The Boxing Film : : A Cultural and Transmedia History / / Travis Vogan.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Arts 2021
• VerfasserIn: Vogan, Travis,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2020]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Screening Sports
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (214 p.) :; 7 b-w images

As one of popular culture’s most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the medium’s late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinema’s most celebrated directors—from Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsese—made boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edison’s Leonard-Cushing Fight to The Joe Louis Story, Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sport’s meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- The Boxing Film -- Introduction: -- 1 The Boxing Film through the Golden Age of Sports Media -- 2 St. Joe Louis, Surrounded by Films -- 3 TV Fighting and Fighting TV in the 1950s -- 4 Muhammad Ali, The Super Fight, and Closed-Circuit Exhibition -- 5 The 1970s, Rocky, and the Shadow of Ali -- 6 HBO Sports: -- 7 Protecting Boxing with the Boxing Film -- Conclusion: -- Filmography -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index