Day of the Fight

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Movie
German title Day of the Fight
Original title Day of the Fight
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1951
length 16 minutes
Rod
Director Stanley Kubrick
script Stanley Kubrick
production Stanley Kubrick
Jay Bonsfield
music Gerald Fried
camera Stanley Kubrick
cut Stanley Kubrick
Julian Bergman
occupation

Day of the Fight is a short documentary film directed by Stanley Kubrick and shot in the USA in 1951 .

action

The short film shows the day on which Irish middleweight boxer Walter Cartier and his twin brother Vincent prepare for the 10 p.m. fight against Bobby James. After breakfast he goes to mass, then to lunch. At 4 p.m. he packs his things for the fight. At 8 p.m. he waits in the locker room. There he prepares himself mentally for the fight and turns into the fighting machine that the occasion demands. At 10:00 p.m. he faces James and after two rounds he is knocked out of the short fight as the winner.

To production

Kubrick's friend Alexander Singer , who worked for the March of Time newsreel , told him that they spent about $ 40,000 on short films. They decided to make films for a tenth of that price. For the first short film, Kubrick observed middleweight boxer Walter Cartier , about whom he had already made a photo report for Look , during his fight preparations and the subsequent boxing match on April 17, 1950.

For the finished film, the March of Time didn't even offer Kubrick the cost of $ 3,900 to make. Kubrick later learned that March of Time was in financial difficulties, which led to the discontinuation of the documentary series in 1951. He offered Day of the Fight to the American Pathé newsreel , which belonged to RKO Pictures , and reportedly made a profit of 100 dollars.

Day of the Fight premiered on April 26, 1951 at the Paramount Theater in New York and was part of RKO-Pathé's This Is America as opening act for the feature film My Forbidden Past with Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner . Frank Sinatra was the live act that evening.

The documentary is a character study as well as a milieu study. The famous knockout scene was not filmed by Kubrick himself, as he had to change the film on his camera at that time.

literature

  • Michel Ciment: Stanley Kubrick's Odyssey . In: Positif 98 (October 1968), pp. 1-22.
  • Ralf Michael Fischer: Space and time in the cinematic oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick. Gebr. Mann, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-7861-2598-3 .
  • Horst Schäfer (Ed.): Materials on the films by Stanley Kubrick . Duisburg: Filmforum 1975.

Web links