In Netflix's jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, the camera serves two functions

The New York Times

"It captures West at a vulnerable moment in his nascent career, when the future was anything but guaranteed. And it is also a kind of marker of success on its own," Jon Caramanica says of the three-part docuseries directed by Chike Ozah and Clarence “Coodie” Simmons. "The camera’s presence forces the people West encounters to treat him just a tad more seriously, or at least to wonder if they should. In almost every encounter captured, there is a slight hiccup at the beginning, in which the other person wonders, what exactly are we doing here? West, one of the defining figures of the last 20 years, has been a consistent innovator in music and style. But he has also long had a preternatural grasp of the mechanisms of celebrity, how success is only truly impactful if it is imprinted onto others. West believed in himself, but wouldn’t stop until he’d convinced those around him, too. Jeen-yuhs is something like the demo tape of that phenomenon. It is both fascinating and obvious, eerie in the way that it foretells who West eventually would become by showing who he always has been."

ALSO:

• jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy isn't a vanity project -- it's a candid look at how Kanye West lost his way
• jeen-yuhs is an extraordinary film in a number of ways, a moving, challenging work of deep and unflinching care
• jeen-yuhs is truly genius...for the first two-thirds, at least: That's not a bad average for an ambitious project
• jeen-yuhs is a heartbreaking ode to the old Kanye
• jeen-yuhs is fascinatingly incomplete
• The frustrating part is that jeen-yuhs never sufficiently illuminates the path that led us here
• jeen-yuhs gets to the root of Donda West's influence on Kanye's life
• What the documentary shows rather than tells is that Kanye suffered greatly after his mother died
• Directors Chike Ozah and Clarence “Coodie” Simmons worked with Kanye West going back two decades, so what was different with this experience?: "Everything up to this point was a rehearsal for this moment," Simmons tells Vanity Fair. Ozah adds: "We were put in a position to throw everything into this. It is rare at times that we are able to throw everything we got, stylistically and sonically, and to be able to do these mash-ups with this raw footage and give this look. That is such an epitome of us—Coodie and I. Our stylistic journey over the years and the impression that we’ve always kind of been trying to make through all these other films, this is the one film that encapsulates all of that."
• What surprised Simmons and Chike while they were making the documentary?: “I would say, the footage that I found of his mother giving him some advice about, you know, ‘The giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing you can. You can stay on the ground and be in the air at the same time,’” Simmons tells The Root. “That was shocking when I saw it because I did her funeral presentation and I don’t remember seeing it. And this was a week before he went to the Oval Office. I felt like that message was for Kanye to see (at that moment). So I was shocked....Was she saying it then or was she saying it now? That’s how powerful that was.”