Wrestling and cinema, 1892–1911

Abstract

While professional wrestling is a form of moving image media most commonly associated with television, its origins date back to the earliest experiments in American cinema. This article traces out the early history of wrestling films over the period 1892–1911, during which, despite widespread national popularity, the legitimate wrestling contest failed to catch on as viable cinematic genre. In tracing wrestling’s shift from the ‘shoot’ film of the early 1900s to the ‘worked’ style that would come to dominate in the televisual era following the financial failure of films of legitimate contests, this essay offers an important counterpoint to largely ahistorical definitions of wrestling as an inherently melodramatic or spectacular mode. Despite the seemingly close parallels between the sports of wrestling and boxing at the turn of the last century, this paper asserts that television wrestling should rather be understood as a mode akin to early cinema genres like slapstick comedy and cartoons, genres that film theorists have long understood as having a privileged relationship to the reconfiguration of the modern sensorium wrought by the introduction of cinema.