What to look for: Most boxing movies show the action from the spectators' point of

view, outside the ring. Scorsese put the camera in the ring, almost like a third
fighter, and carefully choreographed the boxers' movements as if it were a dance
routine. The boxing scenes, which comprise only 10 minutes of the movie's running
time, took twice as long to shoot as they were supposed to.

Those fight scenes are different from everything else in the movie. Outside the ring,
the movie resembles the neo-realism of the 1940s and '50s (as seen in Bicycle
Thieves and some of Fellini's early films): gritty, domestic, mundane, frustrated.
Inside the ring, Raging Bull is pure Expressionism, with sounds and images
exaggerated to show a subjective point of view. The size of the ring literally changes
from one fight to another, to suggest claustrophobia or liberation. Things occur in
slow-motion, set to classical music, like a ballet. Scorsese lingers on specific
images like blood dripping from the rope. The sound of the camera flashbulbs is
actually the sound of glass being shattered, the crowd noises are enhanced with
bird calls and other shrieks, and the punches come from recordings of melons and
tomatoes being smashed. Jake LaMotta isn't just in a different frame of mind when
he's boxing. He's in a different world -- a different movie -- altogether.

The film ends with an older, fatter Jake rehearsing a monologue in a dressing-room
mirror. Having retired from boxing, he fancies himself an actor now. The speech he's
doing, with its "I coulda been a contender" climax, is from On the Waterfront , the
1954 drama starring Marlon Brando as a fighter-turned-bum. In real life, LaMotta
used a speech from Richard III here, but Scorsese decided it would seem out of
place in such an American film. Using something from On the Waterfront was
appropriate. Both films are about a boxer and his brother, and De Niro had redone a
Marlon Brando character once before, in The Godfather Part II (1974), playing the
young Don Corleone.

The famous line "He ain't pretty no more" is spoken by a Mafioso named Tommy
Como. He's played by Nicholas Colasanto, who is now perhaps better known for
playing Coach on the first three seasons of Cheers.

What's the big deal: Raging Bull got mostly good reviews
on its release, not to mention the Oscar nominations, but its
box-office gross of $23 million -- $68 million at today's
ticket prices -- was underwhelming. By the end of the
decade, however, it was being hailed as one of the best
films of the 1980s, and the U.S. Library of Congress
selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry in
1990 -- the first year it was eligible -- for being "culturally,
historically or esthetically significant." Most boxing movies
followed the Rocky formula of an underdog trying to go the
distance. Raging Bull turned that narrative on its ear, with a violent and loathsome
main character using the boxing ring to work out his psychosexual issues.
De Niro's Oscar-winning performance is rightly considered one of the best of its
kind, as the actor completely gives himself over to the requirements of the role, no
matter what awful physical and emotional places it takes him to. The film earned
Scorsese the first of his seven Oscar nominations (so far), and reassured audiences
that, New York, New Yorkmissteps aside, he was a proficient and powerful director.
Thirty years later, he's still one of the most widely respected filmmakers in history.
It's with Raging Bull that that reputation was solidified.

Cinematography

Arguably one of the best aspects of Raging Bull was its unique cinematography. The Director Of
Photography, Michael Chapman, and Martin Scorsese made a number of decisions about how to
film the movie that greatly affected its look and feel. This is apparent from even the first scene
in which LaMotta is preparing for a fight alone in a smoky boxing ring. This scene was shot in
slow motion while using wide- angle lens to enlarge the apparent size of the boxing ring and also
using closed frame composition. The use of these techniques allows the viewers to notice that
LaMotta is completely alone. This ends up applying to both inside and outside of the ring.

The many fight scenes that we see throughout the film are also very interesting. In the
1970s and before, most fight scenes were shot from the perspective of the spectators in the
crowd. In Raging Bull, in order to make the film seem more realistic, Scorsese demanded that the
fights be shot from the perspective of the boxers in the ring using Point of View shots. This
allows viewers to see the expressions on the faces of the competitors. To accentuate the blood
and sweat that would fly off the boxers in a given match, the DOP effectively used backlighting.
Rapid cuts were made throughout many of the fight scenes to portray the intensity and pace of
the matches.
Scorsese also decided to shoot the film in mostly Black and White to convey a sense of
realism. It also conveys the emptiness of LaMottas life by the end of the film. The sudden
switch to color when the LaMotta familys mock home videos were shown in which they were
all happy , is supposed to indicate to the viewer that their happiness is unrealistic and just a
faced.
In those days, the only way to mix color and black and white in a film was to
splice it in. Schoonmaker recalls visiting a theater early in the film's release,
 only to find the projectionist (known, as she wryly explained, as "the final
editor" of a movie) removing the color from the print. When she demanded to
know what he was doing, the man explained that he had a black and white
movie to screen, but someone had goofed up and put color footage in there!

In The Ring
It has been reported elsewhere that in the film, there wasn't just one boxing
ring, but several, from regular sized to enormous, all built to reflect the various
psychological states of LaMotta. What Schoonmaker added to this was that in
addition to the ring size, Scorsese, Schoonmaker, Chapman, and legendary
Sound Designer and Sound Effects Editor Frank Warner employed numerous
other psychological devices to influence the viewer's experience:

o Warner used various animal sounds (including elephants and horses) in

some of the fight scenes to give an otherworldly effect to give the
subconscious impression of animatistic energy and chaos. These granular
details, hardly noticed by the casual viewer, nevertheless contribute
enormously to the effect of the film.

o Scorsese used the original radio play-by-play of the fights, insisting he

couldn't find actors who could reproduce the "poetry" of the boxing
commentators of the 1950s. In another nod to reality, LaMotta's actual
cornerman is the one talking to De Niro in many of the scenes between shots.

o Warner also used a bass drum, detuned, recorded, and run through
various effects, to add layers of texture to the soundscape.

o The production spent upwards of $90,000 on flashbulbs, since Scorsese

wanted to have cameras always going off around LaMotta, and Warner
painstakingly created the sound of an old 1940/50s flashbulb, a sound
imitated ever since by other sound editors. They also underlined the theme of
LaMotta's media presence and came in handy for transitions between shots
that wouldn't ordinarily fit together.

o In some boxing shots the filmmakers used flames, under the camera,to
add a shimmering effect to the shots, as though we are really in a sort of hell.