Quote:
The 1962 documentary Lonely Boy, directed by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor, is a film about the manufacture of a pop idol. Paul Anka, the subject of the documentary, is a popular performer at the peak of his career, but the directors use a variety of strategies to express their view of him as an isolated figure who is seen by his handlers as a piece of merchandise and whose success is questionable. They do this through interviews which focus on the process of Anka’s rise, frequent references to the merchandising operation he is at the center of, editing that highlights the freakishness and hysteria of his fans, and frequent shots that emphasize his isolation. Several other films made in the 1960s dealt with the phenomenon of celebrity in the same cinema vérité style, and examining how the editing choices made by Koenig and Kroitor differ from films such as Primary (Robert Drew, 1960), What’s Happening! The Beatles In the U.S.A. (Albert and David Maysles, 1964) and Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967) is useful in illustrating the directors’ skeptical view of the celebrity machine and the idea that despite Anka’s success, Lonely Boy can be seen as yet another Canadian film about failure.

According to Peter Harcourt, the filmmakers saw Anka as a “tragic figure. Early on, a narrator states the film’s interest is in Anka’s transformation from “an entertainer into an idol.” The process of this transformation is sketched out when Anka talks frankly of his belief that to become the type of star he wanted to be, he “had to look like he was in show business.” He details his losing 35 pounds and spending over a year to shape his hair. Later, his manager Irvin Feld, after a dispassionate discussion of Anka’s facial features, mentions Anka had a nose job and states bluntly that it would be impossible to recognize him from photographs taken just a couple of years before. Feld then discusses his strategy of “grooming” Anka for a move away from his current teen audience to an older nightclub audience. What is interesting about this is less the details of Anka’s transformation than the film’s focus on them. The subjects of Primary (John F. Kennedy), What’s Happening! (The Beatles) and Don’t Look Back (Bob Dylan) were also, to some extent, manufactured celebrities who adopted personas to achieve stardom. But those films, similar to Lonely Boy in many other ways, largely ignore this question.
– David Hanley

Lonely Boy (1962, Wolf Koenig & Roman Kroitor) [576p WEB].mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	26 min 40 s
Size: 	645 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 122 kb/s
BPP: 	0.294
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/043142BC165A1FD/Lonely_Boy_(1962,_Wolf_Koenig_&_Roman_Kroitor)__576p_WEB_.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Wolf Koenig & Roman Kroitor – Lonely Boy (1962) first appeared on Cinema of the World.