Ayrton-Senna-Racing-DaySport barely needs the attention of documentary filmmakers. Modern sport is so widely and eagerly broadcast, dissected and then replayed that viewer fatigue sets in before a filmmaker can come along and make any sense of it, reports the Australian.

A new documentary, Senna, is another standout, one that takes advantage of the blanket coverage given to certain sports. It works precisely because its subject, triple Formula One champion Ayrton Senna, was so often filmed during his time in the 1980s.

The film’s director, Asif Kapadia, has produced something novel in the documentary form. Senna does not have talking heads. Visually, it consists solely of archival footage of Senna and his Formula One milieu, using hundreds of hours of footage from news sources and Formula One’s archives, augmented by material held by Senna’s family.

The standard documentary form of endless numbers of people just talking is discarded in favour of vision combined with newly recorded commentary from Senna’s peers and journalists.

“Everyone at the studio said: ‘When are you going to shoot the interviews because we need to see who we’re hearing,’ ” Kapadia says. “And my gut instincts from very early on were: ‘I don’t want any interviews, I want to make this entirely from the archives.’ ”

Senna feels alive precisely because it focuses unapologetically on its subject and not a series of old men talking in the studio.

“That’s just not the kind of filmmaking I’m interested in or particularly good at because I didn’t come from that background,” Kapadia says. “When I was in TV, doing interviews used to drive me mad. I really want to make films for the big screen and find ways to visually tell the story with images and in the edit.

His devotion to his Catholic faith suggested, at least in the eyes of his rival Alain Prost, that he was immortal. He dedicated some of his most incredible drives to God and the epitaph on his gravestone reads: “Nothing can separate me from God”. The day before his death he is said to have had a premonition about it.

source: © cathnews.com