Wrestling
1961 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Michel Brault, Claude Jutra, Marcel Carrière, Claude Fournier
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, theatrical
Candid cameras observe professional wrestling at the Montreal Forum and in back-street training parlours, capturing wrestlers practising, performing, and playing to crowds during bouts.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to dignify wrestling as performance art now, but Brault and Jutra got there in '61 by just... watching it happen, refusing to editorializes—which means the theatrical absurdity speaks louder than any cynical framing ever could.
Four directors working in the cinéma vérité tradition, capturing the formal duality of wrestling as both labor and spectacle; the film's restraint—letting the Forum's architecture and the body's repetition do the theorizing—places it squarely in the lineage of Rouch and the NFB's documentary maturity.
The decision to shoot backstage and ringside with equal weight, never privileging one as "real" and the other as "show," collapses that false binary in a way that low-budget handheld footage was uniquely positioned to achieve in 1961.