American documentarian Brett Morgen is not satisfied with merely recording the world, he is set out to rearrange consciousness. His films move like recollections caught between dream and evidence, less concerned with chronology than with sensation. They resemble séances assembled from stray fragments, where the point is not to explain a life but to make its pulse audible again. Across these three defining works, Morgen builds not so much biographies as glowing reliquaries, each one preserving a distinctive spirit through rhythm, image, and breath.
In THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, the checkered life of Paramount executive Robert Evans (1930-2019) unfolds like an expensive hallucination. The film's narration, in which Evans portrays all the other characters as well as himself, is taken directly from the recording of the audio-book version of his eponymous autobiography. Evans narrates his own legend with a mixture of pride and ache, his voice both smooth and frayed. Morgen allows him to speak without interruption, trusting that the self-mythologizing will reveal its own tenderness. Photographs drift into motion; studio stills ripple as if stirred by memory.
The film’s surfaces gleam, but a conspicuous fatigue seeps through the glamour. Morgen, sharing the director credit with Burstein, seems fascinated by the machinery of self-invention - the way Evans turns his defeats into anecdotes and his solitude into style. There’s affection in the presentation, but also a kind of gentle irony: Hollywood, he suggests, is built on illusions that are truer than truth itself. The result is not satire but a portrait of longing disguised as success, a confession told through mirrors.
Fifteen years later, the stage lights fade and the jungle takes their place. JANE begins where noise ends. From over a hundred hours of forgotten 1960s footage filmed by Dutch wildlife filmmaker and photographer Hugo van Lawick (1937-2002), the ex-husband of Jane Goodall (1934-2025), the pioneer in primate ethology and the film's subject, Morgen gleans and shapes a meditation on attention. Goodall appears as both scientist and pilgrim, moving through Tanzania with the patience of someone learning a new language. The camera follows her as she studies the chimpanzees, and we sense an intelligence observing another intelligence. Morgen’s editing breathes at her pace - measured, quiet, luminous. Glass’s supreme music swells and subsides like weather. Nothing feels rushed or ornamental.
To achieve a certain clarity in terms of understanding Jane's works, Morgen resists the urge to sanctify his subject. Goodall is not a symbol of purity but a person in dialogue with her surroundings, full of curiosity and resolve. The rediscovered footage carries the warmth of the relationship between observer and observed, and Morgen arranges it with the delicacy of someone restoring an ancient fresco. It’s a work of empathy, not worship. Where THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE explores the glamour of invention, JANE contemplates the grace of perception. Both are forms of creation, but the second possesses no performative showboating, only presence.
Then comes MOONAGE DAYDREAM, a plunge into David Bowie’s vast, iridescent sphere. Morgen abandons the grammar of conventional biography entirely and constructs something closer to a vision. Decades of performances, interviews, and art collide in an electric stream of sound and light. Morgen edits like a musician, cutting not for coherence but for cadence, letting the images rise and fall with the music’s pulse.
Bowie’s voice drifts through it all - reflective, amused, and serene. Morgen doesn’t interpret him or seek a final message; he allows Bowie’s ideas to unfold like constellations. The result is a work of motion and metamorphosis. Every image suggests another life, every transition a new self. For some, the density may feel dizzying, but that’s the point: Bowie lived as flux, and the film mirrors that perpetual change. Beneath the spectacle, however, lies a quiet ascent from fragmentation toward unity. In its closing moments, Bowie seems to dissolve into the very light that once defined him, a human presence dispersing into energy. It feels less like an ending than a continuation - the self released into its elements.
Taken together, these three films trace Morgen’s own transformation. In THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, he studies the spectacle of identity; in JANE, the devotion of perception; in MOONAGE DAYDREAM, the transcendence that arrives when the self disintegrates. Through them runs a single conviction: that editing is an act of resurrection. Morgen's assemblage is to discover hidden correspondences. His cinema asks us to drift rather than decode, to experience rather than conclude. Meaning, in his work, lives between the cuts.
This approach demands surrender. Morgen’s montages are often dense, sometimes overwhelming, but the density feels earned. His subjects - ego, wonder, creation - refuse simplicity. To soften them would be dishonest. Instead, he trusts the viewer’s endurance, shaping films that engulf before they clarify. What we receive isn’t information but sensation. Watching his work feels like stepping into a current: resistance is useless, but if you yield, something vast carries you.
A thread of mortality runs quietly through all three. Evans’s voice trembles with nostalgia; Goodall’s footage glows with the tenderness of time regained; Bowie’s presence radiates posthumous calm. Morgen seems drawn to the afterlife of images (especially now, all the three subjects passed away), to the idea that film can suspend disappearance. His editing room becomes a kind of chapel where lost moments are revived through motion. He rearranges fragments not to reanimate the past but to let it continue breathing in another form.
Through this process, something ineffable happens. Evans’s bravado reveals loneliness; Goodall’s patience turns into devotion; Bowie’s playfulness becomes serenity. Morgen never underlines these shifts - they happen within the movement of the films themselves. The act of cutting becomes a metaphor for living: both are sequences of separation arranged into coherence. In every splice there’s a gesture of belief that fragments, if aligned just right, can suggest wholeness again.
By the close of MOONAGE DAYDREAM, the line between documentary and reverie has dissolved. Morgen no longer constructs meaning; he lets it shimmer. His work doesn’t insist or explain - it communes. The images don’t demand belief; they invite intimacy. What began as a fascination with myth has grown into an exploration of consciousness itself. Evans embodies performance, Goodall perception, Bowie transformation. Together they outline the shape of a soul passing through three disparate trajectories of becoming.
Morgen’s achievement also lies in the consistent distillation of his vision. He reminds us that the non-fictional cinema, even in an age of embarrassment of richness, can still carry over a style. His films refuse cynicism; they restore wonder. He treats montage not as craft but as a form of listening, as if each cut were a question posed to time. When the images finally fade - Evans’s laughter, Jane’s gentle gaze, Bowie’s radiant persona - we are left with the hum of something still alive. His documentaries do not preserve life; they extend it.
Brett Morgen’s work believes that reality alone is never sufficient. It needs to be rediscovered, frame by frame, until it begins to sing again. In that flicker between two images - one fading, one beginning - the world seems briefly whole, and cinema remembers what it was always meant to do: to make life feel newly possible.
referential entries: Michael Apted's GORILLAS IN THE MIST (1988, 6.9/10); Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976, 6.7/10); Tony Scott's THE HUNGER (1983, 5.8/10); Nagisa Ôshima's MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE (1983, 8.5/10); Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin's TINA (2021, 7.6/10).
在70年代主掌派拉蒙的伊凡斯是好莱坞的传奇人物。他手下制作的片单—「教父」, 「爱的故事」、「失婴记」,「马拉松人」,「唐人街」—标示着电影艺术的巅峰…那段光芒四射、无法复制、难以超越的年代。
离开派拉蒙自立门户，他的表现完全走样。一度呼风唤雨的大亨历经连串的官司、离婚、丑闻、中风、终至破产，被迫变卖豪宅，未婚妻在结婚当天跟别人上床，远离了制片厂，成天在两个窝囊地点奔波打转—法院和医院。
从影迷的角度，本片虽不乏可观之处，却少了我们最渴望的内幕—一部巨片从无到有的过程。谁的原始构想？谁负责主导？照伊凡斯的说法，似乎一切都来的理所当然。譬如，被公认影史最杰出剧本的「唐人街」，身为制作人，他承认自己「完全不懂」剧本在说什么。
繁华落尽，阅透影海浮沈，过气的帅哥仍一派潇洒，或许正因为如此，他的故事才值得咀嚼玩味；也或许缺少了这類狂妄的人物，当代好莱坞再也拍不出伟大的電影。
American documentarian Brett Morgen is not satisfied with merely recording the world, he is set out to rearrange consciousness. His films move like recollections caught between dream and evidence, less concerned with chronology than with sensation. They resemble séances assembled from stray fragments, where the point is not to explain a life but to make its pulse audible again. Across these three defining works, Morgen builds not so much biographies as glowing reliquaries, each one preserving a distinctive spirit through rhythm, image, and breath.
In THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, the checkered life of Paramount executive Robert Evans (1930-2019) unfolds like an expensive hallucination. The film's narration, in which Evans portrays all the other characters as well as himself, is taken directly from the recording of the audio-book version of his eponymous autobiography. Evans narrates his own legend with a mixture of pride and ache, his voice both smooth and frayed. Morgen allows him to speak without interruption, trusting that the self-mythologizing will reveal its own tenderness. Photographs drift into motion; studio stills ripple as if stirred by memory.
The film’s surfaces gleam, but a conspicuous fatigue seeps through the glamour. Morgen, sharing the director credit with Burstein, seems fascinated by the machinery of self-invention - the way Evans turns his defeats into anecdotes and his solitude into style. There’s affection in the presentation, but also a kind of gentle irony: Hollywood, he suggests, is built on illusions that are truer than truth itself. The result is not satire but a portrait of longing disguised as success, a confession told through mirrors.
Fifteen years later, the stage lights fade and the jungle takes their place. JANE begins where noise ends. From over a hundred hours of forgotten 1960s footage filmed by Dutch wildlife filmmaker and photographer Hugo van Lawick (1937-2002), the ex-husband of Jane Goodall (1934-2025), the pioneer in primate ethology and the film's subject, Morgen gleans and shapes a meditation on attention. Goodall appears as both scientist and pilgrim, moving through Tanzania with the patience of someone learning a new language. The camera follows her as she studies the chimpanzees, and we sense an intelligence observing another intelligence. Morgen’s editing breathes at her pace - measured, quiet, luminous. Glass’s supreme music swells and subsides like weather. Nothing feels rushed or ornamental.
To achieve a certain clarity in terms of understanding Jane's works, Morgen resists the urge to sanctify his subject. Goodall is not a symbol of purity but a person in dialogue with her surroundings, full of curiosity and resolve. The rediscovered footage carries the warmth of the relationship between observer and observed, and Morgen arranges it with the delicacy of someone restoring an ancient fresco. It’s a work of empathy, not worship. Where THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE explores the glamour of invention, JANE contemplates the grace of perception. Both are forms of creation, but the second possesses no performative showboating, only presence.
Then comes MOONAGE DAYDREAM, a plunge into David Bowie’s vast, iridescent sphere. Morgen abandons the grammar of conventional biography entirely and constructs something closer to a vision. Decades of performances, interviews, and art collide in an electric stream of sound and light. Morgen edits like a musician, cutting not for coherence but for cadence, letting the images rise and fall with the music’s pulse.
Bowie’s voice drifts through it all - reflective, amused, and serene. Morgen doesn’t interpret him or seek a final message; he allows Bowie’s ideas to unfold like constellations. The result is a work of motion and metamorphosis. Every image suggests another life, every transition a new self. For some, the density may feel dizzying, but that’s the point: Bowie lived as flux, and the film mirrors that perpetual change. Beneath the spectacle, however, lies a quiet ascent from fragmentation toward unity. In its closing moments, Bowie seems to dissolve into the very light that once defined him, a human presence dispersing into energy. It feels less like an ending than a continuation - the self released into its elements.
Taken together, these three films trace Morgen’s own transformation. In THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, he studies the spectacle of identity; in JANE, the devotion of perception; in MOONAGE DAYDREAM, the transcendence that arrives when the self disintegrates. Through them runs a single conviction: that editing is an act of resurrection. Morgen's assemblage is to discover hidden correspondences. His cinema asks us to drift rather than decode, to experience rather than conclude. Meaning, in his work, lives between the cuts.
This approach demands surrender. Morgen’s montages are often dense, sometimes overwhelming, but the density feels earned. His subjects - ego, wonder, creation - refuse simplicity. To soften them would be dishonest. Instead, he trusts the viewer’s endurance, shaping films that engulf before they clarify. What we receive isn’t information but sensation. Watching his work feels like stepping into a current: resistance is useless, but if you yield, something vast carries you.
A thread of mortality runs quietly through all three. Evans’s voice trembles with nostalgia; Goodall’s footage glows with the tenderness of time regained; Bowie’s presence radiates posthumous calm. Morgen seems drawn to the afterlife of images (especially now, all the three subjects passed away), to the idea that film can suspend disappearance. His editing room becomes a kind of chapel where lost moments are revived through motion. He rearranges fragments not to reanimate the past but to let it continue breathing in another form.
Through this process, something ineffable happens. Evans’s bravado reveals loneliness; Goodall’s patience turns into devotion; Bowie’s playfulness becomes serenity. Morgen never underlines these shifts - they happen within the movement of the films themselves. The act of cutting becomes a metaphor for living: both are sequences of separation arranged into coherence. In every splice there’s a gesture of belief that fragments, if aligned just right, can suggest wholeness again.
By the close of MOONAGE DAYDREAM, the line between documentary and reverie has dissolved. Morgen no longer constructs meaning; he lets it shimmer. His work doesn’t insist or explain - it communes. The images don’t demand belief; they invite intimacy. What began as a fascination with myth has grown into an exploration of consciousness itself. Evans embodies performance, Goodall perception, Bowie transformation. Together they outline the shape of a soul passing through three disparate trajectories of becoming.
Morgen’s achievement also lies in the consistent distillation of his vision. He reminds us that the non-fictional cinema, even in an age of embarrassment of richness, can still carry over a style. His films refuse cynicism; they restore wonder. He treats montage not as craft but as a form of listening, as if each cut were a question posed to time. When the images finally fade - Evans’s laughter, Jane’s gentle gaze, Bowie’s radiant persona - we are left with the hum of something still alive. His documentaries do not preserve life; they extend it.
Brett Morgen’s work believes that reality alone is never sufficient. It needs to be rediscovered, frame by frame, until it begins to sing again. In that flicker between two images - one fading, one beginning - the world seems briefly whole, and cinema remembers what it was always meant to do: to make life feel newly possible.
referential entries: Michael Apted's GORILLAS IN THE MIST (1988, 6.9/10); Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976, 6.7/10); Tony Scott's THE HUNGER (1983, 5.8/10); Nagisa Ôshima's MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE (1983, 8.5/10); Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin's TINA (2021, 7.6/10).
Title: The Kid Stays in the Picture
Year: 2002
Genre: Documentary, Biography
Country: USA
Language: English
Directors: Brett Morgen, Nanette Burstein
Screenwriter: Brett Morgen
based on the book by Robert Evans
Composer: Jeff Danna
Cinematographer: John Bailey
Editor: Jun Diaz
Rating: 6.7/10
Title: Jane
Year: 2017
Genre: Documentary, Biography
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Brett Morgen
Writers: Brett Morgen, Jane Goodall
Composer: Philip Glass
Cinematographer: Ellen Kuras
Editor: Joe Beshenkovsky
Cast:
Jane Goodall
Rating: 7.7/10
Title: Moonage Daydream
Year: 2022
Genre: Documentary, Music, Biography
Country: USA, Germany
Language: English
Director/Writer/Editor: Brett Morgen
Rating: 7.8/10