Billy the Kid (2007)

User Rating:

7.4/10   

Director:

Jennifer Venditti

Genre:

Documentary

Plot:

"I'm not black, I'm not white, not foreign, just different in the mind. Different brains, that's all,"...

Awards:

5 wins

Cast

Penny Baker	...	Herself
Billy P.	...	Himself
Heather Pelletier	...	Herself

Directed by
Jennifer Venditti

Produced by
Bob Alexander	....	executive producer
Lubov Azria	....	executive producer
Danielle Di Giacomo	....	associate producer
Chiemi Karasawa	....	producer
Barnet Liberman	....	executive producer
Jordan Mattos	....	associate producer
Jennifer Venditti	....	producer

Original Music by
Guy Blakeslee
Liz Lysinger
Christian Zucconi

Cinematography by
Donald Cumming

Film Editing by
Michael Levine
Enat Sidi

Sound Department
David Ellinwood	....	dialog editor
Jay Peck	....	foley artist
Tony Volante	....	sound re-recording mixer
Damian Volpe	....	supervising sound editor

Stunts
Tomas Sanchez	....	stunts

Camera and Electrical Department
Paris Kain	....	camera operator: additional photography

Editorial Department
Jennifer Chiurco	....	assistant editor
John Crowley	....	colorist

Music Department
Samy Bardet	....	music mixer

Other crew
Nina Day Chaudhuri	....	production coordinator
Jaclyn Paris	....	assistant to producer

Thanks
John David Allen	....	special thanks
Ryan Donowho	....	special thanks

Production Companies

• Eight Films
• isotopefilms

Distributors

• Elephant Eye Films (2007) (USA) (theatrical)
• Siren Visual Entertainment (2008) (Australia) (DVD)

Other Companies

• Goldcrest Post Production New York  sound post-production
• Postworks New York  post-production facilities

Runtime:

USA:84 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital | Dolby

Certification:

New Zealand:PG | Australia:PG

Filming Locations:

Lisbon Falls, Maine, USA

Company:

Eight Films

Soundtrack:

Spring Story

Egomania on film

This film demonstrates the depths to which the documentary medium has sunk. Documentaries should be about exposing emotional and/or socio-political truth through reality. In the same way that it was Welles' tragedy to make 'Citizen Kane' as his first film, it is the documentary genre's tragedy that it was effectively created through 'Nanook of the North'. For many years, documentarists tried to keep pace with Flaherty, or, like Dziga Vertov, create an albeit inferior alternative.

Eventually, they gave up and succumbed to the talking head as the purveyor of truth. The only thing talking heads purvey is words, and words are not the prime medium of expression in cinema.

'Billy the Kid' the film is as sad a case as Billy the Kid the person. The film relies on obsessive immediacy in the same way that Billy relies on obsessive subjectivity. There is not, as far as I can remember, one time in the film where anything is communicated by the placement of the camera or the arrangement of the content of the frame.

With Flaherty, it is completely the reverse, it is difficult to find images that are not primarily giving us truth through the placement of the camera. Of course Flaherty *arranged* his films, he scripted them and they were 'acted', not made 'on the hoof'. But there is more emotional, and ontological truth in every scene in Flaherty's work than in the whole of 'Billy the Kid' and a hundred nonentities like it.

The film doesn't even try to be visually expressive. It is television and it has the same relation to the art of the cinema as an average magazine article has to the art of literature.