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 printable version
DA PENNEBAKER & CHRIS HEGEDUS: PROFILE
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By Caroline Frost
DA Pennebaker has been behind a camera for nearly 50 years. One of
America's leading documentarians, he has focussed his lens on subjects
as diverse as Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Bill Clinton.
With no idea what he was going to do when he graduated from college,
Pennebaker spent time in the Navy, worked as an engineer and founded
Electronics Engineering, the makers of the first computerised airline
reservation system, before embarking on a film career.
The archivist of hundreds of jazz records, he decided to make
a film based on a Duke Ellington piece in his collection. Daybreak
Express showed laughing girls running through the New York underground,
and was "a collection of 20th century craziness". On loan to a local
cinema for $25 a week, it ran for a year.
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Pennebaker films Bob Dylan in Don't Look Back |
Groundbreaking early films for Pennebaker included Primary (1960)
and Jane (1962), looking behind the scenes at the lives of American
icons John Kennedy and Jane Fonda. And in 1967, his film Don't Look
Back followed Bob Dylan on his concert tour of England. It was the
first ever rock documentary and cemented the director's reputation
as the foremost chronicler of 1960s youth culture.
DA Pennebaker is a seminal figure in modern American documentary
film making, credited as one of the country's founding fathers of
"direct cinema" or "cinema verite". Back in 1959, he helped further
film technology, creating lightweight equipment, new mobility, and
high quality on-location sound.
In the hands of Pennebaker and his imaginative contemporaries,
these techniques have provided a realism, intimacy and immediacy
not previously seen in documentaries. There is no commentary or
voice over to praise or condone. Protagonists determine events,
and events speak for themselves. Pennebaker calls it "filming people
in the real world".
In this attention to detail, and this confidence in letting others
take centre stage, is Pennebaker the man who made possible the likes
of Maureen and her fly-on-the-wall contemporaries?
The idea obviously horrifies him. "I never wanted to be a fly
on the wall, it's a kind of disgusting idea. But you don't necessarily
need a script a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding
a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as
you see it - that's the truest form of drama."
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