Critics' Favorite 80's Film: 'Raging Bull'

While you youngsters picture the 1980’s as that glorious feast of spectacular action/adventure blockbusters that it was, it’s worth noting that when the critics eventually voted on the best film of the decade, they chose one made back in 1980, “Raging Bull.” Why? Perhaps in reverence for something that was already passing away. Though many of its key filmmakers, like Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, and even Scorsese, would yet make great films, “Raging Bull” marks the culmination of the Hollywood Renaissance.

The American film industry was in bad shape in the 60’s, crippled by the breakup of the studios, the arrival of TV, and the fragmentation of the audience. It was rescued by a new generation of filmmakers we call the Hollywood Renaissance, mostly graduates of film schools who brought along new generational attitudes and aesthetics. Their aesthetics were much influenced by what they had watched in film school: lots of European films, especially the French New Wave, notably “Breathless,” steeped in the aesthetics of modernism (fragmentation, formalism, difficulty, self-reference, distancing, the license of authorship). The breakout films of the Hollywood Renaissance (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “2001,” “The Wild Bunch,” etc.) were full of modernist aesthetics. “Raging Bull” is their fruition.

In taking the life of 1940’s middleweight champ Jake LaMotta as its material, “Raging Bull” gained access to multiple layers of self-referencing history; the entire post-WWII era, its films, even personal histories. As film history, it invokes the prizefight film, a sub-genre of film noir (“Golden Boy,” “Body and Soul,” “Champion,” “The Harder They Fall”) as melodramas of struggle and betrayal, but much more seriously, the gangster genre itself, which through Coppola’s landmark “The Godfather” had become the dominant genre mythology of the 70’s. Scorsese counters Coppola’s family epic cum pagan opera with a world of busted families and predatory crooks, through which the solitary Jake must pass in his lonely spiritual quest, a thrilling dispute that Coppola would take up in “The Godfather Part III.” This self-referencing history oscillates, from the deep background of the film medium itself, which signals the arrivals of color film and TV, to a place where Jake stands in for the solitary film artist in the independent production era, to a foreground nod to Scorsese’s family photos, his father as gangster, even himself in the last scene.

Formally, “Raging Bull” fully accepts the modernist challenge of fighting the war against convention at the front lines. The use of black and white, hand-held camera, and slow-motion modulate the film’s distancing effects; the Expressionist design and low-key lighting are master classes; the editing brilliant in its breathtaking liberties; and of course the sound. The great formal contribution of the Hollywood Renaissance was the total reinvention of motion picture sound, technologically and aesthetically, from “American Graffiti” and “The Conversation” on. “Raging Bull” continues this adventure, editing sound against image, changing speeds of each independently, performing montage purely in audio, and even pursuing the elusive Expressionist soundtrack.

As if these formal adventures are not enough, “Raging Bull” gives us one of the great meditations on film acting, which after WWII means method acting. More than the sixty pounds De Niro would put on during production, every single instant of the film is freighted with the testing of method acting for its promised sense of authenticity, as against classical discipline (“though I’m no Olivier…”), even against it’s greatest performances (Brando’s “I could have been a contender” speech).

The issue of difficulty is tricky. Boxing, among the earliest of motion pictures subjects, is easy. It comes right to you in a violent, vulgar way, like popular entertainment. Opera, from another time in another language, can be difficult, requiring a lot of work by the audience, like high art. “Raging Bull” begins with both, Jake shadow boxing in slow motion in a dream ring to the Intermezzo of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” now high art but in its day an anti-romantic tale of brutal peasant passion, much like “Raging Bull.” It’s a shifting frame, inviting us to consider both the fighter and the filmmaker as artists one instant and buffoons the next. The film continually shifts this frame of violence and beauty, of entertainment and art. The fights themselves will serve as both Jake’s and Scorsese’s arias, deeply felt songs of pure lyrical passion, but in the end Scorsese is a stagehand and Jake a clown, declaring, “That’s entertainment.”

If opera is difficult, how about Catholicism? Scorsese said early on that only two things were important to him, film and religion. This is a film that insists you take its religious dimension and Jake’s spiritual voyage seriously. For Scorsese, it is less the ritual, ceremonial Catholicism of Coppola’s films, but more the Jesuit sense of a lonely and painful spiritual journey. It is appropriate that boxing is essentially solitary. Jake passes through crystalline moments transgression, guilt, penance, and, perhaps, absolution. Perhaps Jake achieves some grace at the end.

After “Raging Bull” it becomes more and more difficult to bridge the gap between entertainment and art, and motion pictures increasingly veer towards either the surefire pleasures of comic books or the smug elitist pleasures of post-modernism.

Amazingly “Raging Bull” manages to hold all its aspects and purposes together. Somehow we know that it is sincere, that it does not speak to us falsely, through silliness or irony. It’s the real deal.