Lights Camera Action

Justin Joy vs Apollo Anderson, MZW Project 4: Open Your Eyes (Maniac Zone Wrestling)

This gala event took place in the early spring of 2019 in Wroclaw, Poland. The two young wrestlers bring plenty of energy into the ring. Crowd favorite Justin Joy is in basic black trunks. A black belt, apparently leather, is fastened around his waist, dangling a tan cloth of some kind. Apollo Anderson, the villain of the piece, wears a white tunic over his trunks. The battle is a nail-biter till the end, with each man taking turns getting thisclose to a three-count pin. I can find nothing on Anderson, but Joy had been MZW's first champion a few years earlier. In still shots, he looks like a roommate I had in Pensacola in the 1980s.

What intrigues me most is the high-contrast lighting. A single-source glaring white light comes close to washing out both men's distinguishing features and illuminates them as if they were about to float up into an alien spacecraft.  Darkness surrounds them. The fighters' shadows are deep black; to the eye, the shadows seem to stretch the bodies to twice their size. It's very dramatic and very effective. I still prefer sharp, clear closeups of desperate acts and pain-stricken grimaces, but I have to say the lighting is almost half the show here. 

The roving camera is another feature. The distorting effect of a wide-angle lens adds an element of surrealism, emphasizing and exaggerating our sense of distance. It's because of the lens that the camera cannot pull in close to the wrestlers' faces without turning them into misshaped nightmares. There is another camera, stationary and behind the last row that gives us a flea-circus view of the action. I wish the handheld camera had given us an unbroken view of the battle, as that would have given the event a stronger sense of continuity, even if a few moves got overlooked in the process.

The wrestling action is wonderfully dynamic and vengeful. I don't want to downplay the role that comeuppance plays in the storyline. It is delicious - and hot.

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