Oscar-winning documentary maker D.A. Pennebaker dies at 94
D.A. Pennebaker, the Oscarwinning 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 on 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 as cinéma vérité. As an assistant to pioneer Robert Drew, Pennebaker helped invent the modern political documentary, “Primary,” a revelatory account of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 victory in Wisconsin over fellow Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey. He on went to make or assist on dozens of films, from an early look at Jane Fonda to an Emmy-nominated 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 seting 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 atention. 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. Scenes from “Don’t Look Back” have become part of the musical and movie canon, among them Dylan playing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” in his hotel room while an impressed (and perhaps intimidated) Donovan looked on. In a much imitated sequence that anticipated rock videos, Dylan’ s fast-talking“subterranean home sick blues” plays on the soundtrack as the singer holds a stack of cue cards with fragments of the lyrics, peeling the cards off and discarding them one by one.
Pati Smith would recall seeing the film so many times she memorized the dialogue.
In a 2000 Associated Press interview, Pennebaker said he didn’t know much about Dylan at the time, but watching through his lens, saw “an amazing prodigy. Very smart in an untutored way. He created his own persona right before your eyes. ... He was a compendium of things it takes professors years to figure out — startlingly naive, but smart.” He recalled Dylan “went into shock” the first time he saw the film, but then returned a night later, watched it again, then gave his OK.
“He had no idea that one camera siting on one guy’s shoulder could make him feel so naked. ... I’ve always admired Dylan for leting (the film) go the way it was,” he said. Pennebaker continued to work with Dylan ater “Don’t Look Back” and was on hand for his raucous European tour in 1966. An all-out rocker by this time, backed by expert and unknown musicians who later became the Band, Dylan performed snarling, defiant versions of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” as fans of his folk style booed and heckled.