D.A. Pennebaker, who has
died aged 94, was a major documentary filmmaker who spent much of his
fifty-year career interrogating notions of image, power and celebrity.
His best known work remains
Don’t Look Back (1967), a groundbreaking, access-all-areas rockumentary following
Bob Dylan on his British tour of 1965. Pennebaker, slyly counterpointing the public
Dylan with the private Dylan, kept catching the newly sainted folk hero with
his halo off-centre: one moment he was giving tetchy press interviews, the next
he could be seen breaking up with Joan Baez.
After a decade or more of
record-company hype and mythmaking, here was an exciting new way of looking at rock’s
superstars. The film’s opening sequence – showing Dylan littering an alleyway
behind the Savoy to the strains of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” – would
subsequently be claimed by music television as in effect the first pop promo,
yet what followed more often suggested the tiny, mumbling, sometimes petty man
behind the global icon.
The film proved a critical
and commercial success, and Pennebaker – stout, sandy-haired, already approaching
middle-age – found himself an unlikely cohort to rockers facing transitional
moments. He followed Don’t Look Back with Monterey Pop (1968), a
snapshot of the US musical scene immediately prior to Woodstock, and captured
Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar ablaze; then repaired to Hammersmith to shoot Ziggy
Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973), the enduring record of David
Bowie’s final gig in full Starman blusher.
These films brought fans
closer to their heroes than ever before. Pennebaker had been part of the Direct
Cinema movement: a major documentary rethink that rejected the old guard’s
multitudinous crews and leading voiceovers in favour of fly-on-the-wall
coverage enabled by new, lightweight recording equipment.
In a break from
documentary tradition, Pennebaker typically avoided looking through his
camera’s viewfinder, preferring to maintain eye contact with subjects – a
technique that accounts for the sometimes rough-hewn nature of his images, but
also their unusual candour, their ability to capture moments beyond the reach
of stage-managed portraits.
“If you’re setting up lights and tripods and you’ve got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can," Pennebaker told Time in 2007. “But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it’s different.”
The unobtrusive approach
worked wonders in The War Room (1993), where Pennebaker and wife Chris
Hegedus eased themselves behind the scenes of Bill Clinton’s Presidential bid. Earlier
political docs – notably the landmark Primary (1960), for which
Pennebaker had shot footage – had focused on the candidates. The War Room
was the first to focus on those spin doctors pulling the campaign strings and
levers, contrasting the personalities of garrulous oddball James Carville and
the super-slick George Stephanopoulos. Oscar-nominated, it again illustrated
how quiet, sustained observation might yield surprising truths.
Donn Alan Pennebaker was
born in Evanston, Illinois on July 15, 1925 to Lucille Levick (née Deemer)
and the commercial photographer John-Paul Pennebaker. He served in the Navy
during World War II, then studied engineering at Yale, first entering pioneer territory
when the company he founded upon graduation, Electronics Engineering, initiated
the first computerised airline reservation system.
Selling the company
allowed Pennebaker to fund the short Daybreak Express (1953), a visually
dynamic record of the sun rising over a soon-to-be-demolished stretch of New
York’s elevated subway system, set to the titular Duke Ellington track;
ever-enterprising, he secured the music rights by showing up on Ellington’s
doorstep.
Pennebaker’s early output
often detailed the hard work that went into putting on a show. Jane
(1962) documented a young Jane Fonda’s disastrous stint on Broadway; in Original
Cast Album: Company (1970), he caught Elaine Stritch endlessly rerecording
her vocals for “Ladies Who Lunch”, while Stephen Sondheim looks on despairingly.
Scarcely less fraught was
a collaboration Pennebaker attempted with Jean-Luc Godard, whose La Chinoise
(1967) he had helped distribute. A project that began life as 1 A.M. (One
American Movie), pitched as Godard’s thoughts on America at the time of Vietnam,
was abandoned after the Frenchman lost interest; Pennebaker reedited the (very striking)
rushes into 1 P.M. (One Parallel Movie) (1972).
Conflict similarly broke
out in Town Bloody Hall (1979), a jolting time capsule that found Norman
Mailer and Germaine Greer squaring up at a 1971 forum on “the feminist
question”. Having been chased around this altogether turbulent event by the
venue’s irate manager, Pennebaker was convinced the footage was unusable; he
was only talked into persevering with it by Hegedus, then his editor.
The pair married in 1982,
and collaborated on several late-career successes: The War Room was preceded
by the much-admired Depeche Mode: 101 (1989) and followed by Down
from the Mountain (2000), a concert-movie companion to the Coens’ O
Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Pennebaker branched out into food with Kings
of Pastry (2009), and then live streaming, directing The National’s 2010 Brooklyn
gig for YouTube. His final work was Unlocking the Cage (2016), on the
Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to erode the legal distinctions between
humans and animals.
A mentor to many – he
produced Jehane Noujaim’s Startup.com (2001), and taught documentary at
his alma mater – Pennebaker received an honorary Oscar in 2013. “It’s like a
line Dylan would say, ‘What don’t you know that you want to know?’,” he told Sight
& Sound in 2016. “[Making] a film is a marvellous process of
continually asking questions.”
He is survived by
Hegedus, their daughter Jane and son Kit; by daughters Stacey and Linley and
son Frazer from his first marriage, to Sylvia Bell; and by a son Jojo and
daughters Chelsea and Zoe from his second marriage, to Kate Taylor.
D.A. Pennebaker, born July 15, 1925, died August 1, 2019.
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