Raging Bull

“I was bleeding internally all over and I didn’t know it. My eyes were bleeding, my hands, everything except my brain and my liver… then I realised I was LaMotta, I’d make the movie about me.” Six years and six films after Mean Streets propelled him into the maelstrom of Hollywood success – and a near-fatal drug problem – Martin Scorsese made what he believed could be his last movie. Its subject: the Bronx Bull, Jake La Motta, a graceless but indomitable boxer who never quits beating himself up. Punishing, painful and pitiless, with the ultimate Method performance from Robert De Niro at its core, it’s in many ways the culmination of the American psycho-realist tradition, but this is realism pushing through towards spiritual redemption by way of Scorsese’s heightened subjective style.

It’s a self-lacerating, tormented film about male aggression, with LaMotta as an uneducated, emotionally inarticulate working class anti-hero who has nothing going for him but his fists and his determination. In Scorsese’s virtuoso filmmaking – and De Niro’s extraordinary performance – the boxer’s anguish becomes all of ours.

When Sight & Sound magazine published their poll of the greatest films ever made, Raging Bull came 12th in the Directors’ Poll. Among the filmmakers who voted for it were Francis Coppola (who also voted for The King of Comedy), Bong Joon-ho, Stanley Kwan, Michael Mann, David O Russell and Andrew Dominik.

Aug 20: Intro by filmmaker and educator, Professor Harry Killas

One of the bloodiest and most beautiful reflections on atonement in the Scorsese canon… It is still one of cinema’s most breathtaking films.

Sheila Benson, LA Times

A monumental piece of art… an inspiration to me.

Al Pacino

One of the original transformation roles to pick up an Oscar, the part of Jake LaMotta required De Niro to bulk up for the scenes set in the boxer’s heyday and pack on 60 pounds to portray him at his lowest. And while those types of physical tricks are often used by actors who struggle to embody their parts on a more spiritual level, in “Raging Bull” it’s arguably the least impressive part of De Niro’s work. He plays LaMotta like a swirling cauldron of self-loathing and bitterness, constantly eating himself alive with the rage that makes him such a force in the ring. It’s a staggering performance.

Wilson Chapman, Indiewire

Harry Killas is Professor and Assistant Dean in the Film + Screen Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. His most recent documentary films include Collective Agency about a group of seniors who became photo-artists in late life, and Greek to Me, an autobiographical documentary about his family and ethnic identity. His research/ filmmaking theme areas include education, the arts, and social, political and other histories. As a curator, Killas programmed seven seasons of the series The Image Before Us: A History of Film in British Columbia at The Cinematheque.