Year: 1961
Language: French
Format: 16mm Black & White
Runtime: 28 min
Director: Gilles Groulx
Producer: Victor Jobin, Fernand Dansereau
Writer: Jean LeMoyne
Cinematographer: Gilles Groulx, Claude Jutra, Guy Borremans, Michel Brault, Bernard Gosselin
Editor: Gilles Groulx
Sound: Joseph Champagne, Pierre Lemelin, Ron Alexander, Claude Pelletier
Production Company: National Film Board of Canada

This direct cinema documentary centres on the Golden Gloves tournament – Canada’s elite amateur boxing competition – and focuses on three Montreal boxers in training, including a black boxer recently arrived from the United States. In behind-the-scenes interviews they talk about their ambitions and what prompted them to take up boxing.

Golden Gloves is a fine example of the Quebec direct cinema style and conveys not only the ritual of the sport but also the social environment of the boxers. It is a fine example of the Quebec direct cinema style and conveys not only the ritual of the sport but also the social environment of the boxers.

The film marks a shift in focus for director Gilles Groulx from the concerns of the group to those of the individual, though it still stresses how the film’s subjects are affected by their environment. It also marks a shift among French-Canadian filmmakers away from the more folkloric conversation pieces of the fifties (made either under Anglophone supervision inside the NFB or by members of the older Quebec elite outside of it) and toward a concern with the ethnography of a modern industrial and urban society.

By: Peter Morris