Oscar-winning documentary maker dies at 94
D.A. Pennebaker, the Oscar-winning documentary maker whose historic contributions to American culture and politics included immortalizing a young Bob Dylan in “Don’t Look Back” and capturing the spin behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign in “The War Room,” has died. He was 94.
Pennebaker, who received an honorary Academy Award in 2013, died Thursday of natural causes at his home in Long Island, his son, Frazer Pennebaker said in an email.
Pennebaker was a leader among a generation of filmmakers in the 1960s who took advantage of such innovations as handheld cameras and adopted an intimate, spontaneous style known
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. —
Documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker is flanked by 35-year-old images of Bob Dylan as Pennebaker sits in his New York editing suite in January 2000. Oscar-winning documentary maker Pennebaker has died at the age of 94. Frazer Pennebaker said in an email his father died Thursday at his Long Island home from natural causes. as cinéma vérité. As an assistant revelatory account of John to pioneer Robert F. Kennedy’s 1960 victory in Drew, Pennebaker helped Wisconsin over fellow Democratic invent the modern political presidential candidate documentary, “Primary,” a Hubert Humphrey. He on went to make or assist on dozens of films, from an early look at Jane Fonda to an Emmynominated portrait of Elaine Stritch to a documentary about a contentious debate between Norman Mailer and a panel of feminists (“Town Bloody Hall”).
Widely admired and emulated, Pennebaker was blessed with patience, sympathy, curiosity, the journalist’s art of setting his subjects at ease, the novelist’s knack for finding the revealing detail and the photographer’s eye for compelling faces and images. When reducing vast amounts of raw footage into a finished film, Pennebaker said, “The one barometer I believe in is boredom. The minute people start to lose interest, that’s it.”
Pennebaker parted from Drew in the mid-’60s and became a top filmmaker in his own right with the 1967 release “Don’t Look Back,” among the first rock documentaries to receive serious critical attention. It follows Dylan on a 1965 tour of England, featuring Joan Baez, Donovan, Allen Ginsberg and others.
Dylan was then transforming from folk singer to rock ‘n roller and “Don’t Look Back” finds the artist clashing with journalists and breaking from his own history, including Baez, with whom he had comprised folk music’s signature couple. She was his girlfriend at the start of the movie and ex-girlfriend by the time the documentary was done, his growing disregard for her unfolding on camera. Decades later, he would apologize, saying he feared she would be “swept up in the madness” of his changing career.