Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

Kevin Clash grows up in Baltimore and starts making puppets out of cloth at home when he is eight. He cuts the lining out of his father's coat to make one, and his family does not get angry. He performs for the children in the neighbourhood, appears on local television, and then goes to New York. Forty years later he will be performing one of the most recognised puppet characters in the world. Constance Marks directs. The documentary appeared in 2011 and won an award at the Sundance film festival. Its best passage is Clash's relationship with his master. The well known puppet maker Kermit Love took the young Clash on and taught him the trade; the documentary covers that in detail. Elmo was at first an unimportant puppet and nobody knew what to do with him. Clash gave the character a voice and a way of behaving, and the character quickly moved to the centre of the programme. The second subject is the cost. Clash worked for years and lost the time he might have spent with his own daughter; the documentary addresses that directly. The technical side of puppetry is shown: the arms, the voice, watching yourself on a monitor and standing for hours. Serious allegations about Clash came out after the film and he left the programme; the documentary was made before those events and does not contain that information. Who it is for: anyone interested in puppetry, television history and documentaries about a craft. Who it is not for: there is no critical distance, the narrative is a straight success story, and the film is incomplete once what followed is known.