D.A. Pennebaker (Contemporary Film Directors) - Softcover

Beattie, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252078292 ISBN 13: 9780252078293

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

This volume is the first book-length study of the extensive career and prolific works of D.A. Pennebaker, one of the pioneers of direct cinema, a documentary form that emphasizes observation and a straightforward portrayal of events. With a career spanning decades, Pennebaker's many projects have included avant-garde experiments (Daybreak Express), ground-breaking television documentaries (Primary), celebrity films (Dont Look Back), concert films (Monterey Pop), and innovative fusions of documentary and fiction (Maidstone).

 

Exploring the concept of "performing the real," Keith Beattie interprets Pennebaker's films as performances in which the act of filming is in itself a performative transgression of the norms of purely observational documentary. He examines the ways in which Pennebaker's presentation of unscripted everyday performances is informed by connections between documentary filmmaking and other experimental movements such as the New American Cinema. Through his collaborations with such various artists as Richard Leacock, Shirley Clarke, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Luc Godard, Pennebaker has continually reworked and redefined the forms of documentary filmmaking. This book also includes a recent interview with the director and a full filmography.

Über diesen Titel

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

By Keith Beattie

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07829-3

Contents

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

Chapter One

Performing the Real

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252078292
• ISBN 13: 9780252078293
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland