RIP D. A Pennebaker a Pioneer Documentary Filmmaker

  • D.A Pennebaker (Rollingstone obit)

  • (wiki)

    Pennebaker has been described as “arguably the pre-eminent chronicler of Sixties counterculture”

  • See his films by year or alphabetically

  • JLG’s 1 AM to D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM – Jean Luc Godard’s unfinished film

  • Much more interesting to me was the film he attempted to make in 1969, tentatively titled 1 AM (or One American Movie). A collaboration with cinema-verite pioneers D. A. Pennabaker and Richard Leacock, the project was abandoned after Godard lost interest during the editing phase but Pennebaker ended up completing his own version of the existing footage which he titled 1 PM (or One Parallel Movie). This is a brief history of the film’s journey from concept to screen.

  • On Don’t Look Back – “What I thought was, this person is trying to generate himself,” Pennebaker told The New York Times in 2016. “He’s trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to do. So I filmed him talking to people and listening to people. When the concerts came, I would only shoot little parts of them. I didn’t want it to be a music film. I wanted it to be a film about a person who was finding out who he was.” (via Rollingstone obit)