Father of modern documentary farewelled

The film-maker may have made his name with a pioneering Bob Dylan song but his legacy lies in inventing both the hardware and style of today’s fly-on-the-wall movies.

ON the 20th anniversary of VE Day in May 1965, Bob Dylan and the film-maker DA Pennebaker stepped into an insalubrious alleyway at the back of the Savoy Hotel in London to shoot one of the most innovative sequences in rock history.

Set against a bleak background of scaffolding and crumbling brickwork that resembled a scene from the Blitz, rather than the Swinging Sixties, a tinny-sounding tape recorder played the singersongwriter’s latest single Subterranean Homesick Blues, while Pennebaker’s handheld camera filmed a young, scruffy-looking Dylan casually tossing away a set of large cue cards containing key words from the song.

The words, drawn in bold letters on pieces of shirt cardboard acquired from a laundry, were often deliberately misspelt (‘‘pawking metaws’’ and ‘‘suckcess"), while curveball messages such as ‘‘Dig Yourself’’ and ‘‘What?’’, which were not part of the song’s lyrics, were also etched on the flash cards as a hipster joke. Shot in a single take and lasting less than two and a half minutes, the black and white clip has since become a cultural meme with not

one but two significant claims to fame.

Although the set-up was artfully contrived, the sequence came to define the cinema verite style of documentary-making that Pennebaker helped to pioneer, using a handheld camera with synchronised sound. At the time, the technique was revolutionary. When Michael Moore later presented the film-maker with an Oscar for lifetime achievement, he noted that Pennebaker had ‘‘invented nothing less than the modern documentary’’.

The Subterranean Homesick Blues clip has also come to be regarded as the precursor of the pop videos that later became an essential part of every artist’s marketing and promotion in the MTV age. In the modern era, Pennebaker’s embryonic ‘‘video’’ has been viewed more than five million times on YouTube, mostly by fans not even born when it was shot.

It became the opening sequence of Pennebaker’s celebrated, apostrophe-free documentary film Dont Look Back, chronicling Dylan’s 1965 concert tour of Britain. In a 2014 Sight & Sound poll, it was voted by film critics as the ninth best documentary film.

Pennebaker made several other fly-on-the-wall films about rock music, including Monterey Pop, about the 1967 festival at which Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar, and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, about David Bowie in his silver spaceman tunic singing about leper messiahs and rock’n’roll suicides at the 1973 concert where Bowie officially retired his alter ego Ziggy.

Yet music was far from his only subject. When Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman approached him to make a film about his young charge, it was on the strength of Pennebaker’s political documentaries, including Primary, which followed John F Kennedy’s 1960 campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and Crisis, which chronicled his conflict as president with Alabama governor George Wallace over school desegregation.

At the time he barely knew who Dylan was, but was persuaded to take on the project after they met in a New York tavern, where Dylan proposed the Subterranean Homesick Blues sequence. He was attracted above all by Grossman’s offer of the kind of open access that chimed with Pennebaker’s vision of ‘‘a kind of direct film-making where you found people who were responsible for doing something, and you watched them do it’’ rather than the conventional voiceover model of narrative.

‘‘You wanted to drive the stories by what people said to each other, not by what you thought up on a yellow pad,’’ he said. In Pennebaker’s concept of cinema verite, ‘‘you didn’t ask questions or do interviews like the news did. You just watched something happen.

‘‘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. But if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it’s different.’’