Almost as soon as film was invented, boxing proved a natural subject for the nascent art form. The first sports film, an 1894 short of a six-round match between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing, survives in just 23 seconds, yet its impact still resonates 132 years later. Since then, no sport has been rendered cinematically to the same degree, through dramas, biopics and documentaries.
The British Film Institute’s new season, The Cinematic Life of Boxing, studies this long fascination. Its curator, Clive Chijioke Nwonka, an amateur boxer from London, says an uncompromising hunt for realism is central to the relationship between sport and art form. The films he has programmed “have all interacted with that sense of human experience, poverty, struggle, triumph, and with boxing as a sport but also as a way of life”.
Boxing films often capture a political zeitgeist. The 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman was not purely pugilistic, but a referendum on ideology during the civil rights era. It was, says Nwonka, “the greatest and most significant fight of all time”, and the subject of 1996’s When We Were Kings – “probably the greatest sports documentary of all time”.
Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby challenged the sport’s misogyny, while the Rocky franchise remains foundational. Since 1976, Sylvester Stallone’s series has spanned six films and the spin-off Creed. Nwonka notes: “I’ve been boxing for many years and you’ll seldom find any boxer who hasn’t been influenced to take up the sport either by seeing a Rocky film, or having a Rocky film referenced by someone else.”
