Documentary maker Murray Lerner, aged 90

An Oscar-winning documentary maker who captured Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival has died at the age of 90.

Murray Lerner also preserved legendary musical acts like Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen and The Doors forever on film.

Lerner’s son Noah said he died at his home in Long Island City.

Lerner earned an Oscar nomination in 1967 for Festival, his examination of the Newport Folk Festival, filmed over three years.

He won the best documentary feature statuette in 1981 for From Mao To Mozart, which followed violinist Isaac Stern in China.

In 2009, Lerner received a Grammy nomination for the documentary Amazing Journey: The Story Of The Who.

Lerner also made documentaries about the Moody Blues, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Jethro Tull.

Lerner was also the film-maker behind the 3D film Magic Journeys at Walt-Disney’s Epcot center in Florida as well as the 1978 influential 3D film Sea-Dream, considered a classic of stereoscopic cinema.

Lerner graduated from Harvard University in 1948, and one of his first films was Secrets Of The Reef in 1956, voted one of the year’s 10 best films by Time magazine.

Festival was his second film, capturing Dylan as he cemented his reputation within the folk music community with his first appearance at Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and then dividing his audience when he appeared with an electric rock band at the same festival in 1965. Lerner revisited some of that footage years later with The Other Side Of the Mirror: Live At The Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965.

“I tried to make music with the camera, to have the camera be a participant of the action,” he told the Boston Herald in 2002. The camera isn’t just a fly on the wall. My theory is that the only valid truth is the interaction between object and subject.”

Lerner is also survived by his wife, Judith.

Murray Lerner won an Oscar.