Wrestling (Original French title: La lutte) is a 1961 documentary film about professional wrestling. Wrestling was shot in the Montreal Forum, where major bouts were staged, as well as wrestling parlors where would be wrestlers learned and practiced their craft.
The filmmakers had intended to make a film exposing, in slow motion, the fakery of professional wrestling, until a chance encounter with French philosopher Roland Barthes changed their minds. Barthes was appalled by what they were planning to do, and spoke urgently about the beauty and social role of pro wrestling in the lives of ordinary people. Persuaded by Barthes, the filmmakers set out to make a film that captured the spectacle of the sport, without judging it.
The film shows the wrestling arena to be a sort of modern day shrine, with wrestling and its rituals taking the place of religion in the then-recently secularized Quebec.
Wrestling was produced by Jacques Bobet for the French program branch of the National Film Board of Canada.
Here the 27 minutes film ``La Lutte``,english ``Wrestling`` :
The following comes from www.imdb.com :
``Like most films to come out of the 'Quiet Revolution' period in Quebec, La Lutte is disarming in it's presentation and subject matter. The filmmakers used the then new handheld technology to shoot a documentary that superficially covers the local wrestling circuit of the day. What Jutra et al. were really interested in was the fact that the audience of such an event are fully aware that entertainment wrestling is fake (I'm sorry to disappoint all of you out there that, until now, didn't realize this; as well, while I'm on a roll, the tooth-fairy-- doesn't exist).
Nevertheless, people allow themselves to be swept away in the illusion that a drama such as this provides. Using the cinema to explore these ideas (which were first examined by Roland Barthes, and he is thanked in the end credits) with the cinema verite aesthetic, one could conclude that the filmmakers were suggesting an overall, albeit subtle, thesis statement that was intended to comment on the cinema itself through the thin vale provided by the film's immediate subject matter.
If films from the French New Wave, documentaries by Pennebaker or the Marsyles Brothers interest you, then this film will be quite appealing. The ideas of the film today seem a bit idealistic and caught up in the then rebellious trends surrounding 'real cinema', however using wrestling as a means to deconstruct the structure of narrative 'art', which could be called entertainment for the bourgoisie, is quite clever. One most note, however, that using wrestling as an analogy wasn't the filmmaker's idea, but Barthes' from one of his essays. But let me tell you, watching this film was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than reading Barthes...``Sources :
www.imdb.com
www.youtube.com
www.en.wikipedia.org
www.mearsonline.com