Boxing Gym (Friday, October 22, 2010) (138)

Fredrick Wiseman has a beautiful and incredibly pure documentary approach. He basically turns on a camera in a location in front of whatever he's looking to shoot and captures whatever is in front of the lens. After he's amassed a certain number of hours of footage (normally more than a hundred hours) he carefully edits it, creating a film that is more experiential than necessarily narrative. There is basically no editorial commentary in his works, no directorial voice and whatever dialogue shows up is just what the people in front of the camera are saying, totally unscripted. This is a document in its most raw state.

In his most recent picture, Boxing Gym, Wiseman looks inside Richard Lord's boxing gym in Austin, Texas. We see the passage of several weeks (or months) as people come in to train, either learning to box for the physical workout or training for professional fights. We see men and women, kids, fathers, mother and grandfathers, Whites, Blacks, Latinos. Everything we see is inside the gym (with a few shots in the parking lot where clients run short sprints).

The film is basically divided into short chapters, each about six or ten minutes long. They function almost like shorts, with the common theme of boxing. There is no particular plot that pushes the film along. As with a collection of shorts, there are certainly some interesting (if light) parallels that link one sequence to another, but the order is essentially emotional, which is to say somewhat arbitrary and hard to verbalize. Most takes are long, running several minutes each, leading to a very peaceful tone overall.

One of the most interesting elements of the film are the sounds we hear inside the gym and Wiseman's use of the poly-rhythms of the boxers punching bags or trainers' gloves. Boxing training is an act of repetition and we get the wonderful sense of the patterns inside each training routine. It is interesting when the patterns change - when there is a cut from one boxer to another - and how that affects us in the audience. Add to this the sound of electronic alarms letting the boxers know that a certain amount of time has passed and they can move on to another exercise, the film is a percussive symphony.

What makes the film so enjoyable is that the members of the gym form a nice community and all seem like friendly people. It is clear that they come from very different backgrounds, but they workout together on this neutral ground. At one point in the middle of the film, the Virginia Tech shooting takes place. The members gather around one man, who seems to have had a relative in the middle of the action, recounting the story. They are all sober, curious and all have very real reactions. Through this scene, throughout the whole film really, the people seem oblivious to the camera that follows them. This adds a level of real-ness that is hard to capture in our very mediated, reality-TV-based world. This is true cinema verité - and it is incredibly beautiful.

Stars: 3.5 of 4