Hands Up, Chin Down – The Life of a Coach in Split Screen

In Hands Up, Chin Down, Matt Houghton uses split screens throughout his piece to show how Jerry Mitchell, the amateur boxing coach and protagonist o  f the film, has two sides to his coaching: aggression and care. Watching two perspectives of his coaching at once is what invites us to hold two conflicting truths in our mind about who this man is.

Houghton starts the video with a big close up on the left and a medium long shot on the right, both rock shots (as with all the shots in this video), both of Jerry Mitchell. Match action editing between shots on the screen creates the impression that this is parallel action, different perspectives of the same thing happening simultaneously. On the left, we see the intensity and focus of his eyes watching the boys practice, a shot that demonstrates devotion, yet in the image on the right, we see that from behind, his body posture is slightly hunched and ready for combat, denoting aggression.  Houghton does this repeatedly throughout the film, positioning different shots of Jerry taken from different distances and angles beside each other to connote his two boxing personas. At 42 seconds, he pairs a shot on the left, a close up of Jerry in which half of his face is cut off as he boxes, with a medium shot on the right, a kinder half of Jerry conversing with a boy. The crop on the left shot feels intentional – a way to visualize that what you see there is only a part of Jerry. He does this a third time at 1:42, but pairs two close-up shots of Jerry shot from opposite sides, one that looks more serious with another that looks more playful.

It becomes apparent about 20-25 seconds in that the audio doesn’t match the visuals. This is disorienting at first because what you’re hearing is similar enough to what you’re seeing, both taken from similar scenes, just mismatched.  While confusing, mismatching the audio and the visuals enables Houghton to juxtapose the two sides of Jerry against each other, one in the audio and one in the visuals. For example, around 1:29 the audio of Jerry laughing and teasing a boy for being out late the night before, is paired with a visual that shows him seriously coaching another boy. This technique also makes the viewer do more work to make sense of the story, and in doing so, the piece feels more abstract, more artistic.

While this piece is full of punching sounds that Houghton could have easily cut his shots to, most of the time he doesn’t cut on the beat. This sets Houghton’s style apart from most action sports videos. I wonder if Houghton does this to intentionally pull the focus of the video away from pure aggression. Only one time does he do this overtly (47 seconds), matching the sound of a punch and Jerry yelling “hit me” with a cut to two shots of people boxing (one where the bag is the focal point, another medium shot from the side, of Jerry boxing with a student). Only doing it here, elevated the moment above others. He breaks his own rule, and it has an impact.  

Throughout the piece, Houghton creates the illusion of matched action sequences. At the 35 second mark, we see a punching bag swing on the left. Then a medium long shot pops up on the right that shows students’ with their backs to the camera, while in the foreground a punching bag swings. The cadence of the swing nearly matches the swing in the shot to its left, but just as we realize this might be an illusion, he cuts to a new shot. He does this again at 53 seconds, when he adds in a cutaway of a bucket of bloody Kleenexes to show the tough side of boxing. To its left is someone throwing punches at a bag – both the bag and bucket shake at a similar rhythm, suggesting matched action. Putting these both on screen also provides a bit of foreshadowing, giving us a suggestion of what might be this boxer’s fate. Finally, I also love how he contrasts this bucket shot with the shot that replaces it, of one boy wrapping another’s gloves for him – a pure juxtaposition of aggression vs. caring.

At 1:12, Houghton plays with using composition and depth staging to show two sides of Jerry. To the left we see a medium shot of Jerry from below, while on the right is a medium long shot of him from above. By framing the left shot from below, Jerry towers over most of the frame, signaling to us that Jerry is large and in charge. However, the right shot taken from above makes him seems small. By using depth staging here, Houghton is able to obstruct the jump-roping figures in the background in the first shot so that we only see Jerry, while revealing them in the second.

Artistically, I love what Houghton does next, where he continues with the jump-ropers on the right in a match action sequence, now only showing their feet from a medium shot taken near ground level. He pairs this with a shot on the left (also just feet, same perspective), but of what looks like figures boxing. The two shots are mirrors of one another in terms of composition and framing, though they are taken from two different scenes (conceptual match cut?). One scene suggests tough play, while another innocent play.

I was drawn to what Houghton did at 1:25, when he took one shot of Jerry and mirrored it against itself on the screen, demonstrating Jerry’s dual personalities. Houghton has also played with depth staging here to create a bit of magic. We can see in the mirror a man being coached by jerry, but that person lives only in the mirror, absent from the rest of the shot because of how the shot has been split. I love this technique, because it almost suggests Jerry is speaking to a ghost, or maybe to his other half.

Houghton ends the piece with a shot of Jerry sitting alone at what looks like a bus stop (2:21). He uses a conceptual match cut here between the two shots on screen. On the right, we see a car’s headlights in the distance coming toward Jerry, while to the left we see a close up shot of the lit windows of a bus or train whizzing by. The two complement and play off of each other nicely. The train exits the screen to reveal what must be Jerry’s window, through which we see a silhouette boxing late into the night. Similar to the bloody napkin cutaway earlier, Houghton uses the two frames on screen to play with time, simultaneously showing us Jerry waiting for a ride home, alongside a shot of him already home and boxing.