16 minutes long and was produced by Jay Bonafield for only 4,000$ and sold to RKO Pictures (Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures). Both versions focus on the main unit of the boxing movie, the fight sequence, and include the waiting prior to the fight sequence. All the events lead to that moment which only occurs at the tenth minute of the original film. In the second version, the ringside images and the diegetic sounds of the boxing spectacle replace the narration of Douglas Edwards, undermining the intimacy set by the newsreel documentary clip.

4The short form condenses the codes of the boxing film and Day of the Fight is Stanley Kubrick’s first cinematic endeavor made at the age of 20. Recalling how he worked on the movie, Kubrick unapologetically confessed his authorship ambitions: “I did everything from keeping an accounting book to dubbing in the punches on the soundtrack. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that I could not make films any worse than the run-of-the-mill Hollywood movies I was seeing at the time. In fact, I felt that I could do them a lot better.” (Gene D.Philipps, Rodney Hill, 2002, xvi) John Baxter comments on Kubrick’s avant-garde style in this short, arguing that his shots of the fight sequence “anticipated [the] pale, undramatic shooting and slice-of-life effects” of the French cinema-vérité, including the use of hand-held camera and diegetic sound. Inspired by his career as a photographer and journalist, Kubrick experimented with techniques later used in the “Living Camera documentaries created by the teams of Drew Leacock Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers (John Baxter, 1997, 37). Aiming for a distinct style from Hollywood, the young director undertook to develop a different cinematic language and to abide by his own moral ethics. Alexander Singer, his long-life collaborator in filmmaking, explains: “He did that sports short as if he were doing War and Peace. […] He was meticulous with everything, from scripting to editing. Stanley was a full-blown film-maker instantly.” (John Baxter, 1997, 37)

5This article posits that the representation of boxing in this first film kick-started an aesthetics of violence that was a recurrent feature in his filmography. How did this boxing film contribute to the construction of his authorship? The documentary short Day of the Fight constitutes a stylistic exercise where Kubrick reinvents and transforms the codes of the boxing genre from his personal perspective as a former photographer. Although Kubrick’s films use violence as a spectacle, they also suggest the instincts behind the acts. Day of the Fight helps us understand the origins of his fascination for violence by capturing the intimacy of the boxer’s life through a nonconformist homoerotic gaze. He already develops a complex character in this documentary short devoted to William Cartier as it sublimates Thanatos and Eros, the death and life instincts conjured in the fight show.

From photography to cinema

  • 5 Philippe Mather, p. 229-230 : “Photographic moments will include the presence of photographs within (...)
  • 6 James Naremore, On Kubrick, London: British Film Institute, 2007, p. 29.
  • 7 James Naremore, “III- Aesthetics of the grotesque”, op. cit., p. 24-41.
  • 8 Richard Meran Barsam, “’This Is America’: Documentaries for Theaters.1942-1951”, Cinema Journal, 19 (...)
  • 9 K. R M Short., “‘The March of Time’, Time Inc. and the Berlin blockade, 1948-1949: Selling American (...)
  • 10 Richard Meran Barsam, op. cit., p. 27.

6Day of the Fight stems from a photographic project of 1,200 photo shoots, which Stanley Kubrick carried out with the boxer at his abode in New York. The proximity he entertained with his subject (both boxing and the man he was filming) added a personal touch to the documentary. The short materializes Stanley Kubrick’s transition between two art forms: photography and cinema. Based on Look Magazine’s photojournalistic work, his documentary short includes what Philippe Mather defines as “photographic moments” and “photojournalistic dimensions”5 in reference to his idiosyncratic style (Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine, 2013, 229-230). Day of the Fight is symptomatic of this approach, “shaped by the artistic modernism he absorbed in New York during the late 1940s and 1950s, at the very moment when black humour and the theatre of the absurd were profoundly influencing American culture.6” At Look Magazine, he worked with two photographers known for their grotesque approach to the real: Weegee, the first American street photographer to have his work displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (1973), and Diane Arbus whose disturbing photographs depict “freaks”. Day of the Fight bears the imprint of this collaboration as a film that intertwines the documentary-like aesthetics with the grotesque.7 In the original version of the movie (12 minutes), the photojournalistic influence is patent and the distance with the object of representation is explicit. Even if the film is intended to be “observational” and to record “the lived experience spontaneously” (Bill Nichols, 2010, 172), the documentary short is imbued with a distant reflexive mode on the cinematic medium. The second version of the short stems from a tabloid aesthetics on screen: it was part of “This Is America” (1942-1951), a series belonging to The March of Time (1935-1951) newsreel documentary series that had the ambition to create a “documentary for theater,” a “screen magazine short subject” with an “enthusiastic optimism for an America then involved in World War II.”8 With a large audience exposure, the program responded to the fears of Americans facing a changing world and unstable international politics. The March of Time presented a reassuring interpretation of sensitive events to garner the support of public opinion in favor of the government and U.S international politics.9 The “real life” of Americans was supposed to be depicted there and even “the printed promotion brochures for ‘This is America’ emphasize that the films were ‘the real-thing – not Hollywood make-believe.’”10

  • 11 Sergio Sánchez-Migallón, “Moral Consciousness and ‘Personal Truth’ according to Max Scheler”, Pensa (...)

7Although the first version of Day of the Fight was made to be sold to the series, Kubrick committed himself personally and took credit as director, cameraman and twice as producer. The opening title card testifies to this auteurist desire by announcing “A Stanley Kubrick Production” (Baxter, 37). The following title card states that “all events depicted are true,” insisting upon the authenticity of the footage of the boxer in real-life New-York. This title card is ironic and the credits undermine this claim for authenticity: Robert Rein was in charge of the narration script and Douglas Edwards acted as the narrator in both versions. In addition to this, Day of the Fight dramatizes the duel thanks to a photographic symmetry and through a solemn stillness of shots announcing the upcoming fight. The truth enunciated here is more of a “personal truth11” that resides in individual subjectivity. The grotesque expressed through the bodily (Naremore, 27) already finds its origins in the uncanny dimension of the twins figure and the story has a “human interest” in the atypical duo besides the athletic violence. James Naremore contends:

The photographs of the twins have a surreal, uncanny feeling – something Kubrick exploits to an even greater extent in his documentary film about Cartier, which, for all its matter-of-fact narration and insistence that the fighter is an ordinary fellow, occasionally leaves a noir-like impression of something bizarre or oneiric.” (Naremore, 8)

8With their deep-rooted association in each step of their routine, Walter and Vincent Cartier recall the Siamese sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton of Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) and the twin girls haunting Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Combining newsreel aesthetics and modernist inspirations, both versions of Day of the Fight stand between the documentary and the artistic short. They articulate a transition between the world of journalism and cinema.

  • 12 David Scott, The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, University of Nebraska Press, 2009, p. 4.
  • 13 David Scott, Ibid., p. 8.

9The boxing movie is not the real America as the newsreel series could have suggested but its role here is to create Americanness. “In the brightly lit ring, man is in extremis, performing an atavistic rite or agon for the mysterious solace of those who can participate only vicariously in such drama: the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America’s tragic theater” (Oates, 2007). Filmed boxing builds American identity through an embedded spectacle, the fight show. As David Scott explains in The Aesthetics of Boxing, “boxing became, with the Greeks, a general spectacle, viewed in a public arena, within a defined space.”12 Art perfected this spectacle, whether stationary with photography or in motion with cinema: “Whatever the issues at stake, boxing provides an elegant and symmetrical format within which tensions and conflicting aspirations may be more or less consciously worked out, combining enthralling entertainment with a display of courage and pain13.” It addresses human conflicts in an indirect way, through visual metaphors. It might be one of the reasons why Stanley Kubrick chose to represent fights in two boxing movies – Day of the Fight (1950) and Killer’s Kiss (1952). Kubrick defined his vision of cinema in a 1961 article “Words and Movies”:

  • 14 Stanley Kubrick, Sight & Sound, [vol.30,1960/61], p. 14. http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/007 (...)

I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be got across through a subtle injection into the audience's consciousness. Ideas which are valid and truthful are so multi-faceted that they don't yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas all the more powerful. You use the audience’s thrill of surprise and discovery to reinforce your ideas, rather than reinforce them artificially through plot points or phoney drama or phoney stage dynamics put in to power them across.14

  • 15 One can remember the contrast between the extreme visual violence (rape and torture scenes) and the (...)
  • 16 In Killer’s Kiss, another movie of Stanley Kubrick – the 1955 full-length film borrows some of the (...)

10Since the fight is an embedded plot in the boxing movie, it has a certain autonomy that leads to an enthralling uncertainty for the audience concerning its outcome. From the beginning of the short, the posters promoting the match make visible the long wait before the fight. As the narrator Douglas Edwards says in the original version, “it’s a long way until night.” The pace of Day of the Fight is created by the training sessions and the focus on blows.15 The music composed and conducted by Gerald Fried follows the emotional swings implied in every boxing fight and its preparation. After the epic composition accompanying the title cards, a slower, jazzier pace follows the unrolling of the posters of the fight glued on lampposts and New York brick walls. This succession of shots denotes the ubiquity of the event to come, making it present to the viewer and foreshadowing the excitement through the written trace: the poster announces “A Middleweight Thriller: Laurel Garden. Mon.APR.17.”16 All the spatial-temporal elements of the thrilling drama are present and in a preexistent symmetry of the poster, the fighters are sometimes filmed one after the other and sometimes together, already playing out the conflictual dynamics of the pugilistic duel.

  • 17 Ulrich Ruchti, Sybil Taylor, Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis, W.W.No (...)
  • 18 Aaron Taylor, « Blind Spots And Mind Games: Performance, Motivation, and Emotion in the Films of St (...)

11If the photographs display Stanley Kubrick’s talent for lighting,17 composition also elicits a particular emotion in the film.18 Considering the multiple camera angles used to express emotions in Kubrick’s late filmography, Aaron Taylor states:

  • 19 Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, p (...)

The point here is that no definitive evaluative conclusions can be reached about the characters instantiated through these performative techniques. Such deliberate haziness is not indicative of that hoariest of art film clichés – that people are ultimately mysterious. Rather, the ambiguity of performance can be understood as a deliberate affront to the presumptuousness of narration’s testimonial function. Kubrick’s later works trouble our efforts to see characters from the inside, and their narratives are “played out at such a level of abstraction and unreality that the notion of character empathy is virtually impossible.19

  • 20 Fr Benoît Andreu, « L’Esprit Saint, maître de silence », Nouvelle revue théologique, 2011, p. 584‑6 (...)
  • 21 Françoise Biotti-Mache, « Aperçu sur les reliques chrétiennes », Études sur la mort, 2007, p. 115‑1 (...)
  • 22 For instance, the “Hand of God” is the name given to Maradona and it is controversial. Indeed, he m (...)
  • 23 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 39: “Jay Leyda’s translation of Sergei Eisenstein Film Form came out in 1 (...)
  • 24 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 40.

12The fight sequence does not show every part of the fight and it skips some rounds as the late boxing film of the 1970s (John G.Avildsen, Rocky, 1976). There is a certain modesty in the representation of the particular and unique relationship between the opponents and Stanley Kubrick exploits the ritualistic nature of the sport – the repeated training and coded moves, the importance of mental preparation, the coded clothing and the rules in this violent practice. The rituals preceding the fight convey solemnity and sacrality in Day of the Fight. At the beginning, Walter Cartier is a humble and vulnerable figure waking up in his bed with his brother under a cross and a religious painting of the Christ and his apostles. In the fight per se, the solemn stillness becomes acoustic by the tenth minute: the omnipresent music hitherto stops abruptly for the fight to begin. The cameo of Stanley Kubrick who comes to watch the match by the ringside at the beginning of the sequence reveals his respect for the pugilistic practice. The spectators sit around the ring as if it was a sacred place: the exhibition of violence and pain is carefully balanced with a few straightforward shots showing the faces of the boxers. Like Walter and Vincent at the beginning who go silently to church to pray for the hard fight day ahead of them, the spectator can pray for his fighter to win thanks to this silent atmosphere, this “holy silence” which reflects divine truth and charity in Catholicism.20 After the win, the narrator speaks again but the paraphernalia on the boxing ring speaks by itself. On the back of his boxing gown, the written name “Walter Cartier” appears and it is celebrated on the ring and in the film. The short is repeatedly dominated by the sense of stillness which punctuates the various steps of the fight preparation. A close-up shows the paraphernalia of boxing as if they were relics that constitute the “holier form of fetichism”:21 the focus on the “things” materializes the boxing world and the narrator insists on the care for these. Douglas Edwards argues that “His boxing gear has been carefully laid off for the ride to the arena and is ready to be packed.” When it is not stillness that serves the filming of the ritualistic sport, repetition takes over. Some shots look like repeated stills. When he trains just before the bout, the “pressure of the last waiting” is visual and musical. The camera pans vertically from the torso to the shorts and doubles the flexions of the body parts. A martial song with beating drums accompanies the training of each body part and especially the hands. A close-up and a bokeh highlight the bandaged hand. Later, a shot on the lower part of his body allows a focus on the hands again: Walter puts his gloves on and that signals the transformation of Walter into another man, a war machine. His hand is somewhat sanctified as is often the case in sports:22 hands are what connect the subject of the documentary and the director, cinematographer and editor Stanley Kubrick during a period where not only hand-held cameras made film look like photographs but also where the art of editing was encouraged by Soviet cinema.23 Drawing from these carefully edited hands shots, the photographic style is his signature as Kubrick states himself: “Everything else [in film] comes from something else. Writing of course, is writing, acting comes from the theatre, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.”24 Photography defined his cinematic approach in Day of the Fight, helping him capture the photogenic attributes of boxing and the particular emotion and sensation around the characters that his work exudes.

Filming the immoral violence of boxing

  • 25 Mick Broderick “Kubrick on Screen”, The Kubrick Legacy, Milton, United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis Gr (...)

13The boxing film was a stylistic exercise that probably thrilled the cinephilic Stanley Kubrick who had roamed the Bronx local cinemas since his schooldays and his Look Magazine years.25 Day of the Fight spearheaded his fascination for filming physical confrontations. As Joyce Carol Oates puts it, the boxing match and the ring imply extreme emotions that are borderline madness:

  • 26 Joyce Carol Oates, op. cit.

Normal’ behavior in the ring would be unbearable to watch, deeply shameful […] The boxer must somehow learn, by what effort of will non-boxers surely cannot guess, to inhibit his own instinct for survival. […] Sanity turned inside out, ‘madness’ revealed as a higher and more pragmatic form of sanity.26

  • 27 Sandra M.Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in The Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Cent (...)
  • 28 Stanley Kubrick filmed psychic deviance in Lolita (1962) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) and stretche (...)
  • 29 Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: studies in sociology of deviance, New York, NY, Free Press, 2018.

14If stereotypically the madwoman’s place can be the attic27, the madman’s may be the ring. Deviance in Kubrick’s filmography is another recurrent theme28 and the pugilistic practice often positions the boxer as an “outsider.”29 Joyce Carol Oates’s essay studies the paradoxical nature of boxing and analyzes its roots in the unconscious. Boxing is a self-destructing sport for the boxer who comes close to death and yet a fascinating spectacle for the viewer. In the boxing movie, violence constitutes an “aesthetic principle” as Joyce Carol Oates explains in her essay On Mike Tyson:

  • 30 “On Mike Tyson” in Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, The Ontario Review Inc. EPub Edition, 2007, p. 130

To the boxing aficionado the sport’s powerful appeal is rarely exponible. It seems to be rooted in its paradoxical nature – the savagery that so clearly underlies, yet is contained by, its myriad rules, regulations, traditions, and superstitions. It seems to make the quotidian that which is uncanny, dangerous, forbidden and unclean: it ritualizes violence, primarily male violence, to the degree to which violence becomes an aesthetic principle. 30

  • 31 Barak Y.Orbach, “Prizefighting and the Birth of Movie Censorship”, Yale Journal of Law and Humaniti (...)

15Stanley Kubrick’s boxing film exploits the transgressive nature of the sport. The exhibition of violence in boxing has always been controversial and its screening even more. The fight films of Edison accompanied the birth of movie censorship.31 Criminality and rigged championships were the main cause of censorship: the love of gambling ensured the sustainability of prizefighting but the milieu of the fans, whom David Snowdon calls The Fancy, set the immorality of the fight show:

  • 32 David Snowdon, ‘Hazlitt’s Prizefight Revisited: Pierce Egan and Jon Bee’s Boxiana-Style Perspective (...)

By its very nature a violent sport, pugilism was inextricably associated with gambling, drinking, and the demi-monde. Officially, it was an illegal activity, bareknuckle prizefights often depending upon the inconsistent leniency of local magistrates. Consequently, there was an opportunistic element about the arrangement of fights, and ‘The Fancy’ would often favor venues situated near county borders. Collectively, The Fancy comprised those who followed sporting events, but the term was particularly applied to prizefighting votaries. 32

  • 33 Geoffrey Shurlock, “The Motion Picture Production Code,” The Annals of the American Academy of Poli (...)
  • 34 Geoffrey Shurlock, ibid. p. 142.
  • 35 Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence. Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 19 (...)
  • 36 Stanley Kubrick when called out for violent scenes in The Killing suppressed them quantitively but (...)

16In 1934, the Motion Production Code regulated “stories with ‘daring’ situations.”33 The Code is indeed a moral document which the cinema industry should respect: “The code, like the Constitution of the United States, for the most part merely enunciates broad general principles.”34 The fight brutality of Day of the Fight is central to the aesthetics of the boxing movie and is subjected to regulation in a context where the Code still applied in American cinema.35 Stanley Kubrick had to trump the constraints of the Code regarding screen violence in more than one movie until 196636 and the end of the PCA (Production Code Administration). The PCA had been successful in limiting blood effusion in The Set-Up, a 1948 boxing film by Robert Wise. Censors cut the scenes with explicit punches and blood spurting out of the script.

  • 37 Normand Berlin, “Traffic of Our Stage: Boxing as Theater”, The Massachussets Review, 2006, p. 22-32 (...)

17Day of the Fight concentrates on the fight sequence stricto sensu in the last two minutes of the film, shifting from extradiegetic sound to the rawness of diegetic sound which intensifies the spectacular aspect of the fight. Before the match begins, Kubrick sits at ringside and the film restitutes this personal perspective. The camera rarely goes beyond the ropes and low-angle shots prevail. The fight (9’55’’-12’00’’) is a documentary-like film where the camera follows Walter Cartier from the entrance to the ring to the end of the match. The film restitutes the authenticity of the pugilistic spectacle since “boxing is theater, primary, raw theater. […] Boxing is theater before theater became associated with words. It is drama without a text, the boxers writing their own script with their bodies and their movement, an agon not imagined but realized in the here and now.”37 The posture of the spectator is highlighted: instead of showing a quantity of bloody shots, intensity is implied obliquely through the figure of the spectator or symbolically through the disposition of photographic objects. Close-ups show a diversity of spectators whose gazes imply what is at stake in the bout, a symbolic death: a man is attentively listening to the radio; a man and a woman in the crowd are staring toward the top of the ring with fascination; a man is watching television and almost exerting a camera gaze. Symbolically, a stool opens the fight. Because of camera angles and a bokeh effect on the stool where Cartier’s opponent is sitting, Walter appears to be standing between the legs of his opponent. This awkward perspective foreshadows his future victory; his domination has a sexual connotation in this still shot. Stanley Kubrick, experienced with the experience of his photojournalistic work with Walter Cartier, discloses a certain proximity with the fighter whose boy he films in extreme close-ups. A few close- and low-angle shots on the boxers suffice to immerse the viewer in the fight.

  • 38 Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Introduction”, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia, Edinburgh University P (...)
  • 39 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 35. Quoting the sporting journalist Pete Hamill.
  • 40 John Baxter, op. cit, p. 35.

18The boxing film is imbued with the emotions of film noir, a genre that had gained momentum in the years prior to the production of Day of the Fight (1941-1958). The sense of danger is omnipresent in the genre and achieved with a specific type of cameras: the 35 mm spring-wound silent Eyemo was the standard camera of World War II combat photographers. “Noir holds both promise and danger38” and Day of the Fight conveys this tension through the score and the voice-over narration: “It is important for Walter to get Holy Communion in case something should go wrong tonight.”; when he goes to the doctor’s examination, “Sometimes he thinks of the men who don’t pass and he knows that he must and he does.” The construction of the fighting narrative of Walter Cartier is meant to represent what is at stake: “to him, it’s worth everything,” the voice-over explains. The noir atmosphere is reinforced by the night setting, prompting John Baxter to comment that “boxing exuded the dangerous glamour of the urban night”39 in Day of the Fight. The voice-over insists on the spectacle of machismo and blood lust that will make entertainment: “Friday-night fights remained as much a fixture of the entertainment week for many working-class and immigrant men as was the Saturday-night visit to the movies.”40

  • 41 Thomas Allen Nelson, “Kubrick and the Aesthetics of Contingency”, Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist’s M (...)
  • 42 Killer’s Kiss focuses less on the pugilistic violence than on the mafia operations of Rappallo (Fra (...)

19Kubrick participates to the regulation of emotion through his own expression since, in the version sold to RKO, “the sixteen minutes of Day of the Fight (1951) combine a newsreel form of narrative compression and visual authenticity with an expressive imagery that recalls the American film noir of the 1940s.”41 Thomas A. Nelson’s “expressive imagery” refers to the symbols of death running through the film: paraphernalia of boxing, shots of the Commissioner with a cigar announcing the beginning of the match to Walter Cartier, the Virgin Mary statue in the church. The man with the cigar looks like a modern Charon, the ferryman of the river Styx that leads to Hades. Symbolic death is strongly implied though not as exhibited as in later films.42 Day of the Fight brings together disparate elements that renew the conventions of boxing films: the extreme violence of boxing is attenuated by the attention to rituals that resonate with religious practices.

The homoerotic gaze on Walter Cartier

  • 43 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 34.
  • 44 Leger Grindon, op. cit., p. 128: “Though the vamp may parade through the boxing world to entice the (...)
  • 45 Eroticism in Stanley Kubrick filmography is largely associated with a young and beautiful female ch (...)

20Day of the Fight was “a very teenage-y thing”43 in Alexander Singer’s words. At the beginning of their project of doing a film together, it involved an attempted love story at the beach between a lonely young man and a pretty girl. This imagery was inspired by the photo essay of Kubrick at Look Magazine that displayed photos in full format of Walter Cartier and his girlfriend at the beach. However, Stanley Kubrick omits the feminine element often present in boxing films4445 in Day of the Fight, favoring the perspective of another striking photograph of the essay. A respectful full page shows him bare-chested and already wearing his boxing trunks and his boxing gloves. His legs are spread and he looks up and away, gathering his strength for the fight. In this picture, there is something more than the account of a sports event:

  • 46 See James Naremore

Kubrick turns him into an icon of masculinity – of, some would say, homo-eroticism. It’s obvious from this single image that Kubrick would have more to say about boxing, so remote from the sunny world of Yankee Stadium which until then had been his main experience of professional sport.46

  • 47 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” 1975, London, Afterall, coll. “Two works”, (...)
  • 48 Loïc Artiaga, Rocky: la revanche rêvée des blancs, Paris, Les Prairies ordinaires, 2021. Translated (...)

21In 1950, Kubrick took photographs of Rocky Graziano in the Look Magazine work “ROCKY GRAZIANO, HE’S A GOOD BOY NOW” (14 February 1950). Homo-eroticism is hardly deniable in these photographs which show a man connected with his flesh: one photograph depicts his naked and unshaved sculptural body in the shower. Kubrick photographs him feeding his youngest daughter Roxy. Considering that the generic spectator is a heterosexual man exerting a “male gaze,”47 “concupiscence for a man's body cannot be too explicitly shown and eroticized, the nude scenes repress desire from the outset, or even avert the gaze, except to inscribe the reading in a sadomasochistic perspective.”48 In Day of the Fight¸ eroticism is suggested thanks to an oscillation between the representation of a “hard body” and a “soft body.” The first version of the film foregrounds an intimacy which allows Kubrick to cross the boundaries of the professional relationship by creating a physical proximity with his subject. The fusion between the filmmaker and the filmed subject is displaced to the eerie figure of the twins that display an impression of autoeroticism on the screen.

  • 49 The second and final version of the film.
  • 50 Gerald R. Gems, « The Politics of Boxing: Resistance, Religion, and Working Class Assimilation », I (...)
  • 51 A similar shot in Killer’s Kiss shows Davey with his middle finger on the nose in front of the mirr (...)
  • 52 Hans-Jürgen Döpp, Objects of Desire - the Eroticism of Touch, New York, Parkstone International, 20 (...)
  • 53 As we can see later in A Clockwork Orange with the portrait of Alex DeLarge, Stanley Kubrick does n (...)
  • 54 Natacha Cyrulnik « The politics of the body or shared intimacy in documentary cinema », Cinema & Te (...)

22At first, one could think eroticism does not belong to a boxing documentary short. Day of the Fight49 represses its eroticism from the start with a focus on the pugilistic discipline and the social discourse around the working-class boxer.50 With an addendum of five minutes on the social origins of boxers and the difficulties to have a professional boxing career, it highlights the importance of hard work in the rough practice of the “sweet science.” In the first version, before the fight, Walter Cartier watches himself in front of the mirror during long seconds and puts his middle finger on his nose.51 The middle finger on the nose before the mirror symbolizes a quest for an idealized and stereotyped virility: even if its primary function is to verify if the nose is not broken, it is symbolically a way to verify if his “hard body” is still complete, that he is not less of a man. However, the first version follows the boxer’s timetable from 6 am to 10 pm, which is filled with moments of tenderness, brotherhood and smiles even when the doctor examines him before the fight. Walter Cartier’s body exudes tenderness and calls for touching: “Even linguistically, ‘tender’ and ‘consoling’ have their origins in tactile sensations without which they would have no meaning.”52 The boxer’s white skin stands out in the first version which transforms the “hard body” of Walter into a soft-hearted man. The sound/image irony disturbs the representation of the pugilistic violence when a long shot captures the idealized image of a man playing with his dog. In Day of the Fight, a moment of tenderness between Walter and his cocker who is generously licking him is associated to the narration of the boxing punches: “Walter has a knockout punch in either hand and he’s one of the hardest middleweights in the ring. He moves around his opponent, jabbing, shifting, looking for an opening then finishing the fight with one exploding punch.” Violence collides with tenderness and this is Kubrick’s first cinematic gesture to the depiction of a complex individual.53 The short dedicates ten minutes to these moments to strengthen the representation of intimacy in a documentary where the body is at the forefront of the relationship between the filmmaker and the filmed individual, creating “politics of the body.”54

  • 55 Marianne Kac-Vergne, “The Limits of Hypermasculinity. Intimacy in American Science Fiction Films of (...)
  • 56 Philip Kuberski, “Eros”, Kubrick’s Total Cinema.Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities, Continuu (...)
  • 57 The gaze is important in Stanley Kubrick’s filmography: it crystallizes emotions and desire. In Spa (...)
  • 58 Gregory D.Black, “Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Admnistration and the Hollywood Film Indu (...)
  • 59 Joyce Carol Oates, “On boxing”, op. cit.
  • 60 Salvatore Polito, « Because I also see: the masculine body in the limelight », Critica sociologica, (...)

23Like science-fiction cinema which is another “hypermasculine” film genre, intimacy allows the male character to express vulnerability and emotion.55 Here, intimacy is physical, deeply rooted in the flesh and gives the impression that the body is subjected to a homoerotic gaze. In the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, love and tenderness stem from the flesh and Eros.56 Love is an illusion maintained by the gaze57 and only the proximity of the fleshes remain. The initial intent of the PCA to protect the public from sexual improprieties was still relevant in 1951.58 Sexuality was implied and suggested rather than exhibited in Day of the Fight through symbols, gazes or postures. The relationship between the boxer and his opponent has something to do with sexual intercourse and the dynamics of domination. The opponent replaces the woman in boxing. The narration of the short implies an intimacy with the opponent: the map of their athletic bodies reflect the map of their souls since “when the fight is over, they’ll know a lot about each other.” The words of Douglas Edwards echo those of Joyce Carol Oates on the replacement of the Woman by the Opponent: “The heralded celibacy of the fighter-in-training is very much a part of boxing lore: instead of focusing his energies and fantasies upon a woman the boxer focuses them upon an opponent. Where Woman has been, Opponent must be59.” The relationship between the director and the boxer is bridled by the camera. Except for the presence of Stanley Kubrick at ringside at the beginning of the match, there is no direct interaction between the filmmaker and the boxer. There is only a gaze between them. It was already the case in the photojournalistic work where numerous photographs show Cartier lying on the beach with his girlfriend or on his bed. In the photojournalistic work on Rocky Graziano, the latter is depicted as a father and a husband and that justifies the presence of the naked body since it symbolizes this newly-found vulnerability for the champion. There, the feminine figure allows the nudity of the male subject. In Day of the Fight, there is no women in sight, except a well-to-do woman at ringside on her way out after Cartier’s victory. Then, the virile body60 absorbs the gaze of Stanley Kubrick. It is devoted to each body part of the boxer in the second part of the documentary short. The projection of Stanley Kubrick is more important than the subject of the documentary himself. In Day of the Fight, the boxer is certainly a subject of desire but is above all an object of the director’s desire who knows him already and wishes to direct his first cinematic effort on him. The ending of the short is punctuated by this shot from behind when we see the boxing gown of Walter Cartier. The names and all the projections in it are what remains in the end. Distance with the new champion takes over the predominating intimacy in the whole documentary short: when the short ends, the relationship of Stanley with Walter finishes.

  • 61 Chon Noriega, “‘Something’s Missing Here!’: Homosexuality and Film, Reviews during the Production C (...)
  • 62 Ellie Anderson, “Autoeroticism: Rethinking Self-Love with Derrida and Irigaray”, PhænEx , 2017, p.  (...)

24This film displays Stanley Kubrick’s crypted homoerotic viewpoint thanks to the eerie figure of the twins. That is why eroticism is possible in Day of the Fight even if the PCA was watching. In our perspective, homoeroticism differs from homosexuality. The sexual act or affirmed sexual attraction between two persons of the same sex characterize the latter when sexual tension between two persons of the same sex is enough to identify the former. Even the suggestion of homosexuality was prohibited during the Code era.61 Thus, Kubrick creates homoerotic desire obliquely, through autoeroticism. Autoeroticism could be defined as a physical self-love -that could be expressed by masturbation – that implies an interiorized Other.62 Sports and training rely on a self-centered routine and solitary excitement: shadow-boxing that is strongly associated with the mirror is highly symbolic of this interiorized love of the Other. The twin figure encrypts homoeroticism by reinforcing an auto-sensual approach to the body. Their movements and actions are synchronized as they awake together in the same bed, take their breakfast together, run at the same pace in the streets when the narrator mentions that they were used to make exhibition fights from the age of three, are almost Siamese twins when stuck to each other in the car. The shots/reverse shots of his sparring with his brother are disturbing as they seem to show the same person fighting with their reflection. The play on the depth of field thanks to the bokeh shows distinctly and alternately the hand of Walter Cartier and Vincent loosening the gloves of his brother. The narrator mentions that “it’s almost as if they were going in the ring together.” More importantly, the long application of oil by Vincent on Walter’s body (7’29’’-8’02’’, 30 seconds) sounds like a confession by its duration. The gaze lingers on the sensual touch of the body in absence of the touch itself:

  • 63 Hans-Jürgen Döpp, Objects of Desire, op. cit., p. 8.

It is not by chance that Freud mentions that “the sensations of touching the skin of a sexual object first of all create a new source of pleasure and a swelling of excitement. “Even if looking remains the normal route to sexual excitement, excitement also comes from touching. “Seeing the sexual organs naked gives us the desire to touch them. And as is often the case, looking replaces touching.”63

25With the satisfaction of gaze and indirectly of touch, the male body of Walter Cartier is at the core of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographic gaze and the young director of twenty-one years old finds different strategies to screen atypical desire from the beginning of his filmmaking career. He puts the pugilistic practice at the forefront, especially in the second version, develops and diverts the cliché discourse of boxing on the celibate boxer, encrypts the homoerotic gaze thanks to the uncanny twin figure.

Conclusion

26The goal of this study on Kubrick’s Day of the Fight was to unpack the characteristics of the aesthetics of the boxing film to understand to what extent this first cinematic endeavor determined Kubrick’s auteurist aesthetics. Biographical elements demonstrate that Stanley Kubrick strongly claimed his authorship on the film, from the credits to the traits of the film. With his photojournalistic work as the main inspiration, photography defined his cinematic approach to the imagery of boxing and the particular emotion and sensation around the characters. His meticulous attention to sound and space exemplified the particular treatment of the tension between the impulses of life and death at stake in Day of the Fight. The choice of boxing in Day of the Fight links the work of Stanley Kubrick with the male body, its instincts of violence and survival. The film could be considered as an introduction to Kubrick’s filmic treatment of violence, which is controlled by the sports of boxing in this case. Violence is constituted as an aesthetic principle, associated to the sense of danger omnipresent in film noir. Above all, the documentary short explores the sprouts of the representation of desire in his films. Mainly male-focused and male-targeted, his filmography charts the male gaze in different action genres from the historical film to the war film. That’s why it is possible to understand the male body of Walter Cartier as the core of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographic gaze. Male bodies being the starting point of the action in his features, his films convey a homoerotic gaze which the censors did not perceive by focusing on the morality of boxing. The young director of twenty-one years old explored different strategies to screen atypical desire. If he puts at the forefront the pugilistic practice, especially in the second version, he develops and diverts the cliché discourse of boxing on the celibate boxer and encrypts the homoerotic gaze thanks to the uncanny twin figure. In Day of the Fight, Stanley Kubrick shows the complexity of the relationship between the characters, the filmed subject and the filmmaker, and finally the tension between the body as the object of representation and its spectators.

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Bibliographie

Abrams 2007: Jerold J. Abrams (ed.), The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Anderson 2017: Ellie Anderson, “Autoeroticism: Rethinking Self-Love with Derrida and Irigaray”, PhænEx, 2017, p. 53-70. [vol.12, No.1]

Altman 1987: Rick Altman, American Film Musical, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Barsam 1973: Richard Meran Barsam, “’This Is America’: Documentaries for Theaters.1942-1951”, Cinema Journal, 1973. [Vol.12, Spring]

Baxter 1997: John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: a biography, London, HarperCollins Publishers, 1997. Normand Berlin, “Traffic of Our Stage: Boxing as Theater”, The Massachussets Review, 2006, p. 22-32. [Spring, Vol.47, No.1]

Black 1989: Gregory D. Black, “Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940”, Film History, Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 167-189. [Vol.3, No.3]

Dixon 2009: Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Doherty 1999: Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood. Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 111.

Döpp 2002: Hans-Jürgen Döpp, Objects of Desire - The Eroticism of Touch, New York, Parkstone International, 2002.

Gilbert & Gubar 2020: Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in The Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, London:Yale University Press, 2020.

Grindon 2013: Leger Grindon, Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

Kuberski 2012: Philip Kuberski, Kubrick’s Total Cinema. Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012.

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Letort 2010 : Delphine Letort, Du film noir au néo-noir : mythes et stéréotypes de l’Amérique, 1941-2008, Paris : L’Harmattan, coll. « Sang maudit », 2010.

Mather 2013: Philippe Mather, Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine. Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism and Film, Bristol, UK/Chicago, USA: Intellect, 2013.

Mulvey 2016: Laura Mulvey, « Visual pleasure and narrative cinema » 1975, London, Afterall, coll. « Two works », 2016.

Naremore 2007: James Naremore, On Kubrick, London: British Film Institute, 2007.

Nelson 2007: Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2007.

Noriega 1990: Chon Noriega, “‘Something’s Missing Here!’: Homosexuality and Film, Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934-1962.”, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cinema Journal Retrospective, 1990. [30, No.1]

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Orbach 2009: Barak Y. Orbach, “Prizefighting and the Birth of Movie Censorship”, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, 2009. [Vol.21, 2009]

Phillips & Hill 2002: Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill, The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick, New York, NY, Facts on File, coll. « Great filmmakers », 2002.

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Scott 2009: David Scott, The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

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Note de fin

1 From Raff https://www.loc.gov/item/00694121

2 Daniel Streible, Fight Pictures, University of California Press, 2008, p. 6.

3 Leger Grindon, “Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema”, University Press of Mississippi, p. 6.

4 Rick Altman, American Film Musical, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 334. Quoted by Leger Grindon, Knockout. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 6.

5 Philippe Mather, p. 229-230 : “Photographic moments will include the presence of photographs within the story, the freeze-frame as an explicit reminder of cinema’s photogrammatic basis, the zoom as a means of analyzing a static composition and further flattening the visual field, and specific features of Kubrick’s photographic style such as deliberate forms of mise-en-scène involving sets and props, symmetrical framings, mirrors and frames within frames, unusual camera angles, composition in depth and naturalistic lighting. The photojournalistic dimensions of Kubrick’s films will highlight the rhetorical and categorical structure of his documentary shorts, descriptive montage sequences, didactic narration, title cards and diegetic signs as commentary, ironic relationships between image and sound/text, and journalistic themes and tropes including reflexivity and iconography directly related to Look Magazine photo-essays.”

6 James Naremore, On Kubrick, London: British Film Institute, 2007, p. 29.

7 James Naremore, “III- Aesthetics of the grotesque”, op. cit., p. 24-41.

8 Richard Meran Barsam, “’This Is America’: Documentaries for Theaters.1942-1951”, Cinema Journal, 1973, p. 23. [Vol.12, Spring]

9 K. R M Short., “‘The March of Time’, Time Inc. and the Berlin blockade, 1948-1949: Selling Americans on the ‘new’...”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, vol. 13, nᵒ 4, octobre 1993, p. 451.

10 Richard Meran Barsam, op. cit., p. 27.

11 Sergio Sánchez-Migallón, “Moral Consciousness and ‘Personal Truth’ according to Max Scheler”, Pensamiento. Revista de Investigación e Información Filosófica, vol. 63, no 237, 1 mars 2015, p. 475-486.

12 David Scott, The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, University of Nebraska Press, 2009, p. 4.

13 David Scott, Ibid., p. 8.

14 Stanley Kubrick, Sight & Sound, [vol.30,1960/61], p. 14. http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0072.html

15 One can remember the contrast between the extreme visual violence (rape and torture scenes) and the refinement of the Beethoven 9th Symphony that rhythmed the sequence in A Clockwork Orange.

16 In Killer’s Kiss, another movie of Stanley Kubrick – the 1955 full-length film borrows some of the fight shots from the short – Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), an Irish-American boxer gets involved in criminal matters against his will by trying to save Gloria Price (Irene Kane) from the clutches of a violent mobster. The posters take part of the opening shots too and they are highly dramatized. A soft focus opens a close-up shot on a photograph of Davey. The piercing gaze of a man in a guard position stares at us. We discover a large picture stuck on a brick wall. It is damaged, as seems to be the spirit of Davey that we saw pacing in the train station in the first shot of Killer's Kiss. Words are missing in the written elements. The names of the two boxers are scratched, foreshadowing the scrapes to come on the boxers' bodies. As with all boxing posters highlighted by Stanley Kubrick, the plot of the fight is foreshadowed by the poster (“A Slugging Welterweight Natural – City Arena – Fri.Oct.25”). Several others follow: one is in a puddle and a man crushes it with his shoe; another hangs from a New York street lamp. Only one at the Hollywood 865 Barber Shop, the temple of virility, is preserved from the weather.

17 Ulrich Ruchti, Sybil Taylor, Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis, W.W.Norton & Company, 2000. For instance, the opening of A Clockwork Orange (1971)is in between painting and photography thanks to the rear tracking on Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) petrifying camera gaze. With Kubrick’s work on natural and candle lightning, Barry Lyndon (1975) looks like a succession of paintings. The mastering of stillness of Stanley Kubrick serves the boxing movie

18 Aaron Taylor, « Blind Spots And Mind Games: Performance, Motivation, and Emotion in the Films of Stanley Kubrick », The Velvet Light Trap, 2016, p. 5‑27. [vol. 77, nᵒ 77]

19 Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, p. 171.

20 Fr Benoît Andreu, « L’Esprit Saint, maître de silence », Nouvelle revue théologique, 2011, p. 584‑600 [vol. 133, no 4]

21 Françoise Biotti-Mache, « Aperçu sur les reliques chrétiennes », Études sur la mort, 2007, p. 115‑132. [vol. 131, no 1]

22 For instance, the “Hand of God” is the name given to Maradona and it is controversial. Indeed, he made a forbidden move in football because he scored thanks to his hand in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Simone Magalhães Britto, Jorge Ventura de Morais and Túlio Velho Barreto, « The Hand of God, the Hand of the Devil: a sociological interpretation of Maradona’s hand goal », Soccer and society, 2014, p. 671-684. [vol. 15, no 5]

23 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 39: “Jay Leyda’s translation of Sergei Eisenstein Film Form came out in 1949, to join Eisenstein’s earlier The Film Sense. In the same year Film Technique, by Vsevelod Pudovkin, director of Mother and other works of symbolic ‘realism’, was reissued in a new edition, combined with his book Film Acting. […] Kubrick devoured all of them, not without questioning some of their premises.”

24 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 40.

25 Mick Broderick “Kubrick on Screen”, The Kubrick Legacy, Milton, United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019, p. 100: “Regarded as a shy, awkward kid from the Bronx, Kubrick remained an avid filmgoer throughout his early childhood, often cutting school to double features at local cinemas. While working at Look magazine Kubrick would try to watch every movie shown in New York during the late 1940s to early 1950s. In preparation for his initial forays into filmmaking he began reading Pudovkin for film technique and Stanislavsky on working with actors. However, before embarking on his independent, self-taught motion picture work in the early 1950s, the young Stanley Kubrick appears, unremarkably, as an extra in the seminal experimental feature Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), developed, produced, and directed by Hans Richter (1943–1947).”

26 Joyce Carol Oates, op. cit.

27 Sandra M.Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in The Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 2020.

28 Stanley Kubrick filmed psychic deviance in Lolita (1962) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) and stretched the moral boundaries of the representation of sex and violence.

29 Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: studies in sociology of deviance, New York, NY, Free Press, 2018.

30 “On Mike Tyson” in Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, The Ontario Review Inc. EPub Edition, 2007, p. 130.

31 Barak Y.Orbach, “Prizefighting and the Birth of Movie Censorship”, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, 2009. [Vol.21, 2009]

32 David Snowdon, ‘Hazlitt’s Prizefight Revisited: Pierce Egan and Jon Bee’s Boxiana-Style Perspective’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 2011. [20, Winter]

33 Geoffrey Shurlock, “The Motion Picture Production Code,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,1947, p. 140-146. [Vol.254, Nov.]

34 Geoffrey Shurlock, ibid. p. 142.

35 Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence. Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968, Rutgers University Press, 2003.

36 Stanley Kubrick when called out for violent scenes in The Killing suppressed them quantitively but not qualitatively. In The Killing (1956), aware on the Special Regulations on Crime, they had to disguise a shotgun to look like an automatic weapon because that was strictly refused by the PCA. Moreover, the drama about a racetrack robbery included a scene where George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr.) kills his wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor) after a betrayal with another man. If the PCA rejected the multiple shots to her regard, Stanley Kubrick heightened the violence of the unique shot. He filmed George with blood streaming and made Sherry agonize. He shot her once but the violence was even more intense than the script’s in the finished film.

37 Normand Berlin, “Traffic of Our Stage: Boxing as Theater”, The Massachussets Review, 2006, p. 22-32, p. 23. [Spring, Vol.47, No.1]

38 Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Introduction”, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia, Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 3. “[…] Noir functions as a literal and figurative zone of darkness, a place that must be illuminated so that we can see. In all noir films, darkness surrounds the characters within the narrative, threatening to engulf them at any moment.”

39 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 35. Quoting the sporting journalist Pete Hamill.

40 John Baxter, op. cit, p. 35.

41 Thomas Allen Nelson, “Kubrick and the Aesthetics of Contingency”, Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2007, p. 4.

42 Killer’s Kiss focuses less on the pugilistic violence than on the mafia operations of Rappallo (Frank Silvera) and the domestic violence that harms Gloria Price (Irene Kane) and is more of a film noir. Boxing is a theme and the boxer a modern knight figure for the maiden Gloria. The mannequins fight with axes and cut limbs infer a potential destroying violence.

43 John Baxter, op. cit., p. 34.

44 Leger Grindon, op. cit., p. 128: “Though the vamp may parade through the boxing world to entice the pugilist, the sweetheart must draw him from the ring for marriage to be realized. Boxing constrains the mingling of masculine and feminine traits necessary to establish a fruitful relationship between a man and a woman. As a result, a crisis of masculinity is characteristic of the genre. The boxer must choose between remaining loyal to the manly ethos of the ring, or compromise his masculine bravado to successfully court a woman. How that crisis is posed and resolved creates a pivotal dramatic conflict in these films. The evolution of this problem allows us to chart the shifting gender relations in our culture.”

45 Eroticism in Stanley Kubrick filmography is largely associated with a young and beautiful female character. Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is identified with her flesh from the opening, as for its erotic aspect with the back nude she offers to the camera when she undresses her black dress than for its prosaic aspect when she is on the toilet seat and flushes the toilets. In his photograph’s career, Stanley Kubrick already photographed women strongly identified with their flesh, dancers like the ballerina Ingrid Secretan performing the opening number in the Broadway musical “Kiss Me, Kate.” See also John Baxter, op. cit., p. 36.

46 See James Naremore

47 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” 1975, London, Afterall, coll. “Two works”, 2016.

48 Loïc Artiaga, Rocky: la revanche rêvée des blancs, Paris, Les Prairies ordinaires, 2021. Translated from French, p. 205: «“La concupiscence pour le corps d'un homme ne pouvant être trop explicitement montrée et érotisée, les scènes de mise à nu répriment d'emblée le désir, voire forcent à détourner le regard, sauf à en inscrire la lecture dans une perspective sadomasochiste.”

49 The second and final version of the film.

50 Gerald R. Gems, « The Politics of Boxing: Resistance, Religion, and Working Class Assimilation », International Sports Journal, p. 89-103. [vol. 8, no 1, Winter 2004]

51 A similar shot in Killer’s Kiss shows Davey with his middle finger on the nose in front of the mirror after the fight.

52 Hans-Jürgen Döpp, Objects of Desire - the Eroticism of Touch, New York, Parkstone International, 2002, p. 32.

53 As we can see later in A Clockwork Orange with the portrait of Alex DeLarge, Stanley Kubrick does not draw Manichean characters.

54 Natacha Cyrulnik « The politics of the body or shared intimacy in documentary cinema », Cinema & Território, p. 13-29 [no 4, November 1 2019].

55 Marianne Kac-Vergne, “The Limits of Hypermasculinity. Intimacy in American Science Fiction Films of the 1980’s” in Intimacy in Cinema (ed.David Roche & Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot), McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014, p. 119-132.

56 Philip Kuberski, “Eros”, Kubrick’s Total Cinema.Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012, p. 85-102.

57 The gaze is important in Stanley Kubrick’s filmography: it crystallizes emotions and desire. In Spartacus (1960), with the gladiator trainee Spartacus and the slave Varinia who is objectified into a sexual gratification for the trainee, the male is reduced to his fighting skills and the female to her “sexual purposes”. The voyeuristic gaze animalizes Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) and Varinia (Jean Simmons): for their first awkward and shy meeting, Marcellus and Lentillus who are in charge of the gladiatorial school spy on them from a grid on the top of his cell. Spartacus yells: “I’m not an animal!” In Killer’s Kiss (1955), the long gaze of Gloria Price (Irene Kane) drinking her coffee and standing by the window is worth a thousand words. She admires with a palpable desire Davey’s defined body contours through her window. The female dancer (ballet sequence danced by Ruth Sobotka, choreography by David Vaughan) and is symbolically a gaze, her name is Iris. She is Gloria’s sister and tells through her dance a tragic story about her ill father, her marriage and her suicide following her father’s death. For instance, she crosses her wrists when Gloria narrates: “she’d cut her wrists and she was dead.” Sensuality seems even more important than sexuality when Davey watches Gloria resting and sleeping and offers a sensual caress to her suspended underwear.

58 Gregory D.Black, “Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Admnistration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940, Film History, Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 167-189. [Vol.3, No.3]

59 Joyce Carol Oates, “On boxing”, op. cit.

60 Salvatore Polito, « Because I also see: the masculine body in the limelight », Critica sociologica, 2007, p. 21-34. [vol. 164]

61 Chon Noriega, “‘Something’s Missing Here!’: Homosexuality and Film, Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934-1962.”, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cinema Journal Retrospective, 1990. [30, No.1]

62 Ellie Anderson, “Autoeroticism: Rethinking Self-Love with Derrida and Irigaray”, PhænEx , 2017, p. 53-70. [vol.12, No.1]

63 Hans-Jürgen Döpp, Objects of Desire, op. cit., p. 8.

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Myriam Mellouli, « Creating a Cinema of Boxing in Day of the Fight (Stanley Kubrick, 1951) »Mise au point [En ligne], 17 | 2023, mis en ligne le 22 juillet 2023, consulté le 22 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/map/6337 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/map.6337

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Myriam Mellouli

Myriam Mellouli se spécialise depuis 2017 dans l’étude des représentations artistiques de la boxe. Elle obtient son master de Lettres modernes à l’École normale supérieure de Lyon grâce à un mémoire de littérature comparée sur l’esthétique de la survie dans la littérature de boxe. Elle soutient ensuite dans la même institution un mémoire en études cinématographiques sur les espaces dans le film de boxe. Elle soutient sa thèse en études cinématographiques sur le film de boxe en 2023 (Le Mans Université, Laboratoire 3L.AM).

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