DA PENNEBAKER
Dont Look Back filmmaker
(1925 – 2019)
THE history of documentary filmmaking would be conspicuously different without Donn Alan Pennebaker. Although best known for his late-’60s/early-’70s music projects – featuring Bob Dylan, the Monterey Pop festival and David Bowie – Pennebaker’s camera also captured JFK, Bill Clinton, Norman Mailer and John Delorean. Pennebaker was part of a close-knit group of filmmakers – including Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles – whose vérité style defined modern documentary making. Their breakthrough came with 1960’s Primary,
a fly-on-the-wall account of the battle for the Democratic party presidential nomination between Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, edited by Pennebaker. While making documentaries for television, Pennebaker was approached in 1965 by Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman about following Dylan’s upcoming tour of England. Shot handheld on black-and-white 16mm film – in hotel rooms, along corridors, in tight dressing rooms – Dont Look Back heightened the sense that viewers were getting to see the ‘real’ Bob Dylan.
“The film was intended first to be shown to Dylan; therefore he was the only audience I was really thinking about,” Pennebaker told NME in 1972. “But I knew the outside audience would be interested because anything that interested Dylan had got to interest a lot of people – because Dylan wouldn’t be interested in anything that was second rate or bullshit.” Dont Look Back
broke ground in other ways, too: the clip of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is arguably the first modern music video. Another Dylan film, Eat The Document,
filmed during Dylan and The Hawks’ 1966 tour of Europe, is rarely seen.
Pennebaker continued to make music films – there are close-up looks at John Lennon (Sweet Toronto), David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars) and Depeche Mode (101). His final music film, Down From The Mountain,
captured a concert by the artists featured on the O Brother, Where Art Thou?
soundtrack. Alongside his wife and frequent collaborator Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker was nominated for an Oscar for The War Room, a behind-thescenes film about President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Pennebaker’s subjects also included dot-com start-ups, French pastry chefs and, in his final film Unlocking The Cage, animal rights.