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When We Were Kings Essay

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The documentary When We Were Kings, was created using many athletics’ of realism to create an accurate and detailed story of Muhammad Ali’s life. This is a nonfiction film made up of many different fight clips, interviews, and discussions between characters, which made it simple for this film to show how Muhammad Ali’s life actually was during the time period around 1974. When considering the elements to make up a film based on truth and realism it is easy to see that many of the elements overlap. For example, the film cannot have on-camera interviews without real people, and it cant have stock film without real people, and stock film can be of the on camera interview, so with that being said it is important for any director to connects all …show more content…

When We Were Kings is primarily made of stock films besides when there are people who come into the film to speak on this behalf. These pieces of stock film including Ali training, speaking highly of himself, George Foreman training, and also many musical clips were inserted giving a more African film. One clip that really stuck out to me was after the narrator talks about how Foreman would be punching a watermelon size whole into his punching bag which then they showed a clip of Foreman at practice and he really has punched a giant dent in the bag. They then showed stock film of Ali also entering the gym where the narrator spoke over the clip saying when Ali would enter the gym he would not give any attention to Foreman and the damage he was doing to his punching bag, instead he would just walk by the man as if he were a nobody. The use of the stock film in this clip is very useful in knowing how powerful Foreman really was, and how Ali’s arrogance gave Foreman no attention. Without the use of stock film in many of this film we wouldn’t really get to know Ali as well, because we would just hear of what he did. With the combination of the narration over the stock film the audience is able to see and hear about Ali’s greatness, which backs each other up giving the audience a sense of truth in what they are seeing and

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