About the Book:

The first filmed prizefight, Veriscope's Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) became one of cinema's first major attractions, ushering in an era in which hugely successful boxing films helped transform a stigmatized sport into legitimate entertainment. Exploring a significant and fascinating period in the development of modern sports and media, Fight Pictures by film scholar Dan Streible is the first work to chronicle the mostly forgotten story of how legitimate bouts, fake fights, comic sparring matches, and more came to silent-era screens and became part of American popular culture.

What people say:

"A valuable social document as well as a groundbreaking volume of early film history. It offers the casual or academic reader the thrill of discovery, an opportunity to learn often-startling new information about aspects of American history and popular culture that have been too-long ignored. It is in every way a masterful piece of work." — Leonard Maltin, The Moving Image

"Written in a straightforward, sometimes punchy style.... Anyone interested in cinema, in boxing, or in the development of modern American society really should seek it out." — Tribune (UK)

"This compelling book forces us to rethink the history of cinema. Dan Streible's thought-provoking rediscovery of an entire lost genre of hundreds of early films reminds us how much we still do not know about the development of American movie culture. The fact that only a fraction of these forgotten films survive, and those mostly in fragments, makes this historical account of them all the more valuable." — Martin Scorsese

"Sporting men and curious women, slumming elites and working-class laborers, nativists and European immigrants, Great White Hopes and insurgent African Americans—Dan Streible's meticulous research brings to life the dynamic, overlapping, and often contentious public spheres that fight films pull into focus. Written in smart and straightforward prose, Fight Pictures combines new critical insights about early cinema's aesthetics of display and struggles for cultural legitimacy with the social histories of boxing and American modernity." — Jacqueline Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity

"An important contribution to American film studies." — American Historical Review

About the Author:

Dan Streible is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and Associate Director of its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master's program. He is also director of the Orphan Film Symposium.