Men Boxing (1891) FULL VIDEO

 

Directed by: William K. L. Dickson and William Heise

Release Date: June 1891

Country of Origin: USA 

Men Boxing is an 1891 American short silent film, produced and directed by William K. L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison Manufacturing Company, featuring two Edison employees with boxing gloves, pretending to spar in a boxing ring. The 12 feet of film was shot between May and June 1891 at the Edison Laboratory Photographic Building in West Orange, New Jersey, on the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, through a round aperture on 3/4 inch (19mm) wide film with a single edge row of sprocket perforations, as an experimental demonstration and was never publicly shown. A print has been preserved in the US Library of Congress film archive as part of the Gordon Hendricks collection.

The pioneering achievement of the 1891 film Men Boxing is that it is the first film in history to depict the sport of boxing, establishing a genre that would become one of the most significant in early cinema. 

Key technical and historical milestones of the film include:

Experimental Technical Demonstration: Directed by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison Manufacturing Company, it was created to test the newly developed Kinetograph camera.

Camera Capabilities: It allowed researchers to test the amount of lighting and the recording speeds necessary to capture rapid, varied human movements.

Innovative Format: It was shot on 3/4-inch (19mm) wide film with a single row of sprocket perforations, fed through a horizontal-feed camera system.

Staged Content: The "boxers" were actually two Edison employees wearing everyday clothes and boxing gloves, pretending to spar in a mock ring.

Cinematic "Masking": It is noted for its circular view of the action, which preceded later innovations in point-of-view (POV) masking. 

While Men Boxing was a short, 5-second experimental test never intended for public viewing, it laid the groundwork for Edison's later commercially successful boxing films, such as the Leonard-Cushing Fight (1894), the first actual boxing match filmed for the Kinetoscope.