Marie Menken's Wrestling + Raoul Walsh's Gentleman Jim
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Wrestling, Marie Menken, 1964, 16mm, 8 mins
Gentleman Jim, Raoul Walsh, 1942, 16mm, 104 mins
The turn-of-the-century prizefighter James J. Corbett was an ideal subject for a Hollywood biopic. He cast the mold for the athlete-as-showman, and was one of cinema’s earliest attractions, lacing up his gloves at Edison’s Black Maria in 1894 for Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph. The film of his 1897 match with Bob Fitzsimmons, clocking in at over 100 minutes, was the longest of its day and, as Dan Streible has noted, “one of the earliest individual productions to sustain public commentary on the cinema.” In Gentleman Jim, our feature this evening, Errol Flynn is perfectly cast as Corbett, a total embodiment of the boxer’s vulpine charisma. Raoul Walsh charts a rake’s progress from modest origins to the height of celebrity. What Corbett brought to the fight game was a “scientific” approach, discerning patterns and with them strategies from a bout’s violent swirl of motion, and Walsh’s art is to bring his own kind of formal order to the chaos. Here as elsewhere in his filmography, deep focus is used to exquisite effect. This orientation, Dave Kehr wrote, “suggests the extension of the world beyond the camera’s range, and even behind it: space is captured whole, unsectioned by planes of focus or composition restrictions. There is seldom a sense of ‘background’ in a Walsh shot: the lines of perspective are almost always allowed to extend, explicitly or implicitly, to the horizon line.”
Marie Menken, who opens our program, assumes a rather different posture toward the spectacle of the ring. She described this film, one of her best yet least-seen, as “TV concrète.” Its images are all shot off a television set broadcasting a pro wrestling match, variously distorted by the jerks of handheld camera movement and the compression of the montage. The cathode scene, already lo-res, is abstracted still further—a silent, biomorphic blur.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing information@lightindustry.org at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.