Boxing Gym

The word that seems to crop up most often in the course of the film is “rhythm,” and Wiseman fills the screen with it. His eye for the diverse rites of training—whether it’s pounding the heavy bag, jumping rope, or practicing footwork, slugging tires with a sledgehammer or tattooing the speed bag—highlights their contrapuntal choreography. Wiseman captures these staccato polyrhythms both visually and sonically.

The greatest ambassador for this much-maligned sport, at least in the first installment of Anthology’s sparring-in-cinema series, is unquestionably Richard Lord, the owner of the no-frills establishment in Austin featured in the trance-inducing documentary Boxing Gym (2010). The goateed, extravagantly rat-tailed former super-featherweight contender practices footwork in the ring with a few of his clients, his incantatory words to them just one element of the film’s constant rhythms.

What overwhelms is a shared sense of discipline, a distinctly American ideal of losing oneself in work, no matter what it is. Wiseman presents in BOXING GYM practitioners of the ideal from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds; however, there’s nothing at all self-conscious about the melting-pot tableau.