Billy the Kid

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.

Without making any arbitrary comparisons or dropping names (check previous review).

This documentary provides thoughtful insight into an unusual and interesting life. Only a cynic would not be charmed by Billy , he is innocent, candid and bright. If only there were more 15 year olds like Billy.

The only issues I would have with the film is that it only documents a short time-span in Billy's life and perhaps ends a bit abruptly. Also, I can imagine that the presence of the camera sometimes inhibited how people really would've really acted towards Billy. I don't think that the step-dad of the girl Billy fancied would have reacted so politely to the karate-kit clad boy naming his favourite slasher flicks off-camera.