Introduction

Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) is a biographical drama centered on middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta, charting his rise in the ring alongside a parallel moral and emotional collapse outside it.

Adapted from LaMotta’s memoir (with a screenplay associated with Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, and substantial contributions from Scorsese and Robert De Niro), the film organises itself less as a conventional sports narrative than as a character study of compulsive self-destruction. LaMotta’s violence is not contained by the ropes; it metastasizes into jealousy, paranoia, and domination within his family life, particularly in his marriage to Vickie and his volatile bond with his brother Joey. The bouts punctuate the story as set-pieces of punishment and endurance, but the deeper subject is LaMotta’s inability to separate intimacy from possession, masculinity from brutality, and love from humiliation.

What “winning” means becomes increasingly ambiguous: the film is fascinated by how LaMotta can be simultaneously triumphant, degraded, and emotionally incapacitated, and how performance, public and private, becomes his only stable identity. 

This film was difficult to get funded and was done so when the producer told the studio they would only get Rocky II if they made Raging Bull.

Understanding where this film sits

In cinema history, Raging Bull sits at a crucial inflection point of late New Hollywood, a period preoccupied with fractured protagonists, distrust of heroic myth, and an increasingly self-conscious engagement with cinematic form.

According to Scorsese in Rebacca Millers' "Mr. Scorsese" documentary, the end was nigh, when he saw Spielberg's JAWS, knowing that the age of the blckbuster had arrived

This film is often treated as one of the defining achievements of American auteur cinema, both for its intensity of performance (De Niro’s transformation and physical commitment became a benchmark) and for how it reivents genre. It is a boxing film that refuses the inspirational arc, the training and victory are not redemption and athletic spectacle becomes an anatomy of compulsion. It is hard to conceive that this film was release the year after Rocky II where the expectations of a 'boxing' film would have been fresh in the public mind.

In film-theoretical terms, the film is frequently discussed as an exemplar of “anti-teleological” character narration. This is where plot progression does not deliver moral development, while also presenting questions of spectatorship and identification.

The audience is drawn into proximity with LaMotta’s embodied experience (pain, exertion, humiliation) but are repeatedly denied the consolations of admiration, (he physically becomes blaoted and unfit) or catharsis (any eventual character redemption). The ring becomes a theatrical space where masculinity is staged and consumed, inviting readings through psychoanalytic frameworks (rage, jealousy, the drive toward self-punishment). This film also introduces theories of performance and persona. We know LaMotta is both subject and spectacle, both agent and object. The film’s reputation has only grown as critical film discourse has increasingly valued works that interrogate the ethics of looking how cinema can make us complicit in fascination with violence without endorsing it. The terrible irony is that this was also just a few months before the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan by Hinkley, inspired by scorsese's previous film, Taxi Driver.

Cinematography

Visually, Raging Bull is inseparable from its design and cinematography (Michael Chapman), which employ black-and-white not as nostalgia alone but as an aesthetic discipline. The effect, from the opening scene is a heightened contrast, texture, and psychological harshness. The fight scenes are stylised rather than documentary. The lighting often isolates bodies in pools of brightness amid enveloping darkness, turning the ring into an abstract arena, akin to ones own mind, (and nightmares!). It feels both intimate and unreal, as though trapped in a dream. Sound and image collaborate to make violence palpable, there are flashbulbs, overhead lighting, sweat, ropes, and and kind of oddess of glove impacts that punctuation marks in a brutal choreography. It feels at time for my like a fight from the TV Series Batman, kaapow! and then the horror thudding of watching a real life beating in an alleyway outside a nightclub.

Scorsese’s camera alternates between fluid motion and brutal punctuation. He drew out all the shots on paper. The tracking moves and sudden shifts in perspective create a sense of unstable subjectivity, as if the viewer is pulled between observing LaMotta and being trapped inside his sensations. He later describes how a three-man team needed to operate the cameras where camera movement, film speed rate and focus and framing all happended independently, and in sync. 

Whilst some of the most important scenes happen outside the ring and in apartment settings, i am focussing on some of the in ring scenes to examine how a Deleuzian lens 

Excerpt - at 32mins06s

Frame & Shot

The opening, with the round board (“ROUND 8”) and the immediate cut into boots, punches, crowd, and the radio announcer, functions as a classic Deleuzian perception-image.

This is the Peircean indicator that establishes coordinates and stakes with minimal psychology. We are at the pivotal moment of the fight. The round marker is not just informational, it is a diagram of the situation (we have a segment of time where violence is regulated, and  spectatorship focussed). The sound bed (crowd roar and announcer) sets a perceptual field that iconnects us to a greater whole (the unseen audience in the auditorium, and. the broader broadcast world)

In Deleuze’s terms, the scene initially obeys the sensory-motor schema. There is the perception of the round, ring, opponent, and crowd, a somewhat closed system. We are immediately in the action (advance, punch, knockdown). The camera’s kinetic “following” supports this. This is not contemplation, there's no time with the cuts and angles. We are tracking actionable space.

Action Image

The sequence then tightens into the action-image, (the situation produces action; action transforms situation)

Jake advances, Robinson is pressured backward, the ring becomes a functional space of trajectories. The low-angle very wide tracking shot of Jake moving across the ring is almost a textbook “large form” action-image (SAS’). The situation (Round 8 pressure, opponent in front of him) is met by a line of action (pursuit, combination, forcing through ropes) that transforms the situation (Robinson is put down/out of bounds). 

Importantly, I think what makes this action-image especially Deleuzian is how it’s not “sport” but a system of forces. Are these people even humans? The wide tracking shot reads  as though Jake is less a psychologically motivated agent than he is a force pushing another force through a bounded arena, the ring.

When Robinson falls through the ropes, I might take the reading that there is another set of 'time and 'motion' rules outside the ring space.

From a “boxing match” perspective there is the action-image’s natural habitat such as clean causality, escalating stakes, and visible consequences. i.e. a boxer spots an opening, sees the opportunity and takes action (punches) and this cycle goes on.

Affection-image

The zoom in to Robinson’s face, flashbulbs popping, and the momentary freezing of Jake towering over him is a shift toward the affection-image, where the face and the close-up present intensity as quality, not merely information. It feels jarring. 

In Deleuze, the affection-image (often anchored in the face) suspends practical coordinates and makes emotion, and in this case, force, legible as a pure affect. what are we meant to feel here? Perhaps, Fear, dominance, shock. This is not about narrative utility.

Even the flashbulbs can be treated as affective punctuators: they don’t advance the boxing logic; they interrupt it with a stroboscopic insistence on spectacle and capture. The pops and flashes perhaps excentuate the punches. They are as though the audience is getting punched. Another aspect is the fight becomes an image being taken, not just an action being performed. (This was around the time fights were begining to be televison)

The pivot: the time-image as breakdown of sensory-motor linkage

We might at first think that the jagged rate rate cinematography of robinson's knock down is the pivot, but I believe it is just the lowering of the drawbridge in to the wild.

What happens next is a decisive rupture:

• “the announcer’s voice fades”

• “time slows down (frame rate)”

• “crowd sounds become muffled”

• “distant boom of a drum”

• flashbulbs pop in a strange, abstracted acoustic space

This is a strong indicator of a shift into the time-image regime. The scene ceases to be organised primarily by action and becomes organised by optical and sound situations (opsigns and sonsigns) that are no longer subordinate to practical linkage. Scorcese keeps us utterly focussed on LaMotta as this happens

Opsigns and sonsigns 

The muffled crowd and the distant drum-like boom produce a sonsign. This is a sound detached from straightforward diegetic realism and from action’s explanatory needs. It becomes a temporal texture, a type of felt duration, a suspended interval in which there feels to be no words or humanity, just LaMotta staring down his prey. [No doubt Scorsese specifically uses the drum beat (thrice) to signify a particular idea]

Likewise, the flashbulbs and momentary slow motion function as opsigns. These are optical events whose purpose is not to guide action but to insist on drawing our attnetion to perception itself. We (the camera) revolve around Jake like a kind of angel / tutalar or spectre.  Instead of the movement-image of “Jake knocks Robinson down, therefore…,” we get time dilation, sound disassociations, light snaps, a pure sensory field that presents duration directly.

The “irrational cut”

Within movement-image, cuts are rationalised by action continuity. Here, the sequence stops being “what happens next” (the fight logic) and becomes “what time does here.”

Impulse-image and the “animal” posture

We are moving toward the demonic and compulsive...

After the knockdown Jake re-engages hunched over, like an animal,  and we move into a register Deleuze calls the impulse-image (prominent in naturalism). The action (of Jake) is no longer guided by rational linkage of situation and response, but by compulsion, appetite, or drive.

The body’s posture of knees bent, elbows bent, head down appears to read less like strategy than like animal instinct.

This is the change that occurs, this is the rise, or release of Jake the animal. 

What kind of time-image is this? The interval as direct time, and the “event” as suspended duration

Time as an interval rather than a measure

The “ROUND 8” board gives us a type of standard, recognisable chronological measure. As a result we believe in 3 mins rounds, rules and regulated time). The time-image moment undoes that. Time becomes an interval that we experience (and perhaps we are aware of it and Jake himself is not).

This is a classic Deleuzian move, from time subordinated to movement (movement-image) to movement subordinated to time (time-image).

The knockdown works as a temporal crystal of spectatorship

When Robinson goes down, and Jake is looming, and we have flashbulbs, and then the quick suspenion of time slowing, we can read this as a small-scale crystal-image formation (i.e. the indiscernibility between the actual and its image). Why?

• The photographers’ flashes literally convert the fight into images.

• The freeze/slow motion moment makes the present feel like it is already being archived.

• Jake’s frozen figure of dominance is both an event and a representation of an event.

Basically, the scene briefly becomes about the production of the image of violence, not only violence as action. The actual knockdown and its spectacular capture fold into each other, there crystal-image

The ring as “any-space-whatever” 

Another brief but highly effect moment by Scorsese is the camera whirling and the blurred auditorium lights spinning past above. This is more than flourish, it temporarily de-coordinates space. This speaks to the loosening the ring’s status as a stable action-space.

One of my favourite taxonomic elements is Deleuze’s any-space-whatever. Prevalent in post war italian expressionism (cinema) this is a space untethered from practical dimensions. It is space as affect, as atmospheric, or more definitionally put it is space as a site of indeterminate potential. The spinning lights are exactly not about where the fighters are located but about what disorientation feels like, (to Jake, as Robinson takes control).