In the understated manner of cinema verité, Wolf Koenig’s and Roman Kroiter’s 1962 film “Lonely Boy”, sets an early and unflinching lens on American-style celebrity and fans alike, dissecting a burgeoning Hollywood behemoth that was just setting out on its imperial conquest of local cultures across the globe. Canadian film culture might well be one of its first conquests. Teen idol Paul Anka, the subject of this award-winning National Film Board documentary film, was a runaway Canadian talent who rose quickly to fame at a young age, and his naïve adoption of the trappings of celebrity culture are presented by the film-makers as a kind of empty success - a success without soul, rooted in nothing but fame itself and the mass hysteria it provoked in the audiences. This subtle and accomplished documentary won several awards in the international film circuit, including Grand Prize at the Festival dei Popoli / International Film Festival on Social Documentary (Italy, 1963), Film of the Year at the Genie Awards (Montréal 1963) and First Prize for a Documentary - City of Oberhausen Award – at the International Short Film Festival (Germany, 1963) . The steady gaze of the no-frills, hand-held camera also examines the fans themselves: face after gushing face, the screams, the tears, are filmed in slow-motion, revealing the hungry ghost-like character of this kind of collective and public emotional caterwauling. The pale faces against the vastness of the darkened theatre halls where Anka performed, showed pubescent females, whose impending sexual impulses and mobbish mind-set were exploited by the promoters for brilliant financial gain. Paul is an affable fellow, who charms both men and women, and whose good looks are artificially sculpted to better fit the role of heart-throb. Judged by the standards of today, Anka’s nose job looks like a quick trip to the meat-removal market, but as presented in the film, it seems a tragic sacrifice of true and idiosyncratic character in exchange for fame - or money. In this sense Anka’s willingness to succumb to the requests of his promoters seems fatuous. Filmed in grainy black and white, the visual impression of the film conveys a kind of nostalgia for something lost, be it in Anka’s character, or in the culture that rouses large masses of people to the point of swooning, signaling a kind of mindlessness and inattention to the actual craft of music. Anka’s talents as a musician, however large or small, are entirely lost in the furor. We see Anka performing on stage, exuding androgens and whipping up his audiences by pointing a finger, or cuddling a fan during a song. Interspersed with “voice of God” narration and clips of interviews with Paul, his promoters and his fans, one eventually has the sense that Anka lives in a kind of aestheticised bubble that borders on the surreal. That this epitomizes the realization of the American Dream is somehow disappointing. Why would one of the most successful young men of his time - for a time - be lonely? In this respect the film challenges American celebrity culture head-on as well as the Canadian yearning for it. So many of Canada’s best-known talents in the film industry had left Canada to pursue the lofty perches of Hollywood, and in so doing blurred the markers that distinguish Canadian culture from that of the US. By presenting a stripped-down look at the mass hysteria that is American celebrity culture, the film seems to be asking the question: what is there to like about it really? We can see that Paul enjoys all the fruits that come with this kind of success, but does he revel in them? Is he truly happy? We see him stripped down in his dressing room as his promoters get him stage-primed; he seems to slip easily into the mold of his tuxedo, but his wistful gaze out of the window of a bus, while his promoters natter incessantly, indicates that perhaps he doesn’t live so easily with this fame. At this point, Paul seems as much a victim as a beneficiary in this money-making machine, and one has the premonitory sense that his flame might soon flicker out, despite the ostentatious statement by Anka’s promoter, Irving Field, that “God gave [Paul] something that I don't think he's given anyone in the past 500 years” The only music presented in the film is during Paul’s performances, and even then we can hardly hear him over all the screaming, with the exception of the scene where the makers abandon synchronous sound –a hallmark of the freshness of cinema verité- and cut to a recorded track of Anka singing. This presents a specter even more terrifying than the reality of the screaming: the complete and utter mindlessness driving the machinery of the fame industry – something akin to Chomsky’s assessment of sports adulation as an exercise in “training in irrational jingoism” . According to an interview with Koenig by Tammy Stone, the choice to cut the screams from the track was because he himself was tired of hearing them . It was a pleasant surprise to him that this enhanced the effectiveness of the scene. The lack of musical accompaniment in most scenes in the film imparts no underserved sentimentality to the machinations of celebrity-adulation money-shaking. Although the film is conservative in technique, its cumulative effect by its end is that of a locomotive; it has the effect of flattening the imagined topography of American success, and of dulling the hallucinatory hues we attribute to what we call “dreaming in technicolour”. Seth Feldman refers to a recurring device in Canadian cinema in terms of silence or absence, and sets it in the context of two linguistic solitudes who cannot properly communicate with each other. In this manner, what is not communicated somehow becomes a central element of the dynamics between the two cultural entities. But silence or absence conveys so much more than mere political enmity; as a device in film making, it carries a heft that transcends heated exchanges, or classically American over-the-top acting styles or out of touch super-heroism. It is in Paul’s moments of quiet reflection when we can catch a glimpse into the young man’s soul and project our own apprehensions about celebrity culture onto him. Similarly, the absence of the screams ironically amplifies their oppressive effect, engendering in the film audience a fight or flight response that must be contained. Feldman attributes the silence to his conviction that English Canadian cinema “has not yet had its Perrault” . Struggling to overcome not one, but two colonial entities, a distinctly Canadian cinematic English language fails to emerge, and our defeated heroes often fall into a sullen silence. Filling the void of articulation was the Griersonian voice-over, a trend that dominated post-war English Canadian films , especially documentaries, and from which Lonely Boy was something of a departure. Noted for its long roster documentary film-makers, Koenig worked in the more experimental wing of the NFB, Studio B, and shared the work of editing the film with several other colleagues involved in the project. An early to mid-life production of Studio B, Lonely Boy is not an experimental film per se, but Koenig admits that the film was assembled from a series of non-sequential shots, a pastiche of moving images, filmed with one single camera and pulled together in collaboration with Roman Kroiter, Tom Daly, the producer, John Spotton and Guy Cote. Lonely Boy, a ground-breaking success for the NFB, inspired other penetrating NFB documentaries such as Dream Machine, produced by Peter Starr in 2001. Tom Perimutter, Chairman of the NFB’s Board, in promoting the NFB’s new on-line archive of great film captures the timelessness of the production, “What strikes you is how perennial or how relevant and fresh these films are. A film like Lonely Boy could have been done yesterday."