Movie Detail

"The kid stays in the picture" is a great documentary that has a great subject in terms of resources available to the directors. Robert Evans and Paramount provide the bulk of the materials for this movie. Robert Evans had already done a book and a book on tape before this documentary had come out, so the directors had the benefit of knowing how well Bob's voice would go over as a narrator. But this movie is brilliant because of how it goes about telling non-fiction in the format of fiction. One of the directors comments that the story consists of three acts and includes a love story. This just sounds like fiction, and it is as much fiction as any thing else because to hear Evans tell his own story is to hear the image of himself that he wants you to hear. The directors took this theme of image and and developed a visual language based on the lavish fairy tail that existed in Bob's world. The visuals achieve this by using the many photographic stills in storage. They would cut out figure and backgrounds in order to be able to move the two independently to create an effect of interaction within the environment. It also used long pan shots of stills and shadow effects. The film also includes stock video footage of highways, storms, clouds, airplane runways in order to illustrate emotional tides. The smooth transitions between each clip also made for a dreamy quality in the picture, when it came time for a quick cut it was really noticeable.

Some of the same clipping out of figures and environment manipulation was used in telling the John Darger story. His drawings we separated apart in order to create action sequences that seem to occur within his paintings. The combination of seeing the paintings with movement and hearing his writings together tell a great story that I wouldn't get otherwise. I don't think that this one is as entertaining as the first in this critique but only because they didn't the resources to compete, and they didn't manipulate actual photographs like in "The Kid Stays in the Picture", but I think a reason for this is that it didn't fit the concept.

Ken Burnes uses long pans on large images.