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Sport on Film • 43

of the violence in the match on television (e.g. the Pabst Blue Ribbon sponsor’s logo
announcing ‘Round 13’ obscures the image of La Motta recovering from one of the
beatings) contrasts dramatically with the brutalism of the reality as experienced by
La Motta in the ring. Yet the monophonic, televisual mediation effectively renders
the impotent displacement experienced by La Motta’s brother.
The sequence featuring Jake and his wife’s home movies is the only part of the

film in colour—the rest of Raging Bull is shot in black and white. Yet there is an
inversion of the usual codes of colour within the film. Romantic nostalgia often sig-

nified by black and white film stock gives way in Raging Bull to a gritty evocation

of the past. The lack of colour in the film delivers a sense of the reality of the times
experienced by La Motta. The camera dwelling on blood soaking the ropes after
La Motta’s defeat to Robinson is even more redolent as we are asked to imagine its
colour in the absence of red.
Raging Bull positions the audience in the ring, experiencing with the boxer a
heightened sensitivity to sound and image. The accumulated sound of Robinson’s
punches have the ‘duty of “rendering” weight, violence, and pain’ (Chion 1994:
112). The editing creates a barrage of sounds and images as La Motta’s head is
punched repeatedly: camera flashes, animal noises, blood splatters, saliva and sweat.

Scenes of reporters in the crowd beyond the ring baying for blood contrast with the
bowed head of Jake’s wife. Robinson is seen from La Motta’s perspective. The slow

motion image dwells on his raised fist, the light shining through the smoky ring cre-
ating a halo effect, giving him the appearance of an avenging angel. The sound fades
out almost to silence and comes crashing in, accentuating the weight and violence of
the punch as it lands. The shots of Jake’s wife’s head fearfully looking up and drop-
ping down at the moment of impact mirror La Motta’s physical defeat.

Narrative and Genre in Sport Films

The signifying systems of film create meanings within and between shots, construct-

ing a narrative or a way of knowing the events they depict. Narrative can be thought
of as ‘the recounting of two or more events (or a situation and an event) that are logi-
cally connected, occur over time, and are linked by a consistent subject into a whole’
(Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis 1992: 62). However, narrative does not sim-
ply recount what happens, but in so doing actively constructs meaning. The audience
is thus engaged in a dynamic process of figuring out and interpreting the unfolding

events. The organisation of events in a film provides its narrative structure. The choice
of where and when to begin and end the film and what is presented in between has

consequences for the way we understand a film. Sport films typically employ a classi-
cal narrative structure that moves predictably towards a climactic big game or contest.
Deviations from this pattern require the audience to reconsider conventional ways of
knowing and making sense of sport. For example, Rocky employs a classical narrative