DA Pennebaker, the Academy Award-nominated director of some of the most groundbreaking documentaries in cinematic history, whose career encompassed more than 50 years and 60 movies to his name, has died at the age of 94.
Is Pennebaker the godfather of the cinema vérité movement? Well, he surely is one of them. How else would you describe the man who is responsible for “Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back,” which feels as stunningly intimate today as it probably did 50 years ago. It’s the closest that anyone’s ever come in the capturing the hysteric fervor of Dylan back in 1966, a year that would not only change music but the whole country as well.
Pennebaker’s uncanny style to step back and be a fly-on-the-wall for some of the most important moments in this country’s history was recurrent. He brought intimacy to the grandiose.
The Dylan doc wasn’t his only seminal depiction of 1960s counterculture, the urgent political issues of that time we’re legendarily portrayed in Pennebaker’s “Monterey Pop.”
Three decades later, he would use the same political instincts that drove his landmark 1960 Kennedy/Humphrey doc “Primary,” with his excellent 1993 film “War Room.” I watched that doc last night, for the first time since its release, and much like Dylan and Monterey, Pennebaker managed to find the pulse of an important moment in American history by following a candidate that, much like Obama, ran on change.
Hell, his style was even copied, to no ends, in satirical fiction on TV such as “Modern Family” and “The Office.” That was Pennebaker for you, a man that turned the documentary into an art form and changed it forever more. I can count in one hand the amount of American filmmakers that were as influential as he was.