(15 July 1925 - 1 August 2019)
The documentary film director and cinematographer Donn Alan Pennebaker, who has died aged 94 from natural causes, became something of a one-man industry as far as cinéma-vérité was concerned. Before taking up filmmaking, he studied engineering at Yale, ran an electronics firm and worked in advertising. He started making short films in 1953, often with Shirley Clarke (famous for her film The Connection, about drug addicts). His first film of any length was Opening in Moscow, on the 1959 American Exhibition in Russia. After some TV work, he made Jane, about the 25-year-old actress Jane Fonda rehearsing a play. In 1967 he made the film he is most famous for – Don’t Look Back, a feature-length portrait of the singer Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of the UK. Monterey Pop covered the pre-Woodstock music festival with The Mamas and The Papas, Canned Heat, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Animals, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar, etc. He filmed the recording of Stephen Sondheim’s Company for Original Cast Album in which Elaine Stritch had trouble getting it together (she compared it to “like Judy Garland playing the Margaret Rutherford story”). Pennebaker made more films with musicians including John Lennon, David Bowie, Little Richard, Otis Redding and a feature on Stax Records. Other subjects included John DeLorean, Bill Clinton, Town Bloody Hall with Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, the actress’s one-woman show, Woodstock Diary, Kings of Pastry, about the French pastry chef award, and the five-hour National Anthem: Inside the Vote for Change Concert Tour in 2004, plus many other counter-culture films, often with a musical subject. He was regularly his own cinematographer, sometimes his editor too and also producer. He had a single acting credit in Wild 90, the 1968 film he wrote for Norman Mailer. D. A. Pennebaker was married three times and is the father of eight children. He was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2013.
MICHAEL DARVELL
