The Complete Document
D.A. Pennebaker: Master of the vérité film portrait died on August 1.
WHEN I asked D. A. Pennebaker, AKA Penny, in 2013 why he’d omitted the apostrophe in “Dont” of 1967’s Dont Look Back, he said, “I got tired of everything looking like everything else. And I thought, Fuck it.” Those two simple words are the perfect epitaph for the director, a pioneer of the cinéma vérité school of film-making who emphasised naturalism and improvisation, and avoided narration, discarded rules, trusted his instincts and designed tools that accommodated his vision.
He chronicled Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour in Dont Look Back, and as Dylan revolutionised music, Penny revolutionised cinema. That film, his first feature, used an improved 16mm sync sound system, a technology he helped develop that enabled him to be as mobile as his subjects. This allowed the film-maker to be a fly on the wall without intrusive equipment or crew. “One person could do it,” he told me. “Like one person could paint a picture or write a book. Nowadays you can see where it’s gone – everybody’s making a film of their butcher, their father, their mother.”
Donn Alan Pennebaker was born in Evanston, Illinois on July 15, 1925; his father was a commercial photographer. Pennebaker studied engineering at Yale, a skill that would prove invaluable. He made his first film in 1953, Daybreak Express, an experimental short about a section of the New York subway system – and he used Duke Ellington’s music as soundtrack. He credited his lifelong love of jazz for his improvisational technique: shooting when it felt right. “The way in which fantastic musicians could reduce a song to three minutes that had an arc to it – that’s the way I edit films. You learn the wonder of making up stuff as you go along.”
While he’d go on to cover presidential campaigns, animal rights and pastry chefs, his films about music and musicians are arguably the most revered. He followed Dont Look Back with Monterey Pop, documenting the 1967 rock festival during the Summer of Love. In addition to celebrating the hippy movement, it featured the first glimpses many got of performances by Janis Joplin, The Who and Jimi Hendrix. He caught the latter torching his guitar with lighter fluid in a spectacular display of hurting the one you love.
Other films focused on David Bowie, Depeche Mode and jazz vocalese practitioner Dave Lambert. But it would be Dont Look Back that changed the way documentaries were made. When Bob’s manager Albert Grossman first approached Penny, he was immediately game. “I didn’t know much about Dylan at the time, but there was a story there – I could feel it in my bones.” It was that extraordinary intuition that made Pennebaker a true artist.
“You learn the wonder of making stuff up as you go along.” D.A. PENNEBAKER