Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Keith Beattie is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, and the author of Documentary Screens: Non-Fiction Film and Television; Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video; and Humphrey Jennings, among other books.

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D.A. Pennebaker

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................xiPERFORMING THE REAL................................1Concert Film.......................................21Collaborative Filmmaking...........................51Portraiture........................................79Rehearsal..........................................107INTERVIEW WITH D.A. PENNEBAKER.....................129Filmography........................................143Bibliography.......................................163Index..............................................171

Chapter One

I remember it well. It was early spring, and I was sitting in the Electric Shadows Cinema in Canberra. On the screen, people shouted and gesticulated at each other, laughed, and delivered planned and ad hoc speeches in which they analyzed aspects of contemporary women's experiences while a heavy-set man, looking alternatively serious, bemused, bewildered, angry, and jovial, attempted to introduce speakers and respond to arguments contained in the speeches. Watching D.A. Pennebaker's Town Bloody Hall (1979) I too was confronted by varying emotions provoked by a film, shot in grainy black and white, at times poorly lit, and with varying sound levels, that eschewed the dull informationalism and distanced perspective on a topic often associated with the documentary form and replaced it with a willingness to involve the viewer in the raucous atmosphere of the event it represented. The actions on-screen resembled certain prototypical late 1960s cultural events: a "happening" or a rock concert with its participatory audience. Here was a performance—by the film's subjects, and by a filmmaker. I watched with intense interest.

Not coincidentally, one of Pennebaker's key words is "interesting." In numerous interviews, Pennebaker has referred to events, subjects, and topics that have a certain "attractive" quality, in the sense that they demand attention, as interesting. In this way, he has insisted that a filmmaker "must shoot only what interests you" (qtd. in Jaffe 44). He has argued that such a focus is embedded within and emerges from a certain approach to filmmaking: "The advantage of making a film ... with no script and no idea of what's coming next, is that you see things the way you see them in a theater for the first time, and if they interest you, you follow them, and if they don't, you lag away from them. What comes out is what was interesting to you at that time" (qtd. in Gill 8). Speaking of Bob Dylan's presence in Dont [sic] Look Back (1967), Pennebaker has said that "[h]e's interesting and people don't know why. And that always creates a mysterious attraction" (qtd. in Gerhard 2). He has referred to the films he shot with Norman Mailer—Wild 90 (1967), Beyond the Law (1968), and Maidstone (1970)—as "interesting in that they're kind of rough. I mean, they're rough to the cob, and they sure as hell aren't documentaries, but they're not fiction either" (qtd. in Levin 241). In a similar way, he has insisted that he does not consider his own films to be documentaries "because I'm really interested in film as drama, rather than film as information" (qtd. in Gill 2). He has individually made and collaboratively produced numerous films, including, among others, Daybreak Express (1953–57), an avant-gardist look at New York City; Jane (1962), a study of the actress Jane Fonda; You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You (1964), an enigmatic portrait of Timothy Leary on his wedding day; and the concert films Monterey Pop (1968), Sweet Toronto (1970), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973), Depeche Mode 101 (1989), Down from the Mountain (2001), and Only the Strong Survive (2002). The focus on musicians in his concert films is matched by representations of stage actors in Original Cast Album: Company (1970), Moon over Broadway (1997), and Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2004). His diversity of interesting films encompasses hybrid forms in which components of "documentary" mix with heightened dramatic elements associated with fiction film. Informing this diversity of interest is a remarkable and varied career.

Donn Alan Pennebaker was born on 15 July 1925 in Evanston, Illinois. His parents—John Paul, a commercial photographer, and Lucille—were divorced soon after he was born, and thereafter Pennebaker lived with his father in Chicago. He served as an engineer in the Naval Air Corps during World War II, and, after graduating from Yale in 1947 with a degree in mechanical engineering, he moved to New York City, where he met his first wife, Sylvia Bell. He started an electronics company that during the early 1950s worked on projects concerned with computer applications, among them airline reservation systems. Looking for a different career path, he sold his electronics company and tried writing and painting before a friendship with the filmmaker Francis Thompson led to a career in filmmaking. His first film, Daybreak Express, was shot in 1953 and completed in 1957.

In the early 1960s, Pennebaker, together with Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, founded Drew Associates, a company that produced films for various television outlets, notably, Time-Life Broadcasting and the ABC network. Pennebaker and Leacock left Drew Associates in June 1963 and started their own company, Leacock Pennebaker, Inc. In 1967 his landmark film Dont Look Back was released. The next year he and Sylvia Bell were divorced, and four years later he married Kate Taylor. Monterey Pop, his groundbreaking concert film, enjoyed wide popular acclaim on its release in 1968. During the late 1960s, Pennebaker worked on a number of projects with various collaborators, including Norman Mailer and Jean-Luc Godard. Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., was dissolved in the early 1970s, and in 1976 Chris Hegedus joined Pennebaker's independent filmmaking company, where one of her first occupations was to edit Pennebaker's footage for the film Town Bloody Hall. The two filmmakers then worked together on The Energy War (1978), an acclaimed account of the fate of the Carter administration's natural gas energy bill. Pennebaker and Taylor divorced in 1980, and Pennebaker and Hegedus married in 1982. In 1993 Pennebaker Hegedus Films produced the Academy Award–nominated film The War Room. Pennebaker and Hegedus live in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, Long Island, and their film Kings of Pastry was released in 2009. Primary (1960), a film Pennebaker made with Drew Associates, is included on the National Film Registry maintained by the Library of Congress, and the films jointly made by Pennebaker and Hegedus have won numerous awards. Pennebaker's output across a remarkable career in filmmaking that spans almost sixty years includes work produced for television, films commissioned on a variety of subjects (notably, the lives of professional performers), rock videos and other promotional work, and independently produced and theatrically released feature-length documentary films.

The range of his work is hinted at in the variety of films and filmmakers Pennebaker has mentioned as exerting an influence on his film practice. Robert Flaherty stands out in this way, as does the work of Michael Powell, especially his films The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I'm Going (1945), and, notably, The Red Shoes (1948). Pennebaker has at various times also mentioned in this relation René Clair (Le million and À nous la liberté, both 1931), Fellini (La strada, 1954), Truffaut (Jules et Jim, 1962), Godard (notably, La Chinoise, 1967), Hubert Sauper (Darwin's Nightmare, 2004), Jules and Gédéon Naudet (9/11, 2002), and the films of Nick Broomfield (qtd. in Pennebaker, "D.A. Pennebaker" and "My Favourite"). In a telling reflection of critical preoccupations, assessments of Pennebaker's filmmaking often overlook this variety of influences—within which, among other associations, documentaries are ranked next to fictional works—and emphasize his relationship with Robert Drew and Drew Associates as the central formative factors in his career.

With Robert Drew

Having left the Naval Air Corps at the end of World War II, Robert Drew commenced a fifteen-year association with Time-Life, Inc., first as a journalist for Life magazine and subsequently as a producer of television programs for Time-Life Broadcasting. In 1955 Drew took up a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard University. During his studies he developed his ideas concerning a format in which the approach of the photo-essay commonly printed in Life magazine—a narrative constructed dominantly within and through a series of images, with little or no accompanying anchorage provided by the printed word—could be applied to stories filmed for television. According to Drew, such stories could be constructed from "[c]andid photography [that] would capture the spontaneous character and drama that make the real world exciting. Editing would use dramatic logic to convey the excitement of the natural drama captured by the camera" (392). Drew returned to Life magazine in 1956, intent on putting his newly developed ideas into practice. Seeking to apply his particular approach, he proposed to Time-Life a series of films for television that would cover the same stories featured in forthcoming issues of Life magazine. The proposal culminated in a number of short films on a variety of topics that Drew produced for Time, Inc.

During his year at Harvard, Drew had watched Toby and the Tall Corn (1954), a program within the CBS Omnibus series made by Richard Leacock, an experienced cameraman who had filmed Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1948). Drew met Leacock and expressed an admiration for the ways in which Leacock had filmed action from different camera positions and edited the various footage into a coherent story. In 1959 Leacock and Pennebaker collaborated on Opening in Moscow, an account of a concert tour of the Soviet Union by Leonard Bernstein, and the same year Leacock introduced Pennebaker to Drew. Pennebaker, Leacock, and Drew commenced to collaborate, and almost immediately, according to Pennebaker, Drew "swung around from putting together a kind of magazine format ... to something ... Ricky and I both [thought] was the concept of a major film ... films which were one hour, minimum, in length" (qtd. in O'Connell 60). Recollecting this period, Pennebaker acknowledged that he was "impressed with Drew's ability, his willingness to go ahead and kind of push out into this void, and to carry [Life] magazine with him" (qtd. in O'Connell 61).

The first major collaboration between Pennebaker, Leacock, and Drew resulted in Primary, dealing with the 1960 Democratic presidential primary, which was followed by a portrait of racing car driver Eddie Sachs, On the Pole (also known as Eddie Sachs, 1960). Unlike Primary, which was broadcast on local stations owned by Time, Inc., the film's producer, On the Pole was broadcast widely when it was purchased by the CBS network. The same year, 1960, Drew, supported by Time, Inc., forged a productive link with ABC-TV. According to film historian Richard Barsam, ABC-TV "provided the creative climate for Drew's initial experiments, [the network] differed from CBS-TV and NBC-TV in that it broadcast public affairs programming that was produced outside of its own news operations. Although ABC-TV had the lowest ratings and the least share of the viewing audience, it had a sponsor (the Bell and Howell Company) willing to support an incentive to try something different from traditional documentary film and ordinary television news programming" (305). The Drew team produced a number of programs for ABC, among them Yanki No! (1960), a study of Castro's Cuba made by Pennebaker, Leacock, and Albert Maysles soon after the Cuban revolution. In a significant development, Drew's association with ABC led to the formation of Drew Associates, a semi-independent production organization with close ties to Time, Inc.

The contract between Drew Associates and ABC was in place for eighteen months, and thereafter Drew Associates continued to produce programs in association with Time, Inc., most of which were broadcast within The Living Camera series on stations affiliated with Time-Life Broadcasting. The series included a number of films that Pennebaker made collaboratively with other members of Drew Associates, among them Mooney vs. Fowle (also known as Football, 1961), David (1961), Blackie (also known as Airline Pilot, 1962), Susan Starr (1962), The Aga Khan (1962), and Jane (1962), his last major work for Drew Associates. Despite a period of intense productivity with Drew Associates, Pennebaker's growing disillusionment with Drew's methods led to his departure from the organization soon after the completion of Jane.

Technological Determinism, "Collective Text," Performance

Although he was with Drew Associates for only two and a half years, accounts of Pennebaker's career not only invariably highlight his association during the early 1960s with Robert Drew but also stress Pennebaker's practice of direct cinema, a form of filmmaking commonly associated with Drew. According to various interpretations, direct cinema is a documentary form that emphasizes observation of actions and events in ways that reveal otherwise unrepresentable aspects of human experience. Frequently cast as a form uniquely associated with the United States, it is contrasted to cinema verité, a form associated with developments in French documentary filmmaking. The film historian Erik Barnouw summarized the approaches by describing what he saw as their essential differences. For Barnouw, "The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the ... cinéma vérité artist was often an avowed participant [in profilmic action]. The direct cinema artist played the role of the involved bystander; the cinéma vérité artist espoused that of provocateur" (255). In practice, the distinctions between the two forms were rarely this definitive.

A popular and critical confusion of these terms is matched by critical readings that misinterpret the role of camera and sound technology in direct cinema. The technology in question was developed by Pennebaker and Leacock, who reworked and reapplied certain developments in camera and sound design to produce new film equipment. As a formative step in this process, Leacock noted with interest the camera technology developed by Morris Engel for his feature Weddings and Babies (1958). Engel had synchronized a handheld 35 mm camera to a small recorder, using a tuning fork as the mechanism that aligned image and sound. Fons Ianelli, an associate of Engel's, extended the technology when he synchronized sound recording to a 16 mm handheld camera, using a mechanical interlocking device between recorder and camera (O'Connell 39).

Leacock used a variant of Engel's rig to shoot segments of Opening in Moscow, and thereafter Pennebaker and Leacock set out to improve the system. As Leacock recalls, "We were able to come up with solutions to various problems based on the development of magnetic reading machines, the discovery and use of the transistor which, for the first time, made it possible to build amplifiers and recorders which could run on batteries, and the development of mini-tuning-fork timing devices.... With funding and moral support from Bob Drew's Time connections we were able to solve our problems" ("Leacock Remembers" 252). The solution was arrived at toward the end of the 1950s. Drew and Leacock commissioned Mitch Bogdanovitch, a camera engineer, to rebuild an Auricon Filmagnetic camera in thin aluminum so that the camera would be lightweight and thereby easier to use for handheld filming. Leacock adapted recently developed high-fidelity battery-driven audiotape recorders—the Perfectone from France and the Nagra from Switzerland—and synchronized them with the camera, at first via a wire connection and later via wireless transmission, using the timing mechanism from the newly developed electronic Bulova watch (Winston, Technologies 84–85). The result of these various steps was a portable rig that, while in many respects a clumsy apparatus, permitted greater mobility and an increased opportunity for location filming as compared to earlier film camera technology.

While significant in terms of offering wider scope for filming, the reworked technology was not in itself the only factor in the development of direct cinema. As Leacock astutely noted in his recollections of this moment: "Far more was involved [in the development of direct cinema] than the technology of portable equipment" ("Leacock Remembers" 253). Despite this recognition, developments in camera and sound equipment are cast in numerous critical assessments within a crude technological determinism in which it is argued that the synchronized camera was directly related to or responsible for the form and content of direct cinema.

In turn, according to various assessments, the technology resulted in specific stylistic conventions. For example, Richard Barsam insists that "lightweight, portable equipment" results in "camera work [that] is intimate, increasing the direct relationship between the filmmaker-subject-viewer; the sound recording is direct and synchronous, often clouded by pickup of extraneous noises that contribute to the sense of reality; and the editing tends to be continuous, rather than discontinuous, striving for a chronological, rather than dramatic, presentation of events. For the filmmaker, this practice involves a direct observation of reality; for the viewer this results in a direct perception of reality" (302–3). Stephen Mamber argues that the camera technology is implicated with a commitment on behalf of the filmmaker "not to shape his material on the basis of limiting preconceptions" (13), and "[i]n line with this commitment, some of the standard devices of fiction film and traditional documentaries fall by the wayside, especially music and narration. The former is never added ... and the latter, if necessary at all, should do no more than provide facts essential to following events on the screen" (3–4). Mamber's ossification of the conventions ("The former is never added ...") is reflected in numerous critical assessments to the point that observational direct cinema is reduced to a strict formula or set of constraints. According to one interpretation, the result was a "pure" version of direct cinema based on a "kind of filmic ten commandments: thou shalt not rehearse; thou shalt not interview; thou shalt not use commentary; thou shalt not use film lights; thou shalt not stage events; thou shalt not dissolve" (Macdonald and Cousins 250).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from D.A. Pennebakerby Keith Beattie Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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