Raging Bull - You Never Got Me Down Ray

‘Raging Bull’ is a sport drama following the biography of Jake LaMotta, the top boxer of his time. The film follows how his anger violent nature make his life outside of the ring impossible, but inside, gives him an unbeatable edge.

Raging Bull was directed by Martin Scorsese in 1980, following the success of Jake La Motta’s book about himself.  Joseph Carter and Peter Savage helped to re-write it for the film, alongside Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin who were in charge of writing the Screenplay.

In the scene that we watched, we saw how in ‘Round 13’ (of what I presume was some sort of championship) the main character, Jake in a fight against Ray. We witnessed how in this round, Jake appeared to just give up fighting back and instead leant against 6the rails beckoning Ray to hit him harder. The scene was really quite graphic, it showed a lot of blood and other fluids flying out of Jake’s mouth, eyes and even ears and I really disliked this graphicness and had to fight away the urge to look away throughout the scene.

The reason behind watching this scene in particular was because of its fantastic example of a director playing with the audience’s sense of time. Scorsese very cleverly gave the impression that a 2/3 minuet long round, lasted instead 5 or more minutes. However the scene did only last in fact 3m 44s.

The way that Scorsese gave this impression was by using a wide collection of techniques. These consisted off, to start; with the way that the surroundings seemed to slowly distant themselves from around Ray, making him appear to be the only person in and around the ring. He also seemed a lot stronger and menacing than in previous shots.

Another is how Scorsese seemed to have slowed down and blurred the sounds, they all seemed echoed and unreal, and this added the effect to give the scene a very eerie feel.

Lastly, the most noticeable and effective technique that Scorsese uses, is the way that he slows down the actions and reactions of Ray and Jake. It seems as if he creates the scene to be viewed from the perspective of Jake, so that we see the effects that he’s feeling. What I mean by this is this, is that for Jake, it would feel as if Ray’s fist would take an age to make contact with his face, and Scorsese is simply allowing the audience to experience the same pain. All of the effects created add up to give a trance like feeling and allow the audience to get sucked into the scene and lose track of time completely.

The film was a really good achievement in forms of receiving 2 Oscars, alongside 19 wins and a further 16 nominations, and proved to be very popular with sport (boxing in particular) fans. It was also an achievement though forms of clever film making and containing a good array of film methods. However, I didn’t like the film clip that we watched, or the idea of the rest of the film and I would strongly refrain from watching the entirety of the movie.