Boxing Gym

BOXING GYM   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

2010

IDEA:  A look at Lord's Gym in Austin, Texas.

BLURB:  Boxing Gym is a film of rhythms. To a degree greater than typical for Wiseman, it foregrounds physical routine over institutional detail, immersing the viewer in an environment characterized by its kinetic and sonic textures. This approach is largely apropos for a study of a gym, which lacks many of the intricate bureaucratic and social dimensions that Wiseman is so good at peeling back in portraits of more complex institutional spaces. That’s not to say Boxing Gym is deprived of socioeconomic, gender, and racial insights – the gym’s melting-pot clientele guarantees its reflection of not just Austin but America – only that the film privileges the effects of a more surface-level materiality. Diminishing the role of dialog, Wiseman returns to the repetitive images and sounds of athletic labor: the smack of gloves against punching bags and focus mitts, the beep of the timer, the dancelike footwork of practice drills. These actions grow nearly incantatory under Wiseman’s steady gaze, transcending their practical function to become something closer to meditation, experienced both individually and among likeminded neighbors. Boxing Gym may be lighter on penetrating social revelations than other films by the director, but its quotidian audiovisual symphony still manages to get at something tactilely profound about the work of focused recreation.