On quite another level Missing Allen is also a tribute to Allen´s work as a filmmaker. The film´s cinematic style reflects the search with a camera constantly in motion, with flowing movements and unusual camera angles, punctuated only now and then by interviews, which usually define the genre.
Very early during the production Christian Bauer decided to leave his usual position behind the camera and to tell the story in the first person.
There are only a few possible explanations for his disappearance: Has he dropped out of society - but for what reason? Is he hiding out, afraid of the revenge of the religious cult he seems to have been a member of? Or has he been murdered - and why? Step by step the film eliminates one scenario after the other, until we are faced with only one possible explanation: Allen is dead. Until Allen´s disappearance in November 1995 they had shot seven films together.įour and a half years later, when Missing Allen begins, nobody has heard from Allen Ross. Their friendship had started with their first project in 1989, a feature length documentary about Allen´s hometown Chicago. The film is investigating the disappearance of Allen Ross, a filmmaker and Cameraman from Chicago who went missing only a few weeks after he had shot a film about the Mississippi River together with director Christian Bauer. Missing Allen is a detective story, which leads the viewer into the American Heart of Darkness, to Waco, Texas and Oklahoma City, to UFO-believers and religious cults. Most documentary-filmmakers find their subjects in other people´s lives - here the director is not only personally involved, but Christian Bauer also tells the story of an unfolding mystery, the story of the search for a lost friend and colleague, in which the filmmaker becomes the detective. A story like Missing Allen has never been told on film.
0 kommentar(er)
