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A [favourite] athlete in a film role for Mike Tyson's birthday

“But this art of total synthesis that is Cinema, this fabulous newborn of Machine and Sentiment, is beginning to cease its moans and is entering its infancy. Its adolescence will soon arrive, seize its intelligence, and multiply its dreams; we ask that we hasten its development, precipitate the advent of its youth. We need Cinema to create the total art toward which the other arts have always tended.“

– Ricciotto Canudo, Gazette des sept arts, 1923 (via)

The match you see is real, between two actual fighters. Paul Werrie's rhythmic poem served as the basis. Everything else is illusion made flesh with what was available. An empty painter's studio, a few friends, footage of a crowd, a deep comprehension of the Kuleshov effect and rapid Soviet-style editing. Dekeukeleire places us from the safe world of the spectator right in the line of fire. But there's no release like in James Williamson's The Big Swallow (1901). Without that gimmick, cinema enters Canudo's realm, as the seventh art.