“Bartitsu: the Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes” preview trailer

A special preview of our upcoming feature-length documentary exploring the cultural history, rediscovery and modern revival of E.W. Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self Defence”.

Founded in London in 1899, Bartitsu was an early example of a mixed martial art, combining boxing, jiujitsu, savate and self defence with a walking stick. After a brief heyday, it was all but forgotten throughout the 20th century except for a single cryptic reference in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “the Adventure of the Empty House”.

Shot on location in Italy, Switzerland, England and the USA, “Bartitsu: the Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes” is presented by Tony Wolf and features interviews with Dr. Emelyne Godfrey, Harry Cook, Graham Noble, Will Thomas, Mark Donnelly and Neal Stephenson.

Watch this site for updates!

Preview trailer credits

Producers:

Ran Arthur Braun

Tony Wolf

Bartitsu Club Italia – Broken Art: Paolo Paparella & Angelica A. Pedatella

Cletarte – Gaetano Guglietta & Filomena Longo

Associate Producers:

Digital Room Srl

Music:

Adi Bar (piano)
Roni Cohen (cello)
Abney Park (“Airship Pirate” and “Sleep Isabella”)

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson on Bartitsu

Popular science fiction author Neal Stephenson‘s comments on Bartitsu, from a recent interview with the UK Daily Telegraph:

“So we’d mostly been doing longsword, in my little group,” says Stephenson. Ropes of muscle on his forearms attest to this, as do the pictures online of a Stephenson-designed spring-loaded practice sword that flexes on impact to soften a blow. “But we became interested in cane-fighting, which was taught in London a hundred years ago or so as part of this school of Bartitsu, founded by EW Barton-Wright, a railway engineer who’d picked up ju-jitsu in Japan. And he brought in a Swiss guy called Vigny who’d taken informal methods of walking-stick-fu and codified them into a system called la canne: he taught the part of the curriculum which involved fighting with walking sticks.”

No way, I say.

“Yeah. There’s a whole curriculum over fighting with bicycles. Pictures of an Edwardian lady in a floor-length dress and a huge hat with flowers, riding primly down a country lane, and when a ruffian comes out she uses some trick with the bicycle to flatten him and rides off. It’s great stuff. The bicycles we’re not sure how to approach, but we’ve created a little assembly line to make rattan canes, with a knob on the end. But there’s, you know, how to use a bicycle pump as a weapon. How to defend yourself with a parasol. Crazy.”