I’ve been aware of Celine Dion at least since she sang the theme song (“My Heart Will Go On”) for Titanic in 1997, but I’d probably heard something from her before then. I didn’t follow her at all, however. To me she was just another pop singer, very good on so-called “power ballads,” but I can’t follow everything, can I? Still, every now and then, I’d hear something. When she was diagnosed with still-person syndrome, I heard about that. Then, a week or two ago the trailer for a documentary showed up on my Netflix feed: I Am: Celine Dion. I watched the trailer. “She looks old.” Not old old, just old. That’s what I thought. A couple of days later I decided to watch the whole film.
According to an interview with the director, Irene Taylor, in The New York Times, they didn’t know about her illness when they started filming. When the illness was finally diagnosed, they decided to continue. Dion had given them permission to film everything, and they did: feeding the dog, light sabers with her sons, a fascinating trip to a warehouse where her many costumes were stored, recording sessions, even therapy. This footage was cut with documentary and concert footage throughout her career, allowing us to see the past through the present, and the present in view of the past. At several points she talked about how she hated to disappoint her fans. Her sorrow was real, her connection with her fans is real.
The climax of the documentary came during a therapy session:
Tell me about your reaction in the moment toward the end of the documentary, when Dion starts to seize up during physical therapy.
I could just see this stiffness that was not like the flowing, lithe dancer that I had been filming for several months doing her physical therapy. Within a couple of minutes, she was moaning in pain.
I wanted to know if she was breathing, because she was moaning and then she stopped. I put the microphone, which was at the end of a pole you can discreetly put closer to your subject, underneath the table. I couldn’t hear her breathing.
I was very panicked. I was looking around the room, and I saw that her therapist called for her head of security. Her bodyguard immediately came into the room. I could see right away these two men were there to take care of her and they were trained to do it.
Probably within about three minutes, once this human response to want to be helpful and drop everything subsided, Nick [Midwig, the film’s director of photography] and I eased into filming everything as it happened. It was very uncomfortable. I’ve never been in a situation with a camera that has been that touch and go.
Facticity, that’s how it struck me, the raw truth. There is no more.
We saw both, the human being, and the artist; the artist animating the human, the human being an artist.
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