Taking a bare-knuckle ride

It took 10 years to capture the blood, sweat and punches that make up ‘Knuckle’, a gripping documentary about Travellers and the sport of bare-knuckle boxing. But are we watching for the action or the voyeurism?

WE TEND to reach too quickly for the word "controversial". Anything that feels just the tiniest bit iffy will be so categorised. But Ian Palmer's Knucklelooks like the real thing.

Arriving in the wake of Channel 4's My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding– a dubious celebration of Travellers' nuptials – Palmer's undeniably gripping documentary concerns itself with bare-knuckle boxing in that same community. Focusing on a charismatic fighter named James Quinn McDonagh, Knuckle, made over 10 long years, offers rounded portraits of the various participants. But many viewers will have concerns about a project that sees a middle-class film-maker presenting brawling Travellers for the entertainment of (this is a documentary, remember) urban art-house cinemagoers.

Palmer is well aware of the potential pitfalls. A thin, spectacled 48-year-old, with a great capacity for chatter, he is happy to ponder the comparisons with My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

“For me, that show did get at something,” he says. “But it focused on people who have a lot of money spending a huge amount. That’s not the way normally. It is a community with a range of people. There are wealthy Travellers. There are working-class Travellers. I wanted to get away from objectification. I wanted to get away from stereotypes. I wanted to show them as real people with complicated lives.”

Palmer’s own story is an interesting one. As a young man, he seems to have had an ambition to attend every prestigious place of learning in the western world. He studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. He did history and English at UCD. He embarked on post-graduate research at Maynooth. He even spent time studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The anthropology thing for me was what I started thinking about when I began making documentaries,” he says. “I will be making anthropological films. I see Knuckle as that. It’s a popular spin on that. It is opening the lid on a hidden culture.” After a period trying to make it as a scriptwriter in Los Angeles – he admits to owning an old-school portable typewriter – he returned to Dublin and began working with his family’s exhibition-management business. When not organising Better Homes displays at the RDS, he travelled the country recording brutal fights with his new friends in the Traveller community. That story began way back in 1997.

“I first met the Quinn McDonagh family at a wedding,” he explains. “A friend was doing research and he introduced me to them. To that point, I knew nothing about Travellers. I just met them when they had called at the door when I was a boy.”

Eventually, Palmer made friends with James Quinn McDonagh and, after shooting a few short films on less bloody Traveller stories, he was taken to see the charming bruiser sparring in a Darndale gym. Gradually, the strange, scary world of bare-knuckle opened up to him. Much of the film hangs around a feud – instigated by a violent death outside an English pub – between the Quinn McDonagh family and their cousins, the Joyce family. The dispute was further fired by the families’ habit of recording videos in which they taunted their rivals.

James Quinn McDonagh is a genuinely fascinating fellow. Lucid, reasonable and apparently kindly, he satisfies few of the preconceptions uninitiated viewers might harbour about bare-knuckle boxers.

“He is an intelligent guy,” Palmer agrees. “He is very articulate. If he had been born into a different world he could have been Tony O’Reilly. He’s very good with people and, as explained in the film, during the 1980s he made a lot of money running building sites in England. The main thing about him is that he is a seducer.” The copious fight sequences also shatter a few illusions. The violence is certainly jarring, but neutrals referee the bouts with some care. These are not chaotic, unstructured pub brawls. Competing for thousands of euro, the better fighters bob and weave like slumming professionals. Still, Palmer cannot have been prepared for his first glimpse of the blood-drenched gladiators in action.

“I can’t really sit still and watch the film,” he says. “I pace around the back on edge. It makes me tense, but it is incredibly invigorating. I have never been into violent sports. But it does make you feel on the edge of being alive. I’d film the fight from behind the camera and get as close as possible. The effect is: crunch, crunch, blood spraying, spittle. Occasionally I even got a smack myself from a flailing punch.”

The thoughtful viewer will wonder how Palmer got such access. Other family members are dissuaded from attending the fights. No women appear to be in the braying audience. Yet this budding film-maker somehow won the right to enter the ring and dance around between the flailing fists. Palmer explains that, early on, his recordings of fights were distributed among the Travellers. He was thus providing a useful service. Having your violent activities turned into a feature film is, however, an entirely different business. Yet none of the subjects ever seem even the tiniest bit camera shy.

“It as a step-by-step thing,” he explains. “I didn’t originally know about this aspect of their lives. They invited me along. And watching that first fight had a huge impact on me. It was just a very dramatic situation. Why would they invite me to do it? Up until quite recently, there had been a few fights filmed. They were getting into the habit. I just upped the quality.”

Fair enough. But what about the notion of a feature film that would be shown to outsiders? “After a while, they were constantly saying: ‘When is the film coming out?’ It went on for so long. We never planned to have it last this length. It was an ongoing thing from them: ‘When are you going to finish the bloody film?’ They were like my producers.”

Knucklehas an impressively (perhaps suspiciously) neat story arc. Indeed, the picture has the shape of a western about it. James, the aging gunfighter, attempts to hang up his pistols, but is eventually drawn back for one last fight. Meanwhile, Michael Joyce McDonagh, James's younger brother, spends years brooding on a nagging humiliation. Disqualified after biting an opponent, he eventually agrees to a rematch in some part of Oxford where dreaming spires are conspicuously absent. The film-maker also claims to have lived through a nicely structured existential crisis. He began questioning himself while filming a fight between two Travellers from the generation above James. The "grandfather fight" was a little too much for Ian.

“I never had a deadline until the very end,” he says. “Up to a certain point, I was a film-maker in search of an ending. It got to a stage where I was filming all these fights and putting the footage under my bed without looking at it. But something happened when I filmed the grandfather fight. My taste for it was waning. I was beginning to not be able to take it. I was battle weary. But also something else was happening that made me question myself. I was filming a fight and suddenly realised there were lots of little kids filming it with little cameras. It brought home that what I was doing was potentially voyeuristic.”

There is no denying that Knuckledepends on transgression for its appeal. The sense that we shouldn't really be watching these brawls – still less enjoying them – adds a naughty frisson to the experience. Just like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, the picture appears conflicted in its attitude to its subjects. On the one hand, the film presents the Travellers as nuanced, intelligent, thoughtful folk. On the other, it focuses on an aspect of the community that will confirm certain negative stereotypes.

Such concerns were set aside when the film secured a place at this year's Sundance Film Festival. One of only 12 international documentaries selected for the prestigious event, Knuckleplayed to enthusiastic crowds and received warm reviews. Of course, the overseas audience was not aware of the ancient issues that complicate relations between Travellers and the settled communities. The film offers such viewers pure, undiluted exoticism.

“It was the first time anybody outside had seen it,” he explains. “I was on tenterhooks. I’d never really talked before an audience. The main thing about the American experience was that they don’t have any baggage about Travellers. There is a more complicated reaction in Ireland. Americans don’t really know what Travellers are. I had to refer to ‘gypsies’.

“But they seemed to react to the film as a real-life dramatic story. Because they don’t have the baggage it’s much easier for them to react in that way.”

One appreciates the tensions that would have assailed Palmer before the Sundance event. But screening the film for his Traveller pals must have been even more terrifying. Happily, most seemed impressed. “They said: ‘You got it’. But one guy was unhappy that I showed him losing. Well, you can’t win all the time. Life isn’t like that.”

Knuckleopens on Friday