D A Pennebaker

C O N T E M P O R A R Y F I L M D I R E C T O R S
D.A. Pennebaker
Keith Beattie
D.A. Pennebaker
i-xii_1-180_Beattie.indd 1 7/14/11 10:38 AM

Contemporary Film Directors
Edited by James Naremore
The Contemporary Film Directors series provides

concise, well-written introductions to directors from
around the world and from every level of the film industry.
Its chief aims are to broaden our awareness of important
artists, to give serious critical attention to their work, and
to illustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.
A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.

D.A. Pennebaker
Keith Beattie
Universit y
of
Illin o i s
Pr e s s
U r ba n a
C h icago
a nd
S pr ing fiel d

© 2011 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Frontispiece: D.A. Pennebaker,

image courtesy of Sonia Gordon.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beattie, Keith
D. A. Pennebaker / Keith Beattie.
p. cm. — (Contemporary film directors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03659-0 (cloth) —
isbn 978-0-252-07829-3 (pbk.)
1. Pennebaker, D. A.—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
pn1998.3.p45255b43 2011
070.1'8092—dc22 2011014503

This book is for Reg Beattie
(19 November 1922–20 September 1998),
a good man.

Contents
Acknowledgments | xi
performing the real | 1

Concert Film 21
Collaborative Filmmaking 51
Portraiture 79
Rehearsal 107
interview with d.a. pennebaker | 129
Filmography | 143
Bibliography | 163
Index | 171

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank James Naremore, director of the Contemporary

Film Directors series, for his support of this book; Joan Catapano, Daniel
Nassett, Tad Ringo, and Mary M. Hill at the University of Illinois Press
for their attention to the manuscript; and Jonathan Marlow for permis-
sion to reprint his interview with D.A. Pennebaker.
While writing part of this book during 2008, I was Visiting Research
Fellow in Film and Visual Culture within the School of Humanities, Col-
lege of Arts and Social Sciences, at the Australian National University,
Canberra. I would like to thank the school and the college for this position.
The phrase “performing the real” was first used by John Corner
in relation to contemporary televisual documentary practices. In my
use of the phrase, I acknowledge Corner’s groundbreaking research
on documentary representation even as I apply the concept of “per-
forming the real” to areas different from those studied by Corner. The
contributions by Dr. Adrian Martin of Monash University, Melbourne,
to building and promoting a vibrant film culture and his insights into all
aspects of cinema are a model for all researchers engaged in the study
of film. Without the constant support and encouragement of Dr. Julie
Ann Smith this book would not have been written.

Performing the Real
I remember it well. It was early spring, and I was sitting in the Elec-
tric 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, be-
mused, 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 vary-
ing 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 film-
maker “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), De-
peche 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.
2 | D.A. Pennebaker

Donn Alan Pennebaker was born on 15 July 1925 in Evanston, Illi-
nois. 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. Pen-
nebaker 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 Na-
tional Film Registry maintained by the Library of Congress, and the
films jointly made by Pennebaker and Hegedus have won numerous
Performing the Real | 3

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 film-
makers 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 rela-
tion 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 reflec-
tion 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 con-
structed 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
4 | D.A. Pennebaker

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 Rich-
ard 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 ac-
count 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 willing-
ness 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 presiden-
tial 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 Rich-
ard 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 dif-

ferent 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 revo-
lution. 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 Asso-
ciates. 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 as-
sociation during the early 1960s with Robert Drew but also stress Pen-
nebaker’s practice of direct cinema, a form of filmmaking commonly
associated with Drew. According to various interpretations, direct cin-
ema is a documentary form that emphasizes observation of actions and
events in ways that reveal otherwise unrepresentable aspects of hu-
man 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
6 | D.A. Pennebaker

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 technol-
ogy 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 ma-
chines, 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 re-
corders—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 develop-
ment 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 Remem-
bers” 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 inti-
mate, 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). Ste-
phen 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 com-
mitment, 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).
In another way, contemporary comments by filmmakers, among
them Pennebaker, have been amassed to constitute a universal frame
8 | D.A. Pennebaker

through which to describe and interpret what has been called the “di-
rect cinema dogma” (Winston, “North American” 84). In this vein, one
commentator refers to an “extensive body of interviews [with filmmak-
ers] conducted in the late sixties and early seventies” as a “collective
text that remains the best theoretical account of direct cinema. . . .
[The interviews reveal a] set of shared assumptions . . . around issues
of technology, immediacy, mediation” (Arthur, “Jargons” 118). Such
a “collective text” has typically been patched together from various
comments, as exemplified in one survey of the rhetoric of direct cin-
ema practitioners: “‘In my opinion, documentary films in general . . .
are fake,’ asserted Drew. . . . He claimed that [the films made by his]
colleagues were very different. . . . The Maysles said that they ‘were
trying to find out what’s going on. We capture what takes place’; noth-
ing more. . . . Pennebaker held that: ‘It’s possible to go to a situation
and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes
on. . . . ’ ‘We were simply observers,’ claimed Leacock. . . . ‘[O]ften we
discover a new sort of drama that we were not really aware of when we
shot it’” (qtd. in Winston, “North American” 84). Within the “collective
text,” pronouncements by filmmakers associated with direct cinema are
presented as evidence of a variety of sins, among them a filmmaker’s
failure to comprehend the effect on a profilmic scene of an observer’s
camera or a refusal to admit the role of editorial decisions in the process
of constructing a representation.
What is not acknowledged within such criticisms is the way in which
certain pronouncements constitute a body of rhetoric that functioned to
secure a place for the new form of direct cinema within the broadcast
schedules of television networks during a period of reassessment and
realignment within the industry. In his first address to the National As-
sociation of Broadcasters, on 9 May 1961, Newton Minow, the newly
appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, famously
criticized broadcast television as a “procession of game shows, formula
comedies about totally unbelievable families, . . . mayhem, violence,
sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes,
gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials”
(qtd. in Watson 22). Minow invited broadcasters to watch their own
television stations: “I can assure you, that you will observe a vast waste-
land” (qtd. in Watson 22).

The context provided by Minow’s intervention in the television in-
dustry permits a reinterpretation of the “collective text.” Within such
a reassessment, pronouncements by filmmakers are recast in ways that
function to address Minow’s criticism of the banal entertainment pro-
grams and the absence of informational content characteristic of broad-
cast television. In these terms, Drew’s argument that documentary films,
generally, are “fake” sets direct cinema apart from extant documentary
works and emphasizes the validity and legitimacy of works of direct
cinema. The emphasis by the Maysles brothers on “trying to find out
what’s going on” bespeaks a devotion to the provision of accurate in-
formation. Pennebaker’s comment that direct cinema filmmakers were
“simply observers” evokes a form of nonintervention, and Leacock’s point
concerning a “new sort of drama” suggests an entertainment function
for direct cinema. In this way, the rhetoric of direct cinema filmmakers
stressed an innovative form of nonfictional representation characterized
by nonintervention (a byword for objectivity) and informational accuracy
and truthfulness wedded to an engaging (“dramatic”) narrative. Such a
position not only implicitly answered Minow’s criticisms of the content of
broadcast television, it also had the effect, supported through continual
references to nonintervention and objectivity in the pronouncements of
direct cinema filmmakers, of meeting the requirements set out in the
FCC’s “fairness doctrine,” a principle that emphasized programming that
was not partisan or directly tied to the needs of a sponsor. References
by filmmakers to direct cinema as new or unique assisted to solidify
the process of legitimation, while Drew’s description of direct cinema
as reportage cast the form within molds that would be recognizable by
the networks (Bachmann 290).
Another well-known form for the televisual reports envisioned by
Drew was the portrait, and a number of early works of direct cinema are
portraits of individuals in a variety of occupations. This “human inter-
est” focus was abetted by an emphasis on celebrities in Pennebaker’s
filmmaking. Celebrities are, by definition, popular, and celebrity por-
traits partake of this effect to assist in installing such representations
on television schedules. Additionally, the human interest focus of Pen-
nebaker’s celebrity portraits resulted in the representation of expressive
and outstanding performances by subjects. In this relation, the film
theorist Stella Bruzzi proposes a significant point: “Perhaps it is these
10 | D.A. Pennebaker

ground-breaking performances and not merely the arrival of lightweight
cameras and portable sound recording equipment that revolutionised
documentary” (132).
The Presentation of (the Performed) Self

While the presence of direct cinema on television facilitated the rep-
resentation of unscripted everyday performances, no less important in
extending performances within and through documentary representa-
tions was direct cinema’s exclusion from network television. Having
relied on direct cinema to meet the FCC’s demands for objectivity,
information, and nonpartisanship, the networks established in-house
facilities to produce documentaries and thereafter curtailed their reli-
ance on independent, direct cinema contributions to programming. The
film historian and theorist William Rothman cites Leacock’s A Happy
Mother’s Day (1963) as an example of the effect of the network’s aban-
donment of direct cinema. In the case of Leacock’s film, which was
commissioned by the Saturday Evening Post to be screened by ABC,
the network edited Leacock’s footage in such a way that he aborted the
deal with the Post and ABC and went on to make a separate version
of the film. “No longer assured a national audience of millions for his
work, but no longer obligated to mask his point of view behind a facade
of journalistic objectivity, [Leacock] was free to think of what he was
creating simply as a film, his film. At this moment [direct cinema] in
America was reborn, disempowered but free, as a movement of inde-
pendent film” (Rothman, “Looking Back” 418).
The formation of Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., provided a platform for
both Pennebaker and Leacock to extend their documentary filmmak-
ing as a form of independent production. For Pennebaker, the eviction
of direct cinema from television eliminated or revised any suggestions
within his work of direct cinema “purity.” The revision of direct cinema
assumptions within his films was particularly marked within and through
his attitude to performance.
Observational filmmaking, the practice most consistently (though not
exclusively) employed by Pennebaker, typically relies on an assumption
or pretense that subjects are not aware of the presence of the camera that
records them. Pennebaker’s work, however, raises a number of qualifi-
cations within such an assessment. Certain scenes of some of his films

enact the pretense associated with observational filmmaking, though
elsewhere sequences and the devices and perspectives informing entire
films eschew or openly confront the position that subjects are unaware
of the camera’s presence. For example, during the opening cue card
sequence of Dont Look Back, the subject of the film, Bob Dylan, looks
directly at the camera, thereby introducing a work in which he openly
acknowledges Pennebaker’s filming as it records his on- and offstage
performances. James Carville’s overt performance in The War Room is
similarly duly recorded by Pennebaker’s camera.
Such performances have not been fully understood by those seeking
to describe the presence of subjects in Pennebaker’s films. The docu-
mentary film theorist Derek Paget refers to Primary and Dont Look
Back in his interpretation of what he calls the “original orthodoxy” of
direct cinema, which, according to Paget, prescribed that the actions of
subjects “was never a matter of behaving—without inhibition. The good
Direct Cinema subject displayed a relaxation in being observed that is
a close cousin to the actor’s facility. For this reason, those accustomed
to public attention (politicians like Kennedy, popular entertainers like
Bob Dylan) were particularly good. They were ‘authentic performers of
self’” (38). Although Paget recognizes that the centrality of presentations
by subjects in Pennebaker’s films are similar to the “actor’s facility,” his
reference to the range of actions, stances, and gests by subjects is sum-
marized in the tautology “authentic performers of self.” The approach
implicates a specific psychology of subjectivity, one that constructs a
divided self. Implicit within the notion of an authentic performance of
self is a separation of a so-called authentic or real self from a performed
self. Similar to various theories that propose a distinction between act-
ing and being, the notion advanced by Paget suggests that a “real self”
hides behind a “performed self.”
The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his book The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life, which was published in 1959, at the same time as the
beginnings of direct cinema, applies a number of terms borrowed from
theatrical language (“show,” “playing,” “audience”) within his descrip-
tion of the connections between performance, self, and daily life. For
Goffman, a performance is “all the activity of a given participant on a
given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other
participants” (15). Within Goffman’s particular lexicon, the “stage” or

space for the public presentation of self includes what he calls “setting,”
the decor supportive of the self-presentation (e.g., degree certificates on
the wall of a doctor’s office). Within this space a performer also main-
tains a “front” in the form of a specific stance toward others in which a
performer presents a role. In Goffman’s analysis, front and the space in
which it is presented is opposed to “backstage”: “Here the performer
can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out
of character” (115). In these terms, backstage is a space in which, to
follow Goffman’s metaphoric language, a performer can relax and shed
a performance on the understanding that no member of the audience
will intrude.
Interestingly, a distinction between “front” or onstage and back-
stage has featured in assessments of documentary films. In particu-
lar, it has been applied within interpretations of music documentary, a
form pioneered by Pennebaker. Popular music critic Jonathan Romney
describes “backstage” in terms reminiscent of Goffman’s analysis. For
Romney, backstage is “[t]he most potent of all concepts designed to
separate performer and fan. It is a space of privacy, a world behind the
curtain in which the real being, the ineffable precious essence of the
performer’s self, supposedly lies shielded from sight. . . . The audience
is not normally permitted behind the sacred veil, but it is a convention
of the music documentary to include scenes which take us backstage
and offer us tantalizing glimpses of the reality behind the show,” argues
Romney. “[Such scenes] offer us a fantasy ‘Access All Areas’ pass, one of
those areas being the artist’s very soul. Above all, they promise access to
the truth, for backstage is imagined as a far more ‘real’ space than the
stage in which the artists do their work” (83).
While it describes a certain function of the convention, Romney’s
interpretation, with its reference to the “real being” lurking backstage,
evokes distinctions between an authentic self and a performed self im-
plicit within Goffman’s descriptions of front and backstage. Though
applied by certain critics to Dont Look Back, in addition to Pennebaker’s
concert films (or rockumentaries), the concept of backstage in the way
Goffman and Romney conceive it does not necessarily fit a film in which
the central subject performs both onstage and backstage. In this way,
Dont Look Back refuses a separation of front/onstage and backstage and
the “dual selves” implied by this separation.

A distinction between such “selves” is implicit within the percep-
tion that if not for the camera, a performance would not exist. Such an
assessment defers to the suggestion that the authenticity of the self is
abandoned within a performance motivated by the presence of a cam-
era. Replacing such an assumption is an approach in which it is recog-
nized that the self that exists on- and off-camera is expressed within and
through performance. This is not to suggest that Pennebaker’s camera
neutrally records profilmic action. Rather, in many of Pennebaker’s films
the presence of the camera is the basis of a license or a warrant for a
subject to extend an off-camera performance before the camera. The
underlying position in this assessment, one that informs the analysis of
Pennebaker’s films undertaken here, is that the performed self is the real
or authentic self.
Showing: Beyond Documentary Representation

This emphasis on performance by a subject is extended through Pen-
nebaker’s filming as a performance. In this way, Pennebaker’s camera
is an expressive practice that intervenes within and informs the tech-
niques of observational filmmaking within and through a process of
“showing.” What documentary film theorist Bill Nichols has labeled the
“observational mode” is a form that “stresses the non-intervention of
the filmmaker. Such films cede ‘control’ over the events that occur in
front of the camera more than any other mode. Rather than construct-
ing a temporal framework, or rhythm, from the process of editing . . . ,
observational films rely on editing to enhance the expression of lived or
real time” (38). Nichols notes the use of synchronous sound, through
which dialogue and sound are located in a specific moment and place,
and adds that “[e]ach scene, like that of classic narrative fiction, displays
a three-dimensional fullness and unity in which the observer’s location
is readily determined. Each shot supports the same overall system of
orientation rather than proposing unrelated or incommensurate spaces.
And the space gives every indication of having been carved from the
historical [or real] world rather than fabricated as a mise-en-scene” (39).
According to Nichols, though it abjures the “defamiliarizing strate-
gies of an argument” (41), observational documentary, and documen-
tary generally, insists on “telling,” a form that explains and analyzes a
particular topic derived from the “historical world” (40). However, in

the case of much of Pennebaker’s work, an emphasis on “telling” is de-
natured, if not replaced, by the process of “showing.” The practice of
showing is grounded in narrative, though the narrative function is often
attenuated and placed in the service of the expressive visual effects of a
work. The visual also supersedes, but does not displace, a work’s audi-
tory components, and the auditory register is frequently deployed to
reinforce visual effects. A textual emphasis on a work’s scopic capacities
cannot be reduced to observationalism, though showing is often estab-
lished through, for example, certain deployments of the long take, the
privileged visual style of the observational mode of direct cinema. The
so-called rockumentary, which has been aligned in critical interpreta-
tions of documentary with direct cinema, applies the long take of direct
cinema’s observational mode in ways that offer multiple sonic and scopic
compensations for a spectator. Rockumentary typifies the revision of
observation within an enhanced showing or display, an active process of
representation, which contrasts with a (direct cinema) observationalism
that is capable of verging on the passivity of surveillance footage.
The formal inventiveness of the approach referred to here as “show-
ing” is frequently expressed within aesthetic strategies reminiscent of
the avant-garde and its open abandonment of informationalism. The
connections between documentary and avant-gardist works and the
aesthetics and formal dispositions characteristic of such a meeting are
evident in a number of Pennebaker’s films, notably in certain early works,
among them Daybreak Express. This five-minute film, which was shot
with a hand-wound camera over three days in 1953, traverses the Third
Avenue elevated railroad from uptown to downtown Manhattan. The
film’s images are accompanied by the Duke Ellington tune that gives
the film its title, and it is Ellington’s music, as much as the tracks of the
“el,” that propels Pennebaker’s camera along in syncopated movement.
Beyond Ellington’s music, another influence on the film was John Sloan’s
paintings of early twentieth-century Manhattan, in particular, Sloan’s
painting of the Sixth Avenue el (which was dismantled in the 1930s).
Pennebaker has mentioned his admiration for a Sloan painting that
depicts the “Elevated as it came out of 3rd Street and zoomed up 6th
Avenue. I . . . thought it was the most magic thing” (qtd. in D’Arcy).
The painting, Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street (1928), captures the
movement of the elevated train and the life of the early evening streets

below in a way that produces an effect of restless activity in the big city.
Pennebaker has acknowledged that the completed version of Daybreak
Express was also influenced by Francis Thompson’s film NY, NY (1957).
For Pennebaker, the combination of image and sound in Thompson’s
film resulted in a work that was engagingly abstract. However, what
particularly interested him about NY, NY was that Thompson’s film
was an example of a self-made, independent production. According to
Pennebaker, the experience of seeing Thompson’s film motivated him
to complete Daybreak Express in 1957 and to pursue independent film-
making as a career.
The footage Pennebaker filmed in 1953 for Daybreak Express pre-
ceded and in a sense anticipated Stan Brakhage’s Wonder Ring (1955),
another film dealing with Manhattan through a focus on the el. The
broader lineage of Daybreak Express and Wonder Ring includes Eu-
ropean “city symphonies” of the 1920s and a cycle of New York City
films of the 1930s, among them A Bronx Morning (1931) by Jay Leyda
and Autumn Fire (1933) by Herman G. Weinberg. Such films informed
documentary aesthetics via an association with avant-garde practices
that, in turn, were extended through representations of reality. Within
the city films, narrative is anchored in a specific place (an urban center)
and time (typically, a diurnal cycle), with an emphasis on movement
within the frame. Similarly, the frequently kaleidoscopic imagery of
Daybreak Express is located within a specific place and time, and a form
of “symphonic” movement is achieved through its orchestration to jazz.
Daybreak Express, with its mixture of midcentury modernity—jazz,
the el, the accelerated pace of everyday life—could have been included
within the program known as “Brussels film loops.” The program con-
sisted of short films—produced by the Department of State and exhib-
ited as continuous loops within the US Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair
in Brussels—that were intended to display aspects of contemporary
American life. The films featured a diverse list of topics, including street
scenes, clothing, food, housing, advertisements, and natural landscapes.
The twenty-three two-and-a-half-minute films were shot by a team of
filmmakers that included Pennebaker, Leacock, Francis Thompson,
Shirley Clarke, and Wheaton Galentine. Pennebaker and Derek Wash-
burn toured the United States filming various topics, and they sent the
footage to New York, where it was edited by Clarke, often in association

Figure 1. Daybreak Express (1953–57).
with Pennebaker, into twelve loops. Pennebaker individually compiled

one loop. The team of filmmakers was coordinated by Willard Van Dyke,
who had earlier worked on a similar assignment that resulted in the
film The City, made with Ralph Steiner and produced by the American
Institute of Planners for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
Within a focus on everyday Americana, the “loops” display a certain
avant-garde aesthetic of movement in the form of free-floating links
between often dissonant images and rapid transitions from one shot
to another. Shirley Clarke described the way in which she and Penne-
baker approached the editing of the footage: “[We tried] to make jokes
of everything because we had been told that there would be no sound
[accompanying the loops], and one thing we couldn’t [use] was jazz. So
[visually they were] all jazz” (qtd. in Rabinovitz 100). The effect of the
loops in their entirety is similar to that of Godfrey Reggio’s innovative
film Koyaanisqatsi (1982), a collection of images shot (by Ron Fricke) in
various locations and edited together into a multifaceted record of hu-
man experience. Aspects of such an effect are achieved in the loop Neon
Signs, which combines footage shot by Pennebaker with footage shot by

other members of the filmmaking team into what has been described as
a “ciné-poem of form, color, and movement that exhibits the visual rich-
ness and humor of America’s brash, outdoor advertisements” (Rabinovitz
101). The short film mixes brief shots, high-angle shots, mirrored and
reflected images, and flashing lights within its view of neon advertising.
According to Lauren Rabinovitz, the “techniques and styles of Neon Signs
and the other loops represent the vanguard of American film aesthetics
in the 1950s” (101). Pennebaker’s own film in the series, Gas Stop (1958),
deploys a narrative documentary focus on a specific action in time and
place, that of an automobile being serviced at a roadside gas station
that, when projected as a loop, is infused with a certain surrealism—the
endless repetition of a mundane task becomes a stylized, ritualized, and
rehearsed performance bespeaking an experience and, more broadly, a
culture that continually replays, and reinvents, reality.
The combination of narrative-based documentary representation
and certain features of avant-gardist approaches and aesthetics charac-
teristic of Daybreak Express and, to an extent, the film loops, proved
problematic within certain fields during the early 1960s. For example,
Jonas Mekas, in the manifesto “Towards a Spontaneous Cinema,” which
surveyed the practices of what was soon to be referred to as the New
American Cinema, a prominent focus of avant-garde aesthetics in the
United States at the time, did not readily accept or endorse “documen-
tary” representation. In this paper Mekas insisted that the “American
documentary has been dead for two decades,” and what he called the
“old, pallid documentary myth” has produced “bloodless industrial or
sales documentaries” (121). Similarly, even though the documentary
filmmakers Shirley Clarke and Emile de Antonio were signatories to
“The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” a document
prepared by Mekas, the statement studiously excluded practitioners of
the emergent direct cinema documentary form.
Nevertheless, the New American Cinema did in various places openly
acknowledge the influence of direct cinema on avant-gardist or under-
ground filmmaking. In this way, in 1959 the journal Film Culture, which
had been founded by Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas in 1955, gave
its first Independent Film Award to Shadows (1959) by John Cassavetes.
In 1960 the award went to Pull My Daisy (1959) by Robert Frank and
Alfred Leslie. The film historian David James has noted that the award

citations for both films refer “in similar terms to the freshness and vigor
of the elements of cinéma vérité [or direct cinema] each contained. . . .
[B]oth films approach the status as well as the style of the cinéma vérité
documentary, positing the primacy of everyday life in the work of art”
(85). The third Independent Film Award went in 1961 to Primary, a film
made collaboratively by Pennebaker, Leacock, and Albert Maysles. In the
citation accompanying the award, Mekas accepted the new documentary
form and praised Primary for its innovative approach to documentation:
“[The filmmakers] have caught scenes of real life with an unprecedented
authenticity, immediacy, and truth. . . . [Primary explores] new camera,
sound and lighting methods. . . . The techniques of Primary indicate
that we are entering a long-awaited era . . . when a film-maker can shoot
his film with sound, alone and by himself. . . . There is a feeling in the
air that cinema is only just beginning” (Mekas, “Independent” 424). In
1962 Mekas’s regular column in the Village Voice included a positive
review of Wasn’t That a Time (1962), a direct cinema documentary by
Michael and Philip Burton. In contextualizing the film, Mekas briefly
surveyed recent developments in independent cinema and went on to
explicitly link documentary and avant-garde impulses in his endorsement
of the aesthetic approaches “being developed by experimentalists and
documentarists” (Mekas, Movie Journal 49). In 1964 Mekas filmed a
performance by the Living Theater of Kenneth Brown’s play The Brig
in direct cinema style. The connections between the US avant-garde
and direct cinema were felt elsewhere. The process is exemplified to
a degree by Bert Stern, included in “The First Statement of the New
American Cinema Group” as a member of the New American Cinema,
whose film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960) served as a model for the
aesthetics and approaches of Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop.
In another way, correspondences between the New American Cinema
and documentary elements similar to those found in Pennebaker’s for-
mative work are exemplified in the early 1960s films of John Cassavetes.
Pennebaker and Cassavetes—whose film Shadows, in its original (1957)
version, was lauded by Mekas as an exemplar of the New American Cin-
ema—shared an attempt to produce a new documentary realism, and the
films of both filmmakers focus on performance as the vehicle for access
to the real. Like Pennebaker, Cassavetes filmed Shadows with handheld
cameras and recorded synchronized sound and often filmed using only

available light. In particular, handheld camerawork permitted both Cas-
savetes and Pennebaker to participate in the profilmic event. Leacock,
in his account of direct cinema as an “uncontrolled cinema” (in an essay
published in the same issue of Film Culture as “The First Statement of
the New American Cinema Group”), insisted that, far from conforming
exclusively to the role of distanced neutral observer, the direct cinema
filmmaker must combine observation with participation in the scene
(“Uncontrolled Cinema” 76–78). Of the range of practices shared by
Pennebaker and Cassavetes, the “shakiness” of a handheld camera most
notably marked the look of the contemporaneous films of both filmmak-
ers. Notably, the practice functions as a central feature of Pennebaker’s
“performing” camera and the accompanying forms of “showing.”
The effect of handheld camerawork is, as noted by the critic Scott
MacDonald, the result of the conscious incorporation of a filmmaker’s
personal gestures into the imagery recorded. While, as MacDonald
points out, Jonas Mekas was one of the “best-known figures in this
development” (164), ironically, Mekas was critical of Pennebaker’s cam-
erawork, which he contrasted to the avowedly “gestural” practices of
the New American Cinema and other avant-garde work. According to
Mekas, Pennebaker’s camerawork may be “shaky. But not too shaky. . . .
Pennebaker ensures that. It won’t shake outside the limits of proper-
ness, I can assure you that. Pennebaker makes films for TV” (Movie
Journal 22). For Mekas, the demands and constraints of broadcast
television denied the full effect of what otherwise would be an expres-
sive “gestural” aesthetic. Degrees of shakiness aside, the film theorist
William Rothman emphasizes the significance of the nonstable camera
in direct cinema—a term he applies to the early work of Pennebaker
and associated documentary filmmakers—as a practice that indicates
that the “camera is hand-held, that it is an extension of the filmmaker’s
bodily presence, his or her hand (and eye)” (Documentary Film 294).
The result is, in Pennebaker’s case, a form of filming and filmmaking as
performance—in the dual sense of a mastered application of technique
and an expressive display of a bodily presence. The performance by
the filmmaker and the performance by documentary subjects coalesce
in Pennebaker’s work in a practice that is summarizable in the phrase
performing the real. This wide-ranging process is examined here through

reference to central themes and concerns within Pennebaker’s work,
namely, the music concert film, collaborative productions, portraiture,
and rehearsal.
Concert Film
The Red Shoes, made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in
1948, is a film about performance. The narrative revolves around the
ways in which the bodies of performers respond to and are manipulated
and transported by the desire to perform. In the ballet “The Red Shoes”
performed within the framing story of the film, a woman sees a pair of
crimson slippers in a shoemaker’s shop and imagines herself dancing in
them. The irresistible attraction of the shoes builds until, in a dramatic
departure from her other preoccupations, she leaps dramatically and
joyously from the ground, landing with the slippers on her feet—which
immediately propel her into new, spirited bouts of dancing. The power-
ful, magical quality of the slippers gives her dancing a new expressive-
ness, though the shoes have a darker effect—driving her dancing into an
uncontrollable frenzy that leads her into hysteria. Unable to remove the
slippers and overwhelmed by uncontrollable emotions, she must dance
until she dies. The narrative of the ballet is a portent. The powerful pas-
sions symbolized in the ballet cannot be confined to the stage. Offstage,
the unleashed passions drive the ballerina, Vicky (Moira Shearer), to
the point where she runs desperately through her apartment and, in a
final leap, jumps from her balcony onto the railroad tracks below. The
leap of joy and the leap to death are parallel—both actions constitute
the outcome of the undeniable need to perform.
The scene changes: the ballet becomes a rock concert, ballerinas
are replaced by musicians, Vicky morphs into Janis . . . In Monterey
Pop Pennebaker’s cameras document Janis Joplin onstage at the 1967
Monterey International Pop Festival with her band Big Brother and
the Holding Company as she delivers a memorable performance of the
song “Ball and Chain.” The sequence commences with a shot in which
the camera pans across the audience, followed by a series of quick shots
of members of the band, and ends with a tight close-up of Joplin’s face
in half profile. At times, the camera unsteadily zooms in on Joplin; at

other times, it captures the color and movement of the accompanying
light show. Interspersed with these shots are cuts of Joplin’s feet, seen
pounding the stage in time with the driving beat of the band and her
own powerful vocalization. At the end of the mesmerizing delivery of the
song, Joplin acknowledges the tumultuous applause of the audience with
a beaming smile and excitedly runs into the wings of the stage. Offstage
but still within view of the camera, she spontaneously leaps into the air,
propelled by the silver shoes that during the song were seen vigorously
stamping the stage, her leap a recognition and affirmation of a remark-
able performance. As with Vicky’s dance leap in her performance of the
ballet “The Red Shoes,” Joplin’s leap is a sign of the need to perform, and
the jump of joy captured by Pennebaker’s cameras is Joplin’s acknowl-
edgment of a powerful performance. The inclusion of the shot in the
final version of Monterey Pop emphasizes performance as an action that
transcends the boundaries of the stage. Further, the ensemble of shots
within which Pennebaker depicts Joplin’s performance—stamping feet,
close-ups of her face distorted with the emotion of the song, the smile
as the audience roars its approval, and the backstage leap—encapsulates
and exemplifies filmmaking as an expressive performance.
Such varied reworkings of performance take depictions of the real
beyond the frame established by documentary representation, and the
effect of the scene was misinterpreted in certain quarters. Wim Wenders,
who started his career as a rock critic, was offended by Pennebaker’s
depiction of Joplin in Monterey Pop. Writing in 1970 in a review of the
film, Wenders argued that “[m]usic films . . . are a battlefield: nobody
seems to think there’s any point in simply, quietly watching a band
standing on stage making music. That’s why cameramen go charging
around with their zooms and pans. Even the result of all this madness
can’t be left in peace; it is then chopped up into tiny pieces in the
editing room. Music films are usually testaments to incomprehension,
impatience or contempt” (62). He adds that Monterey Pop largely es-
capes these charges, though he finds that the depiction of Janis Joplin
is “spoiled by the insult of showing more close-ups of her stamping feet
than the rest of her set” (62). With this comment Wenders misreads
the evocative effect of the film’s focus on Joplin’s foot tapping and the
feet that will propel her into a leap of joy as the acknowledgment of a
triumphant performance. Wenders also fails to recognize that what he

interprets to be Pennebaker’s foot fetishism is part of a larger structure
in the film within which frequent shots of people walking, seen from the
knee or waist down, recur throughout the film to evoke the energy and
movement represented by the performers and the crowd. In another
example, a shot of a pair of shoes abandoned overnight in a parking lot
precedes a rapturous sitar performance by Ravi Shankar. The shoes,
framed within the foreground like a prosaic version of Van Gogh’s Boots
with Laces (1886), presage the perambulatory movement associated
with the coming of a new day. Wenders’s criticism alludes to a desire
for a representational form that renders actions “comprehensible,” in
the manner of works of documentary that record a complete body as
the site of knowledge.
In contrast, the concert film—the depiction of musicians and musi-
cal performances that is a staple of the “rockumentary” (a form that has
also come to encompass biographies of rock musicians)—is not under
any obligation to pursue a knowledge function. In opposition to sober
informational works offered as a means of knowledge and public service,
the origins of rockumentary can be positioned in relation to the fate of
the Hollywood studio system and the genres it maintained. Beginning in
the early 1960s, observational studies of rock musicians came at a time
when established Hollywood genres were showing signs of exhaustion.
This situation was exacerbated by the fact that Hollywood’s traditional
genres, notably, the western and the musical, did not, in the short term
at least, survive the demise of the studio system. Attempts during the
1960s to revive such genres were mixed—while musicals such as Funny
Girl (1968) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971) were relatively successful at
the box office, other endeavors often met with disaster (and the fate of
the execrable Paint Your Wagon [1969] exemplifies the consequences
resulting from a melding of the western and the musical in an ill-conceived
cross-generic hybrid). The combined circumstances—decline of the stu-
dio system and the impact of this situation on established filmic genres,
particularly the musical—left a generic void that was filled in the late
1960s by the rockumentary form pioneered by Pennebaker, which, as
David James has noted, “savagely reinvented the musical as genre” (349).
The resultant form concentrated on varieties of contemporary popu-
lar music and tended to focus on concert performances. Monterey Pop,
Sweet Toronto, together with Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) and

the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter (1970), among other titles, consti-
tute a “first generation” of the concert film. During the middle period
of the concert film appeared Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978)
and Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense (1984). Recent examples
include, among others, Jim Jarmusch’s Year of the Horse (1997) and
Jonathan Demme’s Heart of Gold (2006). The new “musical” replaced
an established generic narrative that dominantly combined musical epi-
sodes with a dramatic focus on the fantasies of individuals seeking to
succeed in the music business. In place of such emphases, concert films
harnessed a utopian desire for abandonment and unfettered personal
expression within and through shots of onstage performances, scenes of
audience participation, and, frequently, a focus on backstage or offstage
antics by musicians. Rock or pop concert films emphasize expressive
performances and exploit the visual and sonic capacities of representa-
tions that are affective, visceral, and sensuous.
In a reflection on the ability of observational film to evoke a sense
of the sensuous and affective, the filmmaker and critic Martha Ansara
comments on the “beautiful, radiant thing” within filmmaking—a pro-
cess that is “as ephemeral and personal as dreaming.” Ansara finds such
a moment within a low-angle shot in Monterey Pop of Otis Redding
swaying back and forth onstage, backlit by a spotlight that alternatively
reveals and obscures the singer within its glare. In the terms of her
musings on the special quality of the film experience, Ansara concludes
that “Pennebaker’s long take of Otis Redding moving within the light
speaks for itself” (128). The description is similar to evocations by film
impressionists, among them Jean Epstein, of the quality they referred
to as photogénie. Epstein used the word to refer to a mysterious effect
in which an image is endowed with poetic value within the camera’s
restricted field of vision. Photogénie was an attempt to simultaneously
describe and explain the ability of cinema to reveal reality through star-
tling and revelatory forms of apprehension. Epstein increased the mys-
tery at the core of the practice within his inability to fully explain the
process of photogénie. For Epstein, photogénie was, ultimately, beyond
explanation. Similarly, for Ansara, the image produced by Pennebaker is
beyond explanation—it “speaks for itself.” Such a formulation exceeds
the features traditionally ascribed to documentary representation as a
knowledge-producing description and lucid explanation of reality.

Figure 2. Otis Redding
backlit on stage in
Monterey Pop (1968).
Ansara’s example stresses the place of the body in performance

within affective and visceral representations. Extending this point,
concert films can be considered within the field of works that Linda
Williams refers to as “body genres.” Williams writes of pornography,
horror, and melodrama as genres that evoke “ecstatic excesses—. . .
a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm—of the body ‘beside
itself’ with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness”
(5). Such genres not only “sensationally display bodies on the screen,”
they share a spectatorial effect that is manifest as “an apparent lack of
proper aesthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and
emotion” (4). In this way, body genres both portray the body and “affect
the sensational body” in a manner such that “it seems to be the case that
the success of these genres is often measured by the degree to which
the audience sensation mimics what is seen on the screen” (5).

Informing this analysis is Jane Gaines’s study of the effects of the
presence of the body in nonfiction film. Gaines paraphrases the specta-
torial effects of the fictional body genres examined by Williams—por-
nography, horror, and melodrama—in terms of “making the body do
things”: “[H]orror makes you scream, melodrama makes you cry, and
porn makes you ‘come’” (90). Gaines adds radical documentary, such as
In the Year of the Pig (1969), Word Is Out (1979), The Battle for Chile
(1979), and Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), to the forms that “produce”
an involuntary response in the spectator. Such documentaries feature
images of bodies in struggle because the filmmakers “want audiences
to carry on that same struggle” (91, emphasis in original). The analysis
implicates another body genre—that of the rock concert film—that, it
can be argued, makes us want to dance. Watching Janis Joplin onstage
at the Monterey festival stamp her feet in time with the beat makes us
want to pound our feet in a mimetic dance accompanied by the band’s
electrified blues.
Such an action is an expression of abandonment, pleasure, joy, and
fun. However, “fun” is a word rarely used in relation to the documentary,
a category that in critical interpretations often subsumes the concert film
and “rockumentary” and one that is commonly associated with idealist
conceptions of truth. One effect of the imposition of a rational truth as
the core of documentary is to reduce documentary to the realm of the
serious, where conceptions of fun are weakened or attenuated, to the
point that documentary is characterized as a discourse that, generally, is
“not a lot of laughs” (Winston, “Not a Lot” 145). Similarly, “pleasure” is a
problematic term within documentary film theory and one that occupies
an uneasy place in academic discourses of cinema generally. Typically,
within this realm, the “more ‘difficult,’ more ‘enlightening’ pleasures of
non-narrative form and formal experimentation are affirmed over [the]
reassuring, conventional pleasures . . . frequently associated with com-
mercial or mass culture” (Rusky and Wyatt 5). The pleasure that accrues
to the insalubrious concert film and rockumentary leads to a reconsid-
eration of the place of these forms within or against the documentary
tradition. The concert film, which has very little public service sobriety
about it, might more appropriately be considered a distinct genre or
at least a hybrid form in which a documentary observational focus on
performance evokes expressive moments of abandonment and joy.

Informed by this perspective, Pennebaker’s concert films represent
and reframe performance in particular ways. The features of image
and sound of such works variously function in relation to Pennebaker’s
Monterey Pop, Sweet Toronto, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from
Mars, Depeche Mode 101, Only the Strong Survive, and Down from
the Mountain. A central device through which Pennebaker’s concert
films convey the affective power of a performance is via close depictions
of a performer. The focus on a performer is complemented by visual
strategies that construct an interplay between onstage performers and
their fans. The image is, however, only one component of the form. The
recording of sound, including music, and the manipulation of sound,
though subservient to the visual domain of the concert film, contributes
to the broad effects of Pennebaker’s work. The images and sounds de-
ployed by Pennebaker within his concert films are often augmented by
archival footage. Pennebaker’s lengthy career has provided him with a
rich archive of representations of rock musical performances, and this
archive is expanded through footage of musical performances from be-
yond the field of rock, including bluegrass (Down from the Mountain)
and soul (Only the Strong Survive). The demand for images of rock stars
and other performers permits Pennebaker to revisit and refashion his
“archive.” Within and through this practice, “original” performances by
musicians function as a palimpsest over which is laid a new, expanded
work within which onstage performances are reconfigured.
Watching Musicians Play and

Watching an Audience Watch Musicians
The image derived from rock concert films of crowds crammed into
concert venues has become a central signifier of “youth culture” and
“contemporary music.” Monterey Pop, arguably the first rockumentary,
established certain features of this image within the representational
lexicon of pop and rock music. However, the visual style of the film had
antecedents that drew on different musical genres, notably Jazz on a
Summer’s Day, a record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival made by
Bert Stern, a leading fashion photographer. Stern invested his film with
the saturated colors that characterized his glamour photography. Over
the few days of the Newport festival, he shot 130,000 feet of film, often
filming musicians weaving in and out of backlights and holding long

close-ups of onstage performers. Significantly, Stern was not exclusively
focused on the stage, and he interspersed numerous shots of the audi-
ence within the final version of Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which took six
months to edit. Stern used five cameras on the shoot, not all running
simultaneously, with a camera devoted to stage close-ups, one behind
the audience to film long shots of the stage, and two roaming cameras,
one on the right of the stage and the other below center stage. A camera
was frequently placed on the stage behind the performers for back shots
that framed performers against the audience.
Approaches similar to certain of these features are found in the film
Monterey Pop. The vibrant colors of Monterey Pop, the tight close-ups
on a performer’s face, and shooting into lights constitute stylistic fea-
tures reminiscent of Jazz on a Summer’s Day. As with Stern’s filming
of Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Pennebaker used a relatively large camera
team on Monterey Pop, and camera operators were positioned at vari-
ous locations: Albert Maysles was situated center stage, about ten rows
back. A camera on the left-hand side of the stage and another on the
right-hand side were operated by Jim Desmond and Nick Proferes.
Richard Leacock and Roger Murphy filmed from rooftops overlooking
the audience and the stage. Barry Feinstein, filming with a “bug eye”
lens, roamed through the crowd, and Pennebaker was responsible for
onstage filming. Like Jazz on a Summer’s Day, audience reaction shots
constitute a central component of the stylistic strategies of Monterey
Pop. Indeed, at the beginning of the film, an audience member contex-
tualizes and “interprets” the forthcoming event. The segment, which
was filmed by Albert Maysles on roaming assignment throughout the
festival ground prior to the first concert performances, is, in effect, a sly
interview. In response to a question from Maysles (which is not included
in the scene), a young woman exclaims, “Haven’t you been to a love-in?
God! I think it’s gonna be like Easter and Christmas and New Year’s
and your birthday all together, ya know? The vibrations are just gonna
be floating everywhere!” Whereas in Stern’s film audience members
are depicted relaxing between sets or watching the stage—frequently
in shots from the stage—or framed within a shot from the rear of the
stage that places performers in the foreground and the audience in
the background, Monterey Pop rigorously deploys shots that implicate
and relate performer and audience within and through an exchange of

looks. The interrelationship of performer and audience established in
this process soon became a staple of concert films. Through replication
and overuse in films such as Woodstock the technique was in danger
of becoming a cliché, leading Jonathan Demme to exclude shots of the
audience from his concert film Stop Making Sense.
Within a repeated deferral to the technique in numerous concert
films, crosscutting from audience to performer, and vice versa, is mo-
tivated by certain considerations. Cutting back and forth between per-
former and audience establishes an exchange or reciprocal relationship
between the two. In addition, intercutting between onstage action and
audience reaction facilitates an affective and emotional identification
between the audience at a live event and the spectator who watches the
recorded concert. The dual effect of the technique in Monterey Pop is
heightened through the deployment of multiple cameras available to
record a range of audience reactions from various perspectives. Con-
tinual looks to and by audience members contribute to the generation
and maintenance of a flow of action that in turn reinforces the sense
of movement that characterizes the film. In other ways, the technique
effectively underlines and reinforces expressive forms of performance.
During Joplin’s delivery of “Ball and Chain,” Pennebaker includes a shot
of Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas mouthing the words “Oh,
wow!” Though the provenance of the shot of Elliot is uncertain—it could
have been recorded at any time during the festival—the insertion of the
take within the context of Joplin’s rendition suitably contributes to the
sense of bravura accomplishment associated with Joplin’s performance.
The interaction of performer and audience is further evoked in the
film’s masterstroke—the final sequence featuring Ravi Shankar. Pen-
nebaker was aware early in the process of editing Monterey Pop that he
would end the film with Shankar’s performance. An early rough cut of
the film included a lengthy performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues
Band. Truman Capote, who, as Pennebaker explains in a commentary
to the DVD version of Monterey Pop, was working in a studio near
Pennebaker at the time he was editing, saw footage of the performance
that, according to his unique aesthetic sense, he considered “tacky.” Pen-
nebaker recut the film the next day, removing the sequence involving
the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which left time for Shankar’s lengthy
performance to be included in its entirety. As Pennebaker proved with the

placement of the shot of Cass Elliot, he was not bound by a documentary
rigidity or insistence on a faithful duplication of the chronology of events
and moments “as they happened” throughout the festival. Shankar actu-
ally appeared on the morning of the third day of the festival, not at the
end of the festival, as the placement of the performance within the film
suggests. Nonetheless, Shankar’s appearance in the film caps a series of
outstanding performances from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and
other featured musicians. In these terms, each act builds to the Shankar
finale, which runs longer than any other performance in the film.
Commenting on elements that are either overused or underap-
preciated in rock documentaries, the British critic Adrian Wootton
has written that “it is crucial that when an artist is filmed in perfor-
mance the camera should be in the right place at the key moments of
any song. Ignorance of a song, or indeed of a specific style of music,
regularly leads to inept close-up and editing work. It is something of a
truism that, if a crew or a director is not fully aware of the structure of
a song—the position of its instrumental passages, vocal extravaganzas,
or notable climaxes—the result can be a series of missed opportunities
in the sense of a failure to capture relevant and revelatory moments”
(99). In this relation, Pennebaker has said that “he’d rather train mu-
sicians to operate cameras than to teach cameramen music” (qtd. in
Holben). However, in the case of Shankar’s eighteen-minute set, the
camera operators, whether or not they were attuned to the melodics
and rhythms of a sitar raga, vividly recorded a hypnotic performance.
The footage of the performance was edited to demonstrate Shankar’s
virtuosity and, via crosscutting, to suggest a rapport between the stage
and the audience. Via this effect, audience members—with their dis-
play of enraptured attention and a spontaneous standing ovation at the
conclusion of the set—are as much the stars as the performer onstage.
In a reversal of traditional narrative procedure, a shot that identifies the
location of the action comes at the end of the Shankar performance.
Footage shot by Leacock from the roof of a grandstand on the edge of
the festival ground—the only high-angle perspective in the film—indi-
cates the size of the adoring crowd amassed in front of the stage. The
high-angle shot and an accompanying shot of audience members seen
from ground level, together with a shot of a radiant Shankar, serve to

emotionally and physically unite the audience members and performer
in a temporal and spatial ensemble.
The implications of this form of representation were noted in various
quarters. During his discussions with Albert Maysles early in the filming
of Gimme Shelter, Mick Jagger commented that he wasn’t going to act
in the film, and he added that he didn’t want “any of that Pennebaker
shit” in the film (qtd. in McElhaney 81). Jagger’s comment on acting
may have been a reference to Dylan’s performing presence in Dont Look
Back, though his scatological comment could be taken as an oblique ref-
erence to Monterey Pop and the way in which Pennebaker establishes a
close connection between performer and audience. In contrast, as Joe
McElhaney has noted, the “power of the Rolling Stones as performers
depends on their maintaining a physical distance from their audience, a
distance seemingly slight but ultimately inflexible” (82). In Gimme Shelter
the physical and emotional distance between the band and its audience
is depicted in scenes in which members of the Stones, removed from
the performance space of the stage, observe their fans as they appear
in footage of a concert screened on an editing machine in the Maysles
brothers’ offices. The dark ethos of the Stones’ concerts, which bubbled
over for their “Satanic majesties” at the Altamont concert, was a calcu-
lated response to the optimistic hippie ideal prevalent at gatherings such
as the Monterey festival. Similarly, the distance between performer and
fan in Gimme Shelter is the inverse of the intimate connections between
onstage performer and audience constructed in Monterey Pop.
Questions of Seeing
The viewer of Monterey Pop, as with a number of concert films that
have adopted it as a representational model, is positioned as a privileged
member of the concert audience, provided unfettered and intimate ac-
cess to a performer within a process that implicates questions of affect.
Watching Otis Redding swaying in and out of the beam of a backlight
produces a certain response in the viewer, and seeing Jimi Hendrix
smashing his guitars produces another, equally visceral response. If the
images in Monterey Pop conform to what Jane Gaines calls a “body
genre,” and as such the film’s visceral representations “make us want to
dance,” Hendrix’s performance in the film, though remarkable, qualifies

such an effect within the fact that the performance does not necessarily
drive us literally to dance (it is difficult to imagine the sort of dance that
could be performed to the sound produced by a guitar as it is ground
against amplifiers). Nevertheless, Hendrix’s performance—and Penne-
baker’s performance in documenting it—raises questions implicit in the
analysis of a body genre such as a concert film concerning the relation-
ship of visceral affect and what it means to see or watch a performance.
Questions of seeing are integral to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966
film Blow-Up, a film not commonly associated with the concerns of the
concert film. The slight narrative of the film—which revolves around
whether or not Thomas, a photographer (David Hemmings), has inad-
vertently photographed a murder—is the vehicle for an investigation of
representation and perception. The film opens with Thomas leaving a
London “doss house” for men where he’s spent the night secretly taking
photographs of the occupants. Back at his studio, he prints the negatives,
revealing black-and-white images that would not be out of place as il-
lustrations accompanying the text of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and
London. In this way the photographs are positioned within the fictional
diegesis of the film as documentary images, revelations of a raw reality.
The photographer extends his wanderings through London’s nether-
worlds, and on one such trip he literally descends into an underground
world, populated by fans in a basement club attending a concert by a rock
band (performed by the British band the Yardbirds). He mingles with
audience members, who are strangely catatonic until they are enlivened
by the band—not by its music but by the fact that its members begin to
smash their instruments onstage. In the ensuing melee the photographer
tussles with a member of the audience for a souvenir, a piece of the
neck of a guitar, which he immediately discards on the pavement once
he’s outside the club. In Blow-Up a deference to documentary modes
of representation and a scene of rock musicians destroying their instru-
ments are elements of a narrative predicated on the ability of the image
to reveal events. Within its inclusion of various scenes and in its focus
on what is seen by the camera, two questions permeate the narrative:
Can we believe what we see? What is real?
Aspects of this narrative are replayed in Monterey Pop in the sequence
featuring the performance by Jimi Hendrix. Throughout most of his
depiction of Hendrix’s performance, Pennebaker excludes the audience

and thus denies a frame of reference in the form of shots of audience re-
sponses—through which we could otherwise gauge our interpretations of
the spectacle. The camera—as it records Hendrix front-on and alternates,
via editorial cuts, from one side of the stage to the other—leaves us with
the questions raised in Blow-Up and that are inherent in documentary
representation: Can we believe our eyes? Is this act real?
As the camera continues to follow him, Hendrix lays his guitar on the
stage, kneels before it, squirts lighter fluid on the instrument, and sets
fire to it. The camera is complicit in the performance—steadily recording
each step of the destruction of the musical instrument. Devoid of music,
we are left to watch and see the end of the performance, as Hendrix
smashes the flaming guitar against the amplifiers mounted on the stage.
We blink in shock and amazement, a corporeal response and one that
endorses the fact that we have witnessed a remarkable performance.
Pennebaker underlines the effect in the end of the sequence by including
the audience in the form of a shot of fans at the edge of the stage, wide-
eyed in alarm at what they have just seen. The look of shock on the faces
of audience members reflects and reinforces our response and validates
the suggestion that we should believe our eyes—that this performance
and its representation is, in the vernacular of the time, “for real.”
Playing with Drama

Pennebaker considered the 1970 film Sweet Toronto a “sequel” to Mon-
terey Pop, and, speaking soon after the release of Sweet Toronto, he
said that the film “finishes what Pop began” (qtd. in Levin 232). Like
Monterey Pop, Sweet Toronto focuses on an outdoor music concert (a
thirteen-hour event held at Varsity Stadium of the University of Toronto
in September 1969), and, as with Monterey Pop, filming involved a rela-
tively large crew. The film team on this occasion consisted of Richard
Leacock (assisted by his son, Robert), Jim Desmond, Dick Lieterman,
Roger Murphy, Barry Bergthorson, Randy Franklin, Bob Neuwirth,
and Pennebaker. Pennebaker had only eight days to organize filming,
and, with an eye to theatrical exhibition of the film, he spent part of the
lead-in time to the concert altering his cameras, widening the gate on
each camera so the blown-up version of the film would, more closely
than a standard 16 mm enlargement, approximate the breadth-to-height
ratio of most theater screens. At the stadium, Pennebaker’s crew erected

a runway on the front of the stage and mounted a bank of floodlights
on the stage to assist with filming. The stage lights permitted filming to
continue when, at the insistence of the twenty-thousand-strong crowd,
the stadium lights were switched off at nightfall.
Pennebaker described Sweet Toronto as a “fantastic film. . . . In a
sense it’s the definitive performance of certain extraordinary rock ’n’ roll
guys, and I wouldn’t even try to do it again” (qtd. in Levin 255). The
performers in question were Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley,
and Jerry Lee Lewis, who constituted the nucleus of an event billed as
a “rock and roll revival.” The complete line-up for the day mixed rock
and rollers with more contemporary acts and included, apart from the
likes of Little Richard and Chuck Berry, the band Chicago, Tony Joe
White, a little-known Alice Cooper, Cat Mother and the All Night News
Boys, Gene Vincent, Doug Kershaw, Flapping (a local band), Screaming
Lord Sutch, the Doors, and John Lennon, performing, with the Plastic
Ono Band, in what was his first live engagement since 1966, when he
Figure 3. Pennebaker filming Bo Diddley

for Sweet Toronto (1970).

performed with the Beatles. Given his preference for the “rock ’n’ roll
guys,” Pennebaker was not necessarily interested in filming bands such
as the Doors and the Plastic Ono Band. No footage was taken of the
performance by the Doors, and in the lead-up to the concert Penne-
baker didn’t “care about Lennon. I didn’t go to film Lennon” (qtd. in
Levin 255). Nevertheless, when it came to filming the concert, Lennon’s
performance captivated Pennebaker.
For Pennebaker, “[w]hat [Lennon] does is extraordinary, him and
Yoko. You can’t believe that. In the end it really puts you through a
change you didn’t expect. So that’s a great movie. That’s really what
movies should do. You go in one way and come out another” (qtd. in
Levin 255). Lennon and Pennebaker had agreed that Pennebaker could
have the rights to the film and Lennon would release an album of the
concert. The album, Live Peace in Toronto, was quickly marketed by
Apple. However, when Pennebaker attempted to release Sweet Toronto
in 1972, a dispute ensued with Lennon, who demanded payment for the
footage of the concert performance by the Plastic Ono Band (Goldman).
A version of the film, which did not include the Plastic Ono Band, was
released in 1973 as Keep on Rockin.’ In 1988 the original footage was
released as Sweet Toronto. The film is currently listed in the catalog of
Pennebaker Hegedus Films as “unavailable for sale,” though footage
from the film appears in a number of knock-off releases featuring Len-
non’s performance at the festival, and Pennebaker has included footage
shot for the film in a number of works, including Little Richard (1981)
and Jerry Lee Lewis: The Story of Rock and Roll (1990).
According to Stephen Mamber, whose book Cinema Verite in Amer-
ica, published in 1974, was a foundational academic study of the form,
the version of the film known as Keep on Rockin’ can be contrasted to
Monterey Pop. For Mamber, Keep on Rockin’ “is a clear application of
well-defined cinema-verite [or direct cinema] principles, and the best
way to understand the short-comings of [Monterey Pop] is to study
[Keep on Rockin’]. Instead of creating a mosaic structure, Pennebaker
[in Keep on Rockin’] limits himself to only four performers, each seen
at some length. The independent sequences have a development that
only real-time, relatively uninterrupted shooting seems able to provide,
and consequently the whole film has a completeness that is inevitably
missing from Monterey Pop, with its highly selective editing approach”

(188). According to Mamber, the advantages of the long takes of Keep
on Rockin’ are exemplified in the segment featuring Chuck Berry, whose
opening version of “Johnny B. Goode” is lackluster and clumsy. “Playing
with a group put together especially for the festival, he is clearly ill at
ease. As they continue, there is a gradual coalescing of talent, and at the
end of the segment, they again play the same song. This time the result
is definitely more satisfactory. However,” Mamber adds, “we can only
tell the difference by having been witness to the progression that led
up to it. Traditional editing practices would surely have cut out the first
performance of the song as mere inferior duplication, and any selection
of ‘best’ songs from the forty-five-minute performance would give no
idea of the subtle ‘drama’ inherent in the entire presentation” (190).
Mamber finds “drama” to be an essential component of the lengthy
scene. Indeed, Berry’s performance is “dramatic,” though in opposition
to Mamber, it is rendered as such through Pennebaker’s close camera-
work, which captures the facial expressions and bodily movements of a
polished professional entertainer. The “mosaic” structure of Monterey
Pop that Mamber disparages contributes to the generation of excite-
ment as an evocation of the mood of the event. Presenting a series
of relatively short scenes suggests movement, a theme reinforced in
Monterey Pop in multiple shots of audience members restlessly walking
about the fairground in preparation for a performance. Sweet Toronto
lacks the “people in motion” unifying theme of Monterey Pop, though
it does include the audience, with frequent shots to audience members
during the daylight scenes of the concert. As Pennebaker has pointed
out, Sweet Toronto “concentrates totally on the performance, and the
immediate audience response” (qtd. in Levin 232).
Bootleg Aesthetics
The relationship of onstage performer and audience members estab-
lished as a central structural feature of Monterey Pop and Sweet Toronto
is extended in Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars through a
specific set of textual characteristics. Ziggy Stardust, a record of David
Bowie’s concert at London’s Hammersmith Odeon during which he
bid farewell to his stage persona “Ziggy Stardust,” is a poorly lit, hastily
shot, haphazard, and grainy film. Pennebaker seemed to recognize the
film’s limitations when he invited avant-garde filmmaker Robert Breer

to provide a rotoscoped image of Bowie for the film. Though unused in
the film, Breer’s sequence would have provided a set-piece interlude
before the live action, as did the animations Jerry Garcia, as director,
included in The Grateful Dead Movie (1971). More particularly, perhaps,
the inclusion of Breer’s animated sequence would have provided an
opportunity to replace poor-quality concert footage. However, it is via
the blemishes in the quality of the footage that the film resembles the
low-budget, do-it-yourself look of “bootleg” filmmaking as produced by
fans at concerts. Such films are treasured by fans as personal, immedi-
ate, and often otherwise unavailable records of an event. In another
way, the filming resembles that of a home movie, the central mode of
personalized filmmaking as the mark of an intimate relationship with a
subject. In these terms, the characteristics of the footage evoke a close
connection between Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and the adoring fans and
a kineticism and hysteria unmatched by many more polished depictions
of rock performances. Pennebaker has acknowledged that the film’s
images are “very sloppy. There were only three of us filming, which is
not a lot to film a concert. We had a fourth camera but we didn’t use it
very much because it was so far away [from the stage]. . . . When you
film something like this you try to get the frenzy of it. . . . The frenzy is
what makes it exciting” (qtd. in BBC Four).
Figure 4. David Bowie

backstage in Ziggy
Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars
(1973).

Aware that the lighting in the theater and onstage was insufficient
for an optimal level of filming, Pennebaker posted signs in the foyer
of the Hammersmith Odeon prior to the concert asking fans to bring
instant flash cameras to the concert. Any light produced by the flash
cameras would illuminate audience members, who would through this
method share with Bowie the camera’s attention. The strategy also points
to a direct participatory relationship between filmmaker and subject
uncommon in documentary filmmaking, which, typically, attempts to
deny any interference by a filmmaker in the profilmic scene. The focus
on the fans is inaugurated at the start of the film, which opens not with
shots of Bowie but with scenes of fans outside the theater. The opening
sequence is followed by backstage shots of Bowie preparing for the con-
cert, intercut with fans arriving for the performance. During the concert
the murky footage includes numerous shots of mostly female members
of the euphoric audience. As Bowie sings Jacques Brel’s haunting song
“My Death,” the audience interrupts to sing the last words of the song.
Bowie smiles and from the stage thanks the audience for its contribution.
Pennebaker underlines the rapport of performer and fans witnessed
in this scene through the inclusion of a backstage shot in which Bowie
appreciatively describes the moment to his entourage.
On the Road and in Concert with Depeche Mode

The interplay between members of an audience and a band features dif-
ferently in Depeche Mode 101, a film that deals with the British electro-
pop outfit Depeche Mode. In what is a surprising example of honesty
in print journalistic practice, press accounts frequently used the word
“boring” to describe Depeche Mode. Pennebaker admits in the com-
mentary to the DVD version of the film that when he first heard the
band he thought that all the songs sounded the same. Andrew Fletcher
of the band himself reinforced the point in his admission to feeling that
the band is “pretty boring” (qtd. in Dafoe). (Indeed, after listening to
the band’s music, it is difficult not to agree with Beavis and Butthead
that “Depeche Mode” is “French for crap band.”) The issue Pennebaker
faced in making Depeche Mode 101 was, then, how to turn “boring” into
his keyword, “interesting.” The approach adopted in the film to address
this situation is one that focuses on the band’s fans. This perspective
results in a bipartite structure in which fans receive almost equal atten-

tion as the band. The dual perspective was achieved through the use
of two film crews. One crew, composed of Pennebaker, Hegedus, and
Dawkins, followed the band, recording the preparations for each concert
and documenting separate performances. Another crew, made up of
the independent filmmakers Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, recorded a
group of fans who had won a bus trip from the East Coast to Pasadena
to see the band play at the Rose Bowl stadium. DeMott and Kreines had
previously worked on The Energy War (for which they filmed footage
in Texas), which was intercut with scenes shot in Washington by Pen-
nebaker and Hegedus.
Through the two crews’ separate documentation of the tour, the film
adopts a road trip structure, with its echoes of the road movie, prevalent
in numerous rockumentaries. Footage of the fans on the bus was shot
using a compact rig comprising a small 16 mm camera with a sound
recorder taped to it. The camera had a single wide-angle lens, which
meant that in order to film a close-up the cameraman was required to
move nearer to a subject. The technique resulted in close interactions
between filmmakers and subjects within the cramped confines of the
bus. The attention to the fans on the bus captures comments that could
betray a certain vacuity on their part; for example, one young fan hasn’t
heard of Graceland. However, the film is never condescending in its
depiction of the fans. Soon after the release of the film, Pennebaker
commented in an interview that the young people on the bus are “all
characters and I tried to let them be whatever they are.” When the
gaffe about Graceland appears, “it gets a big applause in the audience.
It reflects a feeling now. Twenty years ago you wouldn’t imagine hav-
ing anybody saying that. And the kid who mixes up the Sahara Desert
(with the Mojave) knew about Andy Warhol. They’ve been listening
and watching something so I don’t think they’re stupid. Their priorities
of education are different from what my generation would consider
respectable. I can’t make a judgment about that” (qtd. in Darling).
The intimate focus in the scenes of everyday life filmed with hand-
held cameras on the bus was to be replicated in the series The Real
World (1992– ) and, more particularly, Road Rules (1995–2007), which
followed a group of carefully selected young participants as they drove
around the country in a van. Produced for MTV, these contributions to
the reality TV genre mixed observationalism and a quick-cut aesthetic,

which is a mark of many of the music videos broadcast on MTV. A
similar melding of observationalism and aspects of an “MTV aesthetic”
characterizes Depeche Mode 101. The film opens with a photo session of
the band, the footage of which was inadvertently mounted by Hegedus
upside down in the Avid during editing, and the effect was retained
in the final version of Depeche Mode 101. The inclusion in the film of
what is otherwise a minor “special effect” points to the ways in which
Pennebaker and Hegedus edited the film and constructed a certain
aesthetic with Depeche Mode’s youthful audience in mind. In another
way, a scene featuring the band onstage performing the song “Nothing”
is crosscut with footage of the band’s young fans dancing to the same
song on the bus. The effect is reminiscent of a staple of the video clip
in which shots of a band performing are crosscut with dance routines.
Long takes are reserved in Depeche Mode 101 for the filming of aspects
of concert performances, while shorter shots of band members filmed
from various angles proliferate. The band’s spectacular stage lighting,
cued to the beat of the music and filmed in vibrant color, produces an
effect characteristic of innumerable MTV music videos.
Pennebaker and David Dawkins filmed the concert performances
from the sides of the stage, Hegedus and Jim Desmond (who was a mem-
ber of the film crew on Monterey Pop and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
from Mars) filmed in front of the stage, and Nick Doob filmed the stage
with a telephoto lens from behind the audience. During the final concert
of the tour at the Rose Bowl on 18 June 1988, which happened to be the
band’s 101st concert, Dave Gahan of the band escorts Pennebaker, still
filming, onto the stage. As Pennebaker retreats with his camera to the
wings of the stage, his shot clearly frames fellow cameraman Dawkins
also filming the action. Any sense of an observational “purity” that would
preclude acknowledgment of the camera’s presence is openly abandoned
here, as it is in other scenes in which members of the band or fans on
the bus talk or look to the camera. The final concert sequence features
a remarkable telephoto shot by Doob of Gahan, in frame and in focus
for the entire shot, as he walks across the main stage through a wing of
the stage onto a front-of-stage extension. At the end of the shot, Gahan
stands framed against a background of seventy thousand fans, thereby
actualizing the notion of a “concert for the masses,” as the tour was billed.
The relationship in Depeche Mode 101 of performer, music, and

audience is displayed, as in Monterey Pop and Ziggy Stardust, in con-
cert sequences in which onstage performances are intercut with shots
of audience members. In a related way, the relationship structured into
the film between an audience and onstage performers does not ignore
the presence of the music—in fact, performer, audience, and music are
connected in frequent shots in Depeche Mode 101 of audience mem-
bers singing along with the songs the band performs onstage. While a
filmed concert is primarily a visual text, its full effects are achieved via
a combination of visual and sonic realms, and in this way Pennebaker
has paid close attention to the sound of his films.
The Sonic Dimension

Prior to making Monterey Pop, Pennebaker had seen Bruce Brown’s
Endless Summer (1966), a nonfiction surf film in the form of a travel-
ogue that features a number of global surfing locations, among them
various beaches in California. Brown’s film emphasized to Pennebaker
the importance of California as the space of youth culture, and when
Bob Rafelson contacted Pennebaker about filming the Monterey Inter-
national Pop Festival, Brown’s film added to Pennebaker’s desire to film
the event. Reflecting on this impetus, Pennebaker said that the “idea
of doing a film in California about music just knocked me out, because
for everybody coming out of high school, [California is] the first place
they wanted to go. The chemistry was drawing them out there. And I
thought, ‘[California’s] the center!’ And you always try to go to the center
of something, if you’re going to make a film with any kind of broad inter-
est” (qtd. in Stuart). In another way, the example of Endless Summer
proved significant for Pennebaker’s filmmaking practice. In what was an
innovative move at the time, Brown self-distributed the documentary
Endless Summer via commercial theaters.
Though made for ABC television, Monterey Pop was rejected by the
network. As part of their contract with ABC, Pennebaker and Leacock
screened the film for Tom Moore, outgoing president of ABC, and Barry
Diller, the newly appointed president of ABC. The stony-faced execu-
tives were, it seems, disturbed by Hendrix’s onstage histrionics, and at
the end of the screening Diller declared that the film didn’t meet in-
dustry standards. Leacock’s reply—“I didn’t know you had any”—sealed
the fate of Monterey Pop with the network (Leacock, “A Search” 49).

Denied a screening on network television, Pennebaker elected to fol-
low Brown’s lead and self-distribute Monterey Pop through Leacock
Pennebaker, Inc. The move was a costly gamble. Leacock Pennebaker,
Inc., had to obtain a release of the film from ABC and to repay ABC a
sizeable sum that the network had invested in underwriting the film.
Further, the process of self-distribution was a difficult task. Speaking
at the time, Pennebaker noted that Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., lacked
“access to theaters, we don’t have the sales, we don’t have the muscle
that a big major has, we can’t put out a half a million dollars in ad-
vertising” (qtd. in Rosenthal 197–98). Despite the difficulties it faced,
Monterey Pop opened in December 1968 at New York’s Lincoln Center,
and thereafter, following the method of exhibition of Endless Summer,
it was four-walled at the Kips Bay Theater in New York (the site for the
premiere of Endless Summer), among other venues.
The rudimentary sound systems in such theaters raised another set
of issues. The recording of sound for Monterey Pop was a complex pro-
cess. Each of the six cameras filming the concert was cued to individual
recorders, and in addition microphones on the stage fed into an eight-
track recorder. This recorder carried a signal that enabled each of the
camera-recorded tracks to be synchronized with the recordings from the
relatively sophisticated sound system onstage (during his sound check
David Crosby announces in the film, “A nice sound system at last!”).
A second eight-track stereo recorder was linked to a microphone fac-
ing the audience to record audience sound, including applause. While
intended to be broadcast on television, Monterey Pop was recorded in
stereo, an advance on television’s then standard of monophonic sound.
Respected sound engineer Wally Heider oversaw the recordings on
what was the most advanced equipment available at the time. Despite
the state-of-the-art recordings, the limitations of the sound systems in
the theaters in which Monterey Pop was to be screened demanded that
the sound of the theatrically released version of the film was mixed in
a relatively primitive two-track stereo edit with low sonic adornment.
Ambient audience sounds were minimalized, with little depth of sound
or any sense of multiperspectival sound.
The recording of sound for David Bowie’s July 1973 London concert
involved a further set of complications for Pennebaker and a different
variety of sonic manipulation. What became the film Ziggy Stardust

and the Spiders from Mars was originally conceived as a half-hour film
for RCA that would demonstrate and promote the company’s latest
audiovisual technology, a precursor of the video disc. Rewatching the
footage during the process of transferring it to the disc, Pennebaker was
convinced that it could be made into a theatrical film. What ensued was
a decade-long period of postproduction in which Pennebaker sought
an adequate soundtrack mix for the original sixteen-track recordings.
During this period the film was screened intermittently in 16 mm with
a stereo soundtrack. A tour of the film in this format included US col-
lege campuses and a screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The
Edinburgh audience was especially appreciative, shouting and singing
along with the film. Pennebaker recorded these sounds and, in a move
that abandoned a traditional documentary commitment to the fidelity
of an event, mixed the sounds into the soundtrack of the 1983 version of
the film to replace sections of poor quality in the original master tapes.
In the same vein, certain songs and sections of other songs were over-
dubbed with replacement music. Such inclusions added another sonic
dimension to the film and point to an approach to sound recording that
is willing to abandon strict documentation in favor of a creative attitude
to sound as a field that can be manipulated to maximize the expressive
quality of a performance. In the interest of sound quality, as opposed
to any notion of documentary authenticity, the additional overdubbed
sounds were removed by music producer Tony Visconti from a remixed
version of the film released on DVD in 2003. This version of the film
restored to the soundtrack the original stereo recordings of the audience.
Extraneous audience sounds, which were minimized in Monterey Pop,
are present in the soundtrack of Ziggy Stardust and are a feature of the
concert footage in Depeche Mode 101.
Such sound functions as the sonic equivalent of audience shots, a
practice that incorporates the audience as an active component of the
performance. Michel Chion interprets audience sound as an element
of what he calls the “superfield,” the space “created, in multitrack films,
by ambient natural sounds” (15). Within this field, on-screen audience
sound actively contributes to forms of identification established be-
tween the profilmic audience and the film’s audience. The result is a
space in which sound, no longer confined to the screen, fills the theater
auditorium “via the loudspeakers that broadcast crowd noises as well

as everything else” (Chion 15). It is within these terms that audience
sounds are intercut with recorded music as constitutive components
of Pennebaker’s concert films, and the resultant superfield suggests a
new performance space—beyond the stage and screen—inhabited by
an adoring, performing audience.
The Archival Impulse

If strictly defined as a form based on a particular musical genre, “rocku-
mentary” does not adequately describe Pennebaker’s concert films. His
films include other varieties of music beyond rock, including bluegrass,
in Down from the Mountain, and rhythm and blues and soul music, in
Only the Strong Survive. Such music is all too often excluded or dis-
placed from the contemporary sphere of recorded music by the domi-
nance of rock and pop music, and indeed Pennebaker approaches the
music included in Only the Strong Survive and Down from the Mountain
as a form of archival work, a project intended to resurrect, retrieve, and
recognize the performers, music, and legacy associated with each genre.
In this way, Down from the Mountain by Pennebaker, Hegedus, and
Nick Doob seeks to highlight performers and music from the rich vein
of traditional bluegrass music. The film is a record of a concert staged
at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, on 24 May 2000.
The concert was organized by Joel and Ethan Coen, together with music
producer T Bone Burnett, to support the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art
Thou? (2000), a film that features a soundtrack of bluegrass music. John
Hartford, who was something of a living archive of bluegrass and other
varieties of American folk music, served as master of ceremonies for the
concert. In the first thirty minutes of the film, insights into the history
of bluegrass and background to the concert in the form of stock footage
of bluegrass performances are interspersed with coverage of rehearsals
and comments by various musicians, among them Gillian Welch, Ralph
Stanley, Emmylou Harris, and Alison Krauss. The extensive prologue
provides a basis for a broader study of country and bluegrass music, and,
indeed, Pennebaker has said: “We’d have loved to have done more, like
go to film bluegrass festivals, but we weren’t given much time or money.
In the end we wanted to make the film whatever the constraints because
we love working with musicians.” Ultimately, he noted, it is the concert
itself and the performances of traditional folk music that constitute the

“heart” of the film (qtd. in Williamson 18). The concert differed from a
live performance of the music used in the Coens’ film through the fact
that not all the music performed in Down from the Mountain is included
in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Beyond the Coens’ film, the music in
Down from the Mountain can be considered a soundtrack to Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, the remarkable photographic and written record
by James Agee and Walker Evans of the hardships of the sharecropper
way of life that seeks, like the music in Down from the Mountain, to
retrieve and document marginalized rural experiences.
In Only the Strong Survive, Pennebaker and Hegedus shifted their
focus to a different musical genre. The film mixes interviews and archival
footage with scenes of rehearsals and performances by an eclectic col-
lection of musicians, singers, and songwriters associated with soul and
rhythm and blues. Pennebaker and Hegedus shot over one hundred
hours of footage on mini digital video for Only the Strong Survive. The
final version of the film includes Sam Moore (of the duet Sam and Dave)
performing at a tribute to Isaac Hayes in New York City; Wilson Pickett
rehearsing a new album in the studio; Rufus and Carla Thomas appear-
ing at a benefit in Memphis; Jerry Butler at a private function in New
Jersey; and, in a nod to Detroit’s Motown sound, Mary Wilson of the
Supremes performing with the Chi-Lites at an outdoor theater on Long
Island. Fox News columnist Roger Friedman, who coproduced the film
with Pennebaker’s son, Frazer Pennebaker, appears at various points to
interview selected performers, and archival footage is used to provide
brief insights into aspects of performers’ early careers. Such insights are
informed in the case of Sam Moore, who takes Friedman on a tour of
the areas in Manhattan where in harder times he dealt drugs for a living.
Only the Strong Survive was shot in the summer of 1999 and released
in 2003, and the film shares with Down from the Mountain a desire to
acknowledge the music of otherwise overlooked performers. A similar
aim informs Wim Wenders’s film Buena Vista Social Club (1999), which,
like Only the Strong Survive and Down from the Mountain, minimizes
stylistic flourish and in so doing verges on reportage. Within their par-
ticular approaches, both Only the Strong Survive and Down from the
Mountain, as is Wenders’s film, are informed by an archival impulse
that records music and performances for posterity while simultaneously
making them available to new audiences.

Figure 5. Only the
Strong Survive (2002).
Pennebaker’s work embodies other features of archival practice in

the form of the production of a full, complete—“definitive”—repre-
sentation of events. An issue in the construction of such an “archive” is
that of releases, without which selected footage cannot be included in a
film. The making of Monterey Pop raised such issues. Initially, releases
were to be arranged by the foundation that established and organized
the festival. As it transpired, when releases were obtained, they were
only partial or contested. As a result, Pennebaker devoted nine months
to the process of securing releases, including permission to use footage
of Ravi Shankar’s remarkable performance. Pennebaker noted: “[W]e
had Ravi Shankar running much longer in the film than was permitted
by his verbal commitment; but when he saw the film, and the way he
was used, it was alright” (qtd. in Rosenthal 194). The difficulty and
expense involved in securing a release from a high-profile band such as
the Doors may have contributed to Pennebaker’s decision not to film
the band’s performance at the Toronto Festival in 1969.
The demand for a “definitive archive” of representations was further
addressed in relation to the release in 2002 of an expanded digitalized
version of Monterey Pop. The reworked and transformed collection of
DVDs that make up this version of the original work conform to the
definition of an archive as a “general system of the formulation and
transformation of statements” (Foucault 29). In particular, the reworking
of the extant “statements” constitutes a new work, one that is distinct
from the 1967 version of the film. This different work is identified in

the accompanying promotional material as a record of the “complete
Monterey Pop Festival.” However, despite this claim, absences and
lacunae mark the new version. Camera failure resulted in the fact that
Hendrix’s performance of “Purple Haze” was not filmed. The bands
Moby Grape, the Steve Miller Band, and the Grateful Dead and the
singers Lou Rawls and Johnny Rivers all appeared at the festival yet are
not included among the additional features of the 2002 release.
In these terms, the new version is “complete” in the sense that it
includes for the first time all the performances recorded at the festival.
This form of abundance and the claims of the new edition to definitive-
ness are further realized within the range of features of the collection.
Such features include, among others, new high-definition digital trans-
fers of the original footage shot for Monterey Pop; new sound mixes
(which restored the original soundtrack to the film); a filmed interview
with Pennebaker and Lou Adler, one of the organizers of the festival; a
filmed interview with Phil Walder, Otis Redding’s manager; audio inter-
views with festival organizer John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas,
publicist Derek Taylor, and performers Cass Elliot and David Crosby;
a photo essay; a “scrapbook”; theatrical trailers for the original release
of the film; and radio spots for the original concert. The third disc in
the set features outtake performances by the Association, Big Brother
and the Holding Company, the Blues Project, Buffalo Springfield, the
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, the
Electric Flag, Jefferson Airplane, Al Kooper, the Mamas and the Pa-
pas, Laura Nyro, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Simon and Garfunkel,
Tiny Tim, and the Who. The result is a rich archive that expands and
informs the representation of the Monterey performances and highlights
connections between archive, performance, and the real. Specifically,
the plenitude of the real is encoded in the expanded—full, complete,
definitive—archival record of the performances at Monterey.
Chris Hegedus has noted that archival film “becomes valuable be-
cause it’s part of history.” Hegedus adds: “You know [that] no one else
has that footage of Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. So you end up having
these things to keep you alive” (Stubbs 67). In this way, as Hegedus
notes, “selling footage of dead rock stars” has provided Pennebaker
and Hegedus with a financial basis for various film projects (qtd. in
Stubbs 66). Hegedus was largely responsible for compiling Jimi Plays

Monterey (1986) and Shake! Otis at Monterey (1987), two films that
originally screened on HBO and were subsequently included in the
Monterey Pop box set. Hegedus also produced Monterey Pop: The Lost
Performances, which screened on VH1 in the spring of 1997. It was not
only the archive of footage from the Monterey festival that has yielded
new works. Hegedus made Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock (1992), which
features in its entirety Hendrix’s debut with the Band of Gypsies at the
Woodstock festival.
Footage of dead or alive rock stars forms part of a symbiotic rela-
tionship between film and the music industry. MTV, with its constant
demand for images of musicians, for a number of years served as the
nexus for this relationship. An industry geared to promoting the latest
music also demands a steady stream of imagery to support the music. In
a related way, the release in 1998 of the compact disc Bob Dylan Live
1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert (which was actually recorded at
the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 17 May 1966) revived interest
in Pennebaker’s footage of Dylan’s 1966 European tour, which, in turn,
spurred Pennebaker to reassess the outtakes of Dont Look Back, his
portrait of Dylan during his 1965 tour of England. Pennebaker’s archival
impulse drives his responsibility “for seeing [that the Dont Look Back
outtakes are] preserved and kept in a safe place and [for ensuring] that
they don’t get ripped off or destroyed by fire or something else. That’s
basically . . . my responsibility as a film-maker, and I take that very seri-
ously” (Livson 77).
When he returned to the footage shot for Dont Look Back, Penne-
baker found twenty hours of outtakes, from which he assembled the film
65 Revisited (2006). The film is not a reissue of Dont Look Back. It is a
new work, a concert film edited from material not included in Dont Look
Back. Pennebaker’s desire to produce a portrait of Dylan as opposed
to a concert film was the motivation for his decision to abridge Dylan’s
musical performances in Dont Look Back. Pennebaker had, however,
filmed most of the concerts on the tour in their entirety, and it was this
footage that provided the basis of 65 Revisited. In describing what is,
in terms of the title Dont Look Back, the ironic process of returning
to and reviewing footage not included in the film, Pennebaker has said
that he was hesitant to again delve into the Dont Look Back footage:
“I didn’t want to make Dont Look Back, II [but] what we found were

many things that I had either forgotten about or never noticed in the
first place—and the whole process was filled with surprise” (commentary
to DVD of 65 Revisited).
The outcome is a film that complements and informs many of the
scenes in Dont Look Back and that includes a number of scenes that
were not included in the original film. The film opens with Dylan at a
piano playing an early version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train
to Cry,” as Tom Wilson, Dylan’s producer at Columbia Records, looks
on. Moments such as these extend the portrait of Dylan in Dont Look
Back, though 65 Revisited lacks a sense of the frenzied and dislocating
movement—between friends, hotels, press conferences, rehearsals, and
performances—that characterizes the original film. In place of the con-
tinual movement in Dont Look Back from one unnamed city to another,
the new work includes perfunctory titles (“New York,” “Manchester,”
and so on) that identify each stop on the tour.
The concerts replace movement with stasis, a function of the ap-
proach adopted by Pennebaker to filming each performance. “There
would be just one camera [filming each song], one take, one position,”
Pennebaker remembers. The method served as an apprenticeship for a
style applied by Pennebaker in a number of subsequent concert films.
Speaking on the commentary that accompanies the version of 65 Revis-
ited on DVD, Pennebaker noted: “We tried to do that . . . at Monterey—
to let people [with] a good shot hold it as long as they could. Don’t cut
it just to have another angle to dazzle people with, and I still like . . .
the single camera approach to concert performance.” (Bob Neuwirth,
Dylan’s road manager on the 1965 tour, whose opinions were sought for
the commentary of the DVD of 65 Revisited, piped in at this point to add
that the “constantly moving camera is for people with the attention span
of puppies.”) Through this filming method Pennebaker recorded onstage
performances that were either omitted from or truncated in Dont Look
Back, among them versions of “To Ramona,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby
Blue,” “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
The fascination and archival importance of 65 Revisited resides in the
fact that the film contains versions of the complete performance of each
song. The focus here, as opposed to the different formal dynamics opera-
tive within the portrait of Dylan in Dont Look Back, is on the music. In
its rewriting of the portraiture of Dont Look Back, 65 Revisited, with its

emphasis on Dylan’s music, shifts attention from the visual to the sonic
domain. Typically, while the visual appeal of the concert film is enhanced
by its auditory features, the soundtrack, which may be appealing in itself,
especially to the fan/spectator attracted to the film by the opportunity to
hear particular music, is subservient to the image track. In most cases,
the music performed live at concerts is available in recorded form, and
in this way people watch filmed versions of concerts (and, perhaps, at-
tend a live concert) to see the music being performed.
The maximization of the scopic field within a concert film is exem-
plified in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. The film informs a visual
chronicle of the final concert given by Dylan’s one-time backing mu-
sicians, the Band, in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1976, with
on-camera interviews conducted by Scorsese with members of the
band. If, as Stephen Severn has argued, the film “represents a dramatic
reimagining of the possibilities inherent in the ‘rockumentary’ genre”
(25), it does so by “reimagining” (in the form of a revision) many of the
formal aspects of rockumentary’s scopic realm. For example, Scorsese’s
camerawork in The Last Waltz disrupts expectations of the genre by
eliminating the audience from the film. The degree of the revision of the
established formal codes of concert films achieved in The Last Waltz is
further evident in Scorsese’s attitude to interviews. Whereas Monterey
Pop eschews interviews, and in the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter
comments by Mick Jagger and other members of the Rolling Stones
in response to footage of events screened on a Steenbeck stand in for
an interview, The Last Waltz abandons such observational devices and
openly employs interviews. Further, any sense of an unscripted observa-
tionalism structured into Monterey Pop or Gimme Shelter is erased from
The Last Waltz within the elaborate directorial planning of the concert
footage segments. Scorsese prepared a two-hundred-page script of the
shoot that incorporated specific details of the performance to the level
of indicating the place of guitar solos. The method, in effect, denies
shots of “backstage” impromptu actions, musical rehearsals, and other
unscripted moments. In The Last Waltz improvisation and rehearsal are
replaced by closely scripted on-camera action.
A similar attention to scripted details underpins Scorsese’s biography
of Dylan, No Direction Home (2005). Scorsese’s documentary employs
a range of footage from various sources to re-create aspects of Dylan’s

life and music. In doing so, Scorsese relies heavily on footage shot by
Pennebaker, here recast as full-blown archival film, to illustrate key mo-
ments in Dylan’s career during the 1960s. Among the memorable footage
selected from Pennebaker’s “archive” is a scene included by Scorsese near
the end of No Direction Home of a notorious moment during Dylan’s
legendary concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966. As
Dylan plays electric rock, a disgruntled fan in the audience shouts “Ju-
das,” the fan’s comment on what he perceives to be Dylan’s “betrayal”
of folk music. Dylan answers by saying, “I don’t believe you—you’re a
liar,” before instructing his band to “Play fucking loud!” Scorsese sifted
through Pennebaker’s work to include in No Direction Home segments
from Daybreak Express, Dont Look Back, You Know Something Is Hap-
pening, Pennebaker’s sketch of a film based on footage he shot on Dylan’s
1966 tour, and Eat the Document (1972), the longer work Dylan edited
from the same footage. The so-called special features of the DVD edition
of No Direction Home include Pennebaker’s footage of Dylan perform-
ing a number of songs during the 1966 tour, including “One Too Many
Mornings,” shot in Liverpool on 14 May, “Like a Rolling Stone,” filmed
in Newcastle on 21 May, and “I Can’t Leave Her,” filmed in a hotel room
in Glasgow on 19 May. Clearly, Scorsese relied heavily on Pennebaker’s
work to inform No Direction Home, and Pennebaker himself appears
briefly in the film as an interview subject. While PBS advertised No Direc-
tion Home as “A Martin Scorsese Picture,” Scorsese included in the end
credits of the work a prominent acknowledgment to Pennebaker for his
“extraordinary contribution” to the production. In terms of the extent of
Scorsese’s reliance on Pennebaker’s footage, No Direction Home begins
to approximate a collaboration between the two filmmakers.
Collaborative Filmmaking
Documentary filmmaking has, since its inception, dominantly been a
collaborative enterprise. Joris Ivens reinforced this point in his seminal
account of documentary practice, The Camera and I: “‘The day of the
one-man documentary is over.’ . . . Any film, including any documentary,
has so many sides to its content and its expression that its ideal author
is a team, a collective of people who understand each other” (226, em-
phasis in original). Collaboration in documentary filmmaking marks the

limit of an auteurist focus on a single filmmaker as the creative force
behind a work, and the practice replaces such Romantic ideals with an
emphasis on working relationships in which participants variously share
directorial and editorial roles. Pennebaker has exemplified aspects of
this process in his numerous collaborations, most notably those with
Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, Norman Mailer, Jean-Luc Godard,
Bob Dylan, Chris Hegedus, and Nick Doob. In the examples analyzed
here, collaboration extends the practices of documentary filmmaking
as performance: in each case, collaborative work is a dual performance
involving Pennebaker and a collaborator. The dialectic of performance
and the real is evident in the collaborations with Leacock, Hegedus, and
Doob, which are structured in part through reference to performances
by social actors. In the films Pennebaker made with Mailer and Godard,
the notion of performing the real is further informed through methods
of improvisation, dramatic enhancement, and reflexivity.
Being There and the Crisis Structure

The initial focus of the collaboration between Pennebaker and Leacock
was Robert Drew. Drew maintained that the direct cinema filmmaker
was, in effect, invisible—a neutral and unobserved presence within a
profilmic scene, resulting in a feeling for the viewer of being directly
involved in the action. A key phrase in Drew’s rhetoric in this relation
was “being there,” and Drew insisted that an overriding concern within
filming and editing was to create this impression for the viewer. In rein-
forcing the point, Drew stated: “If there is one thing that our films have,
which is lacking both in fiction films and in most other documentaries, it
is that sense of being in a real situation with real people—‘being there’”
(qtd. in Breitrose 120). Further, for Drew, “being there” referred to a
form of observation that denies the process of mediation. The allusion
to voyeurism within the position was denied within an overt appeal to
access to immediate, unrehearsed action. Notably, in many respects the
expression of performing the real in Pennebaker’s work was founded on
a reworking of the approach espoused by Drew.
Attitudes and approaches to “being there” were developed within
the production of Primary, the first major collaboration of Pennebaker,
Leacock, and Drew. Primary, which was produced by Drew, documents
aspects of the 1960 Democratic presidential primary involving Senators

John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts and Hubert H. Humphrey from
Minnesota. Both politicians are depicted on the hustings, speaking to
crowds of supporters at rallies and other gatherings, traveling to the next
public engagement, and consulting with staff. Voting in the Wisconsin
primary and the tally of electoral returns in what was an extremely
close race are part of a narrative in which Kennedy and Humphrey are
counterposed as politicians of considerable, though differing, political
skills. The film team for Primary included Leacock, who used an Auri-
con camera cabled and synchronized to a Perfectone recorder; Albert
Maysles, working with a local newspaper reporter on sound; and Ter-
rence McCartney-Filgate and Bill Knoll, a freelance cameraman, using
silent Arriflex cameras. Pennebaker coordinated a portable sound editing
and mixing machine that enabled him to add sound to silent footage as
the five-day shoot progressed.
Primary has entered film and television history as a landmark work
of innovative technique, particularly its sound and image relationships.
The assessment tends to overlook the fact that the film was shot with
cameras using rolls of 16 mm film, the then-standard gauge for televi-
sion broadcasts, which, as with other cameras at the time, would permit
only two and a half minutes of filming before a roll had to be replaced.
More particularly, most of the sound in Primary was overlaid on the
image by Pennebaker—there is comparatively little use of synchronized
sound in the film. The synchronized footage shot by Leacock forms a
minor percentage of the two thousand feet of film, edited from a to-
tal of eighteen thousand feet, that constitutes Primary. Nevertheless,
Leacock’s defense of the techniques employed in the making of the
film emphasizes the versatility of the filming method and highlights
a certain position in relation to the new techniques. Speaking of his
experience of filming Kennedy within the cramped confines of a hotel
room, Leacock commented: “I retired into the corner and got lost, sitting
in a big comfortable arm-chair with the camera on my lap. I’m quite
sure he hadn’t the foggiest notion I was shooting” (qtd. in Mamber 37).
Leacock’s statement resembles Drew’s many comments on the “invis-
ibility” of the direct cinema filmmaker, and Leacock shared with Drew a
repeated emphasis on the evocation of “being there” as the foundational
achievement of direct cinema filming.
Pennebaker’s comments on the same scene as that mentioned by

Leacock subtly reveal a different attitude to profilmic action. In a panel
discussion on direct cinema hosted soon after the release of Primary,
Pennebaker agrees, to a certain extent, with Drew’s comments that
subjects came to disregard the presence of Leacock’s camera. Penne-
baker states that a “perfect example [of this effect] was when Ricky
was filming Jack Kennedy. . . . What actually Ricky did put into the
situation, was a sort of ease, so that people in the situation did not feel
impelled to be directed by him, they forgot about him, in a sense. . . .
[This ability] was, naturally, helped by the equipment, which was small
enough and portable enough, which did not intrude into the situation
by noise or appearance.” Within what is essentially a standard defense
of direct cinema techniques, Pennebaker notes: “Had Kennedy felt
that Ricky was in any way an intruder, in a physical or moral sense . . .
he wouldn’t have allowed certain things to happen, or he wouldn’t have
acted himself in the natural way he did” (qtd. in Bachmann 294, em-
phasis added). Pennebaker’s recognition of Kennedy’s performance, a
position that contests the absence of such a display implicit within the
emphasis by Drew and Leacock on “being there,” informs and extends
the early rhetoric surrounding the new camera technology and the as-
sociated representational forms. In place of “being there,” Pennebaker
insists in the same panel discussion that it is necessary for a filmmaker
to have a point of view. A point of view mitigates the naive realism and
unmotivated observation associated with “being there.” Pennebaker’s
position acknowledges that subjects perform for a camera and that such
performances are mediated by and through a filmmaker’s physical and
“moral,” or emotive, directorial or editorial presence.
The collaboration between Pennebaker, Leacock, and Drew con-
tinued during the production of numerous films, among them Crisis:
Behind a Presidential Commitment, which was filmed and broadcast in
1963. Crisis was shot over a two-day period and involved four camera
crews comprising Pennebaker, Leacock, Greg Shuker, Jim Lipscomb,
Mort Lund, Patricia Powell, Hope Ryden, and Abbott Mills. Drew ed-
ited footage as he received it in New York. The technology relied upon
by the filmmakers had progressed to the point that during the making
of Crisis cameras could shoot ten minutes of footage without the need
to change rolls, and synchronized sound was recorded throughout the
filming. Crisis concerns the legal standoff between Governor George

Wallace of Alabama and Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his
aides, including Nicholas Katzenbach, over the admission of Vivian
Moore and James Hood to the segregated University of Alabama. The
events are monitored in Washington by the president, John Kennedy.
Pennebaker has referred to an active collaboration as “entwining,”
the meshing of ideas and practice within filmmaking (Gerhard). Fortu-
ity sometimes plays a role in entwining. During the making of Crisis,
Leacock filmed Katzenbach in Alabama as he spoke over the telephone
with Robert Kennedy in Washington. Simultaneously, though unaware
of this at the time, Pennebaker was filming Robert Kennedy in Wash-
ington speaking on the telephone. It was only during the editing that
Pennebaker became aware that he and Leacock had filmed both ends
of the same conversation. Perhaps the most notable scenes in Crisis are
those shot by Pennebaker inside the White House. Filmed frequently
in close-ups, John Kennedy is seen in the Oval Office receiving updates
concerning the situation in Alabama and conferring with members of
his staff. The access to such scenes accorded to Pennebaker was osten-
sibly premised on the ways in which the cameras would document the
human side of the political crisis in Alabama. An impending crisis may
well be present in the narrative of the 1963 film, though deference to
effects implicit within the theory of the “crisis structure” propounded
by Drew is, in this case, problematic. The theory holds that a subject
confronted by a pressing or critical situation will, due to the demands of
the situation, deny the presence of a camera, which, as a result, is able
to record what are within the terms of such an assumption, honest and
transparent (or authentic) actions and activities. In the case of Crisis,
Kennedy was familiar with Pennebaker from the filming of Primary and
from the eight days in 1962 Pennebaker spent shooting footage in the
Oval Office, which was edited into the report Adventures on the New
Frontier (1961). Kennedy established a rapport with Pennebaker during
this filming and, even more so than in Primary, was able to rehearse his
performance of a lack of acknowledgment of the ever-present camera.
During the Oval Office filming for Crisis, Kennedy was fully aware
of Pennebaker’s presence and even played a small trick on his advisor
Theodore Sorenson to admit Pennebaker to the Oval Office. Originally
denied access to the office, Pennebaker approached Robert Kennedy,
who drove Pennebaker and his team to the White House and admitted

them to the Oval Office, where Sorenson’s look of surprise told Pen-
nebaker that it was Sorenson who had objected to filming in the inner
sanctum. John Kennedy, who was aware of Sorenson’s objections and
who had approved Pennebaker’s filming, watched the encounter with
a smile on his face. Kennedy’s awareness of the effect of being filmed
during a critical situation was reflected in the fact that he had arranged
with the filmmakers to delete any of his comments that he deemed
unsuitable for broadcast. During filming in the Oval Office, Kennedy
frequently interacted with Pennebaker in ways that directed the filming.
Pennebaker understood that Kennedy could at any moment instruct
him not to record certain conversations. If that happened, then not
only was the filming interrupted, but Pennebaker and Leacock would
subsequently at an opportune moment have to seek Kennedy’s permis-
sion to restart filming (O’Connell 174). The awareness of Kennedy’s
ability to veto any scene resulted in a situation in which the far from
“invisible” Pennebaker was acutely cued to any sign from the president
of imminent censorious displeasure.
Despite Kennedy’s consummate performance in Crisis, Drew con-
tinued to maintain that the camera was invisible and that subjects were
not performing in the films produced by Drew Associates. The critical
Figure 6.
John F. Kennedy
in Crisis: Behind
a Presidential
Commitment (1963).

reaction to Crisis ignored Drew’s arguments, as exemplified in a panel
discussion hosted on the New York educational television station Chan-
nel 13 soon after the national broadcast of Crisis on 21 October 1963.
The panel members variously identified the level of performance in
the program and lamented that “play-acting” had entered government
(qtd. in Watson 151). An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune
echoed the panelists on Channel 13 by insisting that the “President has
no business in show business” (qtd. in Watson 151). Various editorials
in the New York Times took up this position, arguing that the “White
House isn’t Macy’s window” (qtd. in Watson 149). Such points implicitly
acknowledge that the presence of cameras would lead to a form of per-
formance. According to Pierre Salinger, Kennedy was disturbed by the
critical reaction to Crisis: “He thought he’d gone too far. . . . He was not
sure that the image he gave was the right image” (qtd. in Watson 151).
In other words, Kennedy accepted his act, though he doubted whether
it was the most appropriate performance for the circumstances. In his
reading of the critical reaction to Crisis, Pennebaker faulted the press
for assuming that the film was a “big setup” in which Kennedy was di-
rected to perform. Pennebaker’s objection does not deny performance;
it is a comment on the nature of the specific performance in Crisis. For
Pennebaker, the critics missed the point. Kennedy was not, as Pen-
nebaker insisted, instructed to perform. Instead, as Pennebaker could
have added, the context of the specific type of filmmaking pursued at
Drew Associates admitted rehearsed and unrehearsed performances in
the form of a feigned naturalness before the camera.
The criticisms in effect objected to Crisis for its departure from
extant journalistic practice, and as a result of such criticisms Drew,
according to Pennebaker, “began to see that he was going to have to
deliver to Time-Life, and ABC, programs that fitted in with what they
had in mind” (qtd. in O’Connell 113). For Pennebaker, the result of this
pressure was a drive to produce programs within which the formula of
“crisis” was reasserted. Pennebaker also objected to Drew’s habit of
adding narration to films, and Leacock was troubled by the constant
demand to hastily produce more films, a process that left little time for
reflection on the processes involved in making the films. Looking back
on this period, Pennebaker noted: “Ricky and I were speeding very
fast in another direction” (qtd. in O’Connell 113). That direction led

them to abandon Drew Associates during the editing of Crisis and to
collaborations with Norman Mailer, Jean-Luc Godard, and Bob Dylan.
“I Want You to Help Me Make a Film”

Pennebaker and Dylan. The filmmaker and his subject from Dont Look
Back, which was filmed in 1965, collaborated the following year to film
the European leg of Dylan’s world tour. However, Pennebaker noted,
“I could see it was going to be difficult” (qtd. in Hogenson 28). Adrian
Martin has astutely pointed out that:
It must be terrifying to work with Bob Dylan: In the first volume of his
Chronicles . . ., Dylan presents an unapologetic portrait of himself as a
creature of mood: the songs, as recorded, never quite have the sound
he had in his head; determinations to leave this or that track (like the
classic “Blind Willie McTell” recorded in 1983) off the official version
of an album are reached purely via the whimsical sense that it “didn’t
fit” or “didn’t feel right” . . . ; certain key life decisions are made accord-
ing to sudden but absolute hunches, inexplicable changes of feeling or
intuition. (53)
Undeterred by the capriciousness of Dylan’s interpretation of “col-

laboration,” other artists continued to propose to Dylan various projects
that they work on together. Robert Kramer, whose film Route One, USA
(1989) is a remarkable document of the transcontinental condition of
America toward the end of the twentieth century, wrote to Dylan to sug-
gest a filmmaking collaboration. A Kramer/Dylan collaboration did not
come to pass, and in many ways the film Kramer proposed (“pieces of this
and that, scenes you imagine . . . something . . . that is rich and varied”)
had already been made in the form of Eat the Document, the outcome
of the collaboration between Dylan and Pennebaker during 1966.
Speaking in 2003, Pennebaker described the origins of the film
in terms of a collaborative endeavor. “Eat the Document is a peculiar
anomaly. After we made Dont Look Back, Dylan said to me, ‘I want you
to help me make a film that I’m going to direct and you’re going to be the
cameraman.’ We went out to do this thing the next year. It was fascinat-
ing” (qtd. in BBC Four). Pennebaker added that Dylan “didn’t want [the
new film to resemble Dont Look Back]. He wanted another film that
he directed that wasn’t Dont Look Back” (qtd. in BBC Four). Howard

Alk, the assistant cameraman on Dont Look Back, filmed footage for
Eat the Document in addition to Pennebaker’s camerawork. Jones Alk,
who had also worked with Pennebaker on Dont Look Back, recorded the
nonconcert sound (assisted by Bob Neuwirth, Dylan’s sidekick during
the 1965 tour). Bob Alderman recorded sound during the concerts.
The resultant footage depicts various often unrelated and disorga-
nized scenes from the 1966 world tour. Dylan had already performed in
Australia when Pennebaker joined the tour in Sweden and subsequently
traveled with him to Denmark, France, and Britain. While the location
of each scene is difficult to ascertain with certainty, some stops on the
tour are identifiable from the footage, notably Stockholm, Copenhagen,
Paris, Glasgow, Manchester, and London. In the opening scene, Dylan
sits at a piano in a restaurant. A waiter appears in the scene, which
also includes Richard Manuel, a member of Dylan’s backing band, the
Hawks (soon to be known as the Band). Dylan asks, “Have you heard of
me?” and then adds his own reply, “Quoi?” Wearing dark sunglasses, he
plays some chords on the piano. He then rises from the piano and asks,
“Are we ready to move on?” The scene raises two important points that
run throughout the film: the notion of a performed identity (evoked in
the context of Dylan’s first question) and an emphasis on movement
and travel (as in the question about moving on). The subsequent scenes
do not so much construct an identifiable narrative as string together
a sequence of moments, seemingly randomly assembled and lacking
clear indications of time and place, which in their entirety bespeak the
disorder, fatigue, and endless rounds of interviews, engagements, and
performances that characterize a musical tour. Dylan is depicted on-
stage (in one scene, shots of Dylan singing “Tell Me, Momma” during
different concerts—one from Paris, where Dylan and his band perform
before the Stars and Stripes, and another performance without the
backdrop—are conjoined), in hotel rooms, on a train, on a bus, in a
London cab (a stoned Dylan with John Lennon), and at press confer-
ences (at which his answers to interviewers’ questions are even more
obscure than his responses to journalists in Dont Look Back). Fans,
disappointed and angry by Dylan’s turn to electric music, criticize Dylan
after the infamous concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (shots
from the sequence are included in three different places in the film).
In another scene, Dylan mixes with fellow musicians (members of the

Spencer Davis Group). Robbie Robertson of the Hawks and Albert
Grossman appear in various scenes. Dylan sits at a piano with Johnny
Cash, and the two musicians harmonize on a song. A number of scenes
feature backstage rehearsals. In one of the few scenes shot outdoors,
Richard Manuel, with Dylan looking on, jokes with a young man sitting
on a roadside in Sweden about “buying” his girlfriend. Other outdoor
scenes include shots of the exterior of London’s Royal Albert Hall and
glimpses of train platforms.
Soon after filming ended, Pennebaker felt that the “high-speed film
really caught the psychedelic aura of drugs and rock on-stage. . . . I think
it was a major jump forward from Dont Look Back” (qtd. in Shelton 367).
In later assessments, his opinion of the film had changed. In an interview
published in 1984, Pennebaker felt that under Dylan’s direction the film
“had no logic. Whatever he [wanted] filmed, he would take long hours
and would set up scenes with people, and acting, and he would pretend
to be directing” (qtd. in Hogenson 28). Elsewhere Pennebaker described
one such scene (which was not included in the final edited version of the
film): “We were at the Georges V [hotel in Paris]. There was this large
mirrored clothes cabinet [in the room], and [Dylan] had people going
[into the wardrobe], closing the doors and coming out. There would be
a succession of people—I don’t know where they came from. . . . There
would be strange women and guys and I would just film these little
scenes and then he would set up things” (qtd. in Livson 67). Though
such “setups”—which echo the comedic routines of Richard Lester’s
vehicle for the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night (1964)—found favor with
Todd Haynes—who chose to reconstruct such shenanigans in one scene
of his multiple portrait of Dylan, I’m Not There (2007)—they stretched
Pennebaker’s patience. For Pennebaker, such filming was “just so goofy
that finally I couldn’t stand it” (qtd. in Hogenson 28). He preferred to
film concert footage, though, as he has pointed out, Dylan “wasn’t really
interested in making a concert film. . . . He was interested primarily in
directing material off the stage. Stage material did not interest him,
and in fact I shot a lot of it kind of on my own.” Pennebaker “filmed
[a] whole concert on-stage. . . . [Dylan] didn’t know that I was going to
do that. He was kind of surprised to see me [filming onstage]” (qtd. in
Livson 64). Between filming Dylan’s setups and shooting stage footage,
Pennebaker felt that he was “trying to make two different films” (qtd.

in Livson 67). The result was a certain sense of frustration stemming
from the form of collaboration. Pennebaker felt that the filming had
been reduced to “[m]aking home movies. . . . It’s not that I put them
down at all, I don’t, [but] as soon as you’re looking through a camera
trying to figure out what someone else wants to get, it’s very hard. . . .
Since I was really responsible for much of the camera-work, I felt very
ambivalent as to what I should be doing, and I never did sort it out. In
fact . . . I never would do a film like that again, under those conditions.
It’s just simply too hard” (qtd. in Livson 68).
Pennebaker noted that Dylan wasn’t interested in making a film for
theatrical release (such as Dont Look Back); instead, “[h]e was interested
in making a film for television” (qtd. in Livson 64). The collaboration
between Pennebaker and Dylan stemmed from a commission Dylan had
received from ABC-TV to produce a program for its Stage 67 series. To
this end Pennebaker, working with Bob Neuwirth, put together a work
based on the footage. Problems with the recorded concert sound delayed
the editing, and it took Pennebaker a month to synchronize sound and
image (Livson 64). The resultant rough edit, often referred to as You
Know Something Is Happening, ran for approximately thirty minutes.
Pennebaker has referred to this version as a “sketch: it’s like a rough
thing you do on a piece of paper—not a finished film” (qtd. in Livson 71).
Dylan was not impressed with the cut. According to Dylan, the version
was “another Dont Look Back, only this time it was for television” (qtd.
in Heylin 177). The deadline for the program commissioned by ABC-TV
created tension during the editing phase, added to which was the fact
that Dylan was recuperating from a fall from his motorcycle. Through
the insistence of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, Pennebaker, who
had not been contracted to edit footage when invited to film the tour,
began to assist Dylan to compile the footage into a work for broadcast on
ABC. During the editing process, the collaboration between Dylan and
Pennebaker collapsed. The working relationship was strained: “[Dylan]
was very pissed at everybody,” Pennebaker has noted, “and I don’t know
whether it was because they were putting pressure on him to get the
film ready for TV and he didn’t want to do it, or whether he felt he was
in some kind of competition with me, which I certainly never wanted to
get into.” Pennebaker “wasn’t going to grab the film away from him. . . .
[I]f he didn’t want to make it . . . I didn’t care. So we just tucked away

the film that Neuwirth and I had worked on. We just buried it, and they
went on and made a film” (qtd. in Livson 70).
Dylan, working at home during his recuperation from the motor-
bike accident, edited the footage on equipment loaned by Pennebaker.
Howard Alk and occasionally Robbie Robertson assisted with preparing
a final release print of the work titled Eat the Document. Pennebaker
has observed that “to do so they took the original—when they did that I
asked Howard not to cut the original. I said someday somebody’s going
to want to look at that. This is the inevitable second film to Dont Look
Back. . . . I said you don’t have to cut the original. . . . [M]ake an optical
[duplicate for the purposes of editing]. But they chose not to” (qtd. in
Livson 71). Alk, according to Pennebaker, was “very protective of the
film and he felt that Eat the Document was in some sense his film, his
and Dylan’s, and that he wanted to make that film have some plausibil-
ity” (qtd. in Livson 71). Attuned to the requirements of ABC-TV, the
fifty-four-minute final release print included breaks for advertisements,
though it contained few other accommodations to the demands of broad-
cast television. The film was refused by ABC. In early 1971 the film was
screened at New York’s Academy of Music, and it received a two-week
run at the Whitney Museum of American Art later that year.
Jonathan Cott, writing for Rolling Stone magazine, reviewed the film
after its screening at the Academy of Music. For Cott, Eat the Docu-
ment conveyed a “sense of a private diary, both the subject and its filmic
embodiment being that of a true night journey through mad, disjointed
landscapes, a magic swirling ship of jump cut. . . . Dylan said: ‘We cut it
fast on the eye.’” Cott astutely noted that Eat the Document “suggests the
works of Man Ray, Ron Rice and William Burroughs with its insistence
on perceiving a multitude of concrete details and elliptical progressions.”
He quotes Pennebaker’s observation that “Dylan wanted Eat the Docu-
ment to show what TV never does, to snap people’s head a bit. It’s Dylan’s
logic.” For Cott, it is a “quasi methedrine logic,” and Eat the Document
“is a near visual equivalent of some of the songs Dylan was singing [at the
time] on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.” Cott’s description
of the film in Rolling Stone magazine as an “anti-documentary that uses
the star image in order to de-mystify and decompose it” was echoed in
the program notes for the film’s screening at the Whitney Museum of
American Art, wherein Eat the Document was characterized as an “anti-

document . . . an adventuresome . . . challenge to all the preconceived
notions we have of a star and his public image” (qtd. in Shelton 366).
Recently, looking back at Eat the Document, Pennebaker mentioned
that “somewhere in there is an incredible film,” by which Pennebaker,
who disliked the staged scenes of Eat the Document, seems to mean an
effective concert film (qtd. in BBC Four). Or perhaps he refers to the
possibility of retrieving from the footage a close study—in the style of
direct cinema—of a rock star besieged by various pressures, on the verge
of events that would forever change his life (in which case, Pennebaker
may well have sought to collaborate with Gus Van Sant, who made such
a film in the form of Last Days [2005]). Completed at the time that Pen-
nebaker was first collaborating with Norman Mailer, Eat the Document
indulges a focus on performance that Mailer exploited in various ways,
particularly in the form of free-floating improvisations mixed with scenes
structured from depictions of unmotivated or minimally motivated real-
life action. This body of work—the collaboration that became Eat the
Document and the association with Mailer’s filmmaking—constituted
for Pennebaker a radical experimentation far removed from established
codes of direct cinema.
Improvisation and Direction

According to Jonas Mekas, it was on his suggestion that Mailer began
to make films that, Mekas argues, are indebted to Warhol. Mekas noted
that, following Warhol, Mailer improvised his films without a script and
permitted participants, many of whom were his friends, to create their
own characters (qtd. in Manso 441). Among the Warhol films that Me-
kas urged Mailer to view was Kitchen (1965), which Mailer described
as “almost unendurable to watch” and as such was the “best film made
about the twentieth century” (qtd. in Canby). Mailer admitted in the
late 1960s that he learned much from Warhol: “He made every director
brave enough to make a slow scene without trying to speed it up” (qtd.
in Canby). Whether or not it was because his films followed this logic,
Mekas in the mid-1980s summarized Mailer’s films as the “most under-
estimated and most neglected independently made films” produced to
that time (qtd. in Manso 443).
In an interview conducted soon after completing his film Maidstone,
Mailer mentions Warhol’s films, notably Kitchen, yet cites Bruce Con-

ner as his chief filmmaking model (qtd. in “Norman’s Phantasmagoria”).
Given that there is little resemblance between the style and content of
Mailer’s various films and the found-footage montage of most of Conner’s
work, presumably Mailer was referring to the low-budget mode of pro-
duction and patterns of self-distribution of Conner’s films as influences
on his own filmic practice. Another informing presence for Mailer was
the camerawork associated with direct cinema. Though he objected to
the assumption circulating in critical rhetoric that direct cinema was a
“window on the world,” Mailer sought to meld direct cinema camera-
work to improvised, unscripted action. With a trademark boastfulness,
Mailer claimed for himself the application of the style of direct cinema
camerawork to feature-length fictionalized films (Mailer 162).
Mailer first used the technique in Wild 90, a film shot in a single night
in a New York loft. Mailer and his actor friends Mickey Knox and Ber-
nard “Buzz” Farber play three small-time crooks who taunt each other
as they plan their next heist. Apart from his role filming the improvisa-
tion, Pennebaker, at Mailer’s insistence, acted the role of a policeman in
the film. Pennebaker summed up his involvement in the film in terms
of complicity, being “a part of the crime, so to speak” (qtd. in Manso
441). Pennebaker’s collusion with Mailer’s ad hoc production extended
to his willingness to pursue Mailer’s ideas and to improvise in filming,
an approach that resulted in footage shot from multiple angles in low
light. Mailer’s insistence on improvisation also revealed, ironically, the
limitations he placed on the practice. According to Pennebaker, Mailer
had the idea that “he could look at the camera and take it away from
the person who’s running it, as if he’s . . . photographing himself” (qtd.
in Manso 441). By dominating the camera and by focusing its attention
on himself, Mailer subsumed improvised action and filming within his
specific directorial dictates. Such a domination of the camera has the
potential to spell the end of collaboration.
Nevertheless, Pennebaker agreed to work with Mailer on his next
film, Beyond the Law, a work that provokes questions pertaining to
legality and power. In examining these issues, the narrative focuses on
a number of interrogations conducted by detectives in a Manhattan
police station over the course of a night. In place of the single camera
crew that he employed on Wild 90, Mailer used three camera crews
coordinated by Pennebaker on Beyond the Law, each one filming dif-

ferent interrogations simultaneously occurring within the police station.
Mailer plays the lead character, Francis X. Pope, a swaggering Irish cop
who dominates the numerous characters, both police and suspected
criminals. The constant movement of figures within the frame, the rapid
and often manic dialogue, and the cutting from one interrogation room
to another contribute to a feeling of dislocation that is compounded by
a sense of claustrophobia associated with the cramped interior spaces
of the police station. Pennebaker’s camerawork adds to the breathless
atmosphere by filming in close to characters, often in tight close-ups.
Mailer began filming his next film, Maidstone, on 18 July 1968 with-
out a script but with a complex scenario of ideas. Mailer plays Norman
T. Kingsley, a renowned director who is preparing to film a version of
Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967) in which, in a radical reworking of Buñuel’s
story, female clients visit a male brothel. The establishment is staffed by
members of Kingsley’s circle, known as the Cash Box, a group headed by
Kingsley’s half-brother, Raoul O’Houlihan Ray (played with manic glee
by Rip Torn). Kingsley also has political ambitions and is considering a
run for the presidency. In a reflection of the events and paranoia of the
era (Robert Kennedy was assassinated six weeks before filming com-
menced), Kingsley’s political activities are monitored by a secret police
organization, PAX,C (Protection Against Assassination Experiments,
Control), which was formed to prevent assassinations but which may
actually be carrying them out. The threat of assassination, the fate of
Kingsley as the director, and an interweaving of the two narrative com-
ponents are reflected in a startling sequence that an intertitle identifies
as “The Death of the Director,” a visual assault of a quick-fire montage
of images that marks Kingsley’s assassination.
The annihilation of Kingsley is the intradiegetic focus of the violence
that permeated the production of Maidstone. Mailer sought to create
an edgy and tense situation whereby a blurring of on-screen and off-
screen action would reflect and feed into a profilmic mixing of realms
and stories. Throughout the five days of filming in various locations in
east Long Island, the cast members, as Pennebaker noted, were “like
fish driven around and ready to jump out of the pond. I could feel the
tension” (qtd. in Hoberman 217). The film’s reenactment of this violence,
itself a reflection of social unrest within American society in 1968, occurs
within a film that mixes actors and nonactors, including representatives

Figure 7.
Norman Mailer in
Maidstone (1970).
of militant social groups. The practice, as David James summarizes it,

“introduced into performance extradiegetic social animosities that set one
part of the cast in competition with the other, making the profilmic the
space of collective improvisation and charging fictional interaction with
verbal tensions” (292). Performance in Maidstone and a questioning of
the concept of performance are produced through the correspondence
of fictional and “documentary” sequences, within which Pennebaker,
serving as a cameraman, often appears in frame. His on-screen presence
is a conceit that aligns filmmaking and performances of the real—film-
making as a performance of the real—as the subject of the film.
However, a conceit—an ingenious interaction of narrative levels
and filmic approaches—is a complex mode that requires an assured
directorial hand. Such direction was compromised by the very condi-
tions through which Mailer sought to carry off his conceit. Mailer’s
orchestration of a threat of impending violence and the regulation of
violence once it was unleashed (and his ability to coordinate a large cast,
the members of which on Mailer’s encouragement freely indulged in
alcohol and other drugs as a way to enhance or provoke their on-screen
performances) certainly established the groundwork for the sort of chaos
from which he hoped, in terms of the improvisation he valued so much,
exciting and unexpected actions would result. In a film predicated on
improvisation—a practice that brackets and has the potential to su-

persede planned intervention by a director—any deferment to a strict
directorial coordination of action may be inappropriate. However, con-
ditions intended during the making of Maidstone to spur improvisation
ultimately descended into a situation that one cast member, the poet
Michael McClure, described as a “psychotic pigout” (qtd. in Manso 484).
Mailer’s abrogation of a sense of directorial responsibility led to a
curious situation in which the camera operators (there were five cam-
era teams on Maidstone, including Pennebaker’s) adopted, in effect, a
directorial role. Pennebaker outlined the process in terms of the erratic
nature of Mailer’s filmmaking: “Nobody was running the show. . . . Ac-
tors working their way up don’t know what a scene looks like and want
to be protected by a director. Norman was saying, ‘That’s your tough
luck,’ so the ones that had anything at stake were nervous. The others,
who were just hanging out for the free booze, were fucking up the works
for the pros, which was pissing everybody off” (qtd. in Manso 478). The
result of Mailer’s attitude was that members of the cast were, according
to Pennebaker, “at the mercy of the cameramen,” who offered certain
advice and a modicum of direction (qtd. in Manso 478).
Pennebaker’s creative “direction” was most notably exercised in what
became the film’s remarkable final scene, a sequence that has been called
“one of the great moments in American cinema” (James 297). On the
morning after Mailer had announced that the filming of Maidstone was
complete, he asked Pennebaker to shoot some footage of him and his
wife and four children disporting on the lawn of the estate where much
of Maidstone was shot. During this impromptu home movie the actor
Rip Torn suddenly ran across the lawn and attacked Mailer with the flat
side of a hammer. Shouting “I must kill Kingsley,” Torn bloodied Mailer,
who in the ensuing fight punched Torn and bit his ear. Real experience
had, as it is wont to do, overflowed the boundaries of its representation.
Mailer’s description of Maidstone as “an attack upon the nature of reality”
(132) was enacted in the literal form of Torn’s assault. Mailer noted that
the cameramen, “equipped to photograph scenes which might veer off
in any one of a dozen directions,” were “ready to be surprised” (163).
In this way, Pennebaker accepts unexpected action and zooms in on it.
As blood is drawn and children scream in terror, the nominal director
(Mailer, not Kingsley) shouts at Pennebaker to stop filming. However,
Pennebaker, maintaining the directorial investment made in him by

members of the cast, refuses to cede the camera or to relinquish creative
control, and he continues filming.
Mailer recognized the value of what Pennebaker had filmed during
the assault and included it in the final version of Maidstone, where it
functions as emblematic of performances that refuse to be contained.
Though a crucial scene in the film, the inclusion of which extends and
focuses the relationship of performance and the real, it was not edited
by Mailer. In a further relinquishment of creative investment in the
film, Mailer resisted learning how to edit (however, Pennebaker offered
Mailer certain ideas in this regard). According to Pennebaker, speaking
a number of years after Maidstone was completed, Mailer’s refusal to
edit his own film was a lost opportunity. Pennebaker argued that what
the film “needed was an extraordinary pulling together, so that it always
moved unexpectedly on you. Instead it moves so deliberately that you
begin to anticipate things, and the surprises get fewer and fewer. It loses
the quality of something constantly flowering” (qtd. in Manso 488).
Soon after filming Maidstone, Mailer wrote that Pennebaker’s approach
to filmmaking had replaced the “stodgy, unhappy catatonia of the old
documentary” (160), and, in turn, Pennebaker had envisioned that his
collaboration with Mailer would further this project. According to Pen-
nebaker, Mailer had at the outset of filming been ready to accept that
“‘[t]here aren’t any rules.’ . . . I’d hoped he’d bring that possibility into
filmmaking and explode it. Documentary filmmaking is so hidebound, it
really needs somebody with Norman’s arrogance to come in and shove it
around. Unfortunately that’s not what happened” (qtd. in Manso 488).
Pennebaker’s comments again point to a loss of directorial guidance.
Ironically, the condition reinforced the usefulness of collaboration. In
the absence of guidance from Mailer, Pennebaker, his collaborator, con-
tributed to the coordination of action and the editing of footage in which
fiction and nonfiction, subject and actor, fabrication and reality coalesce.
One Plus One: One A.M. plus One P.M.

In 1968, the same year as he worked with Mailer on Maidstone, Penne-
baker collaborated as cameraman with Jean-Luc Godard on the film One
A.M. The collaboration was a curious one from many perspectives, not
the least since Godard had an ambivalent relationship to the direct cin-
ema associated with Pennebaker and his colleagues. Godard was critical

of an aesthetic that, as he saw it, promoted the idea of capturing reality
yet refused to reflect on the role of the camera in the representational
process. The focus of his criticisms, published in Cahiers du cinéma and
elsewhere, was another of Pennebaker’s collaborators, Richard Leacock.
Godard’s entry on Leacock for a dictionary of American filmmakers
published in Cahiers du cinéma was scathing, and in the same entry he
reproached Primary as a work that was incapable of explaining the US
political process. Nevertheless, Godard read with interest an article by
Leacock on the new lightweight synchronized sound camera used by
Morris Engel in the making of Weddings and Babies. His association
with the approaches of direct cinema filming was confirmed when he
employed Albert Maysles, a colleague of Leacock and Pennebaker at
Drew Associates, as the cameraman on his segment, Montparnasse-
Levallois, for the portmanteau film Paris vu par . . . (1964). Godard’s
lament that with the coming of sound the spectacular side of cinema
was privileged over film’s ability to document experience and his insis-
tence that cinema is obligated to report bespeak his conviction to apply
“documentary” techniques in his filmmaking (qtd. in Dronsfield 67).
Pennebaker had met Godard in Paris in the early 1960s, and, ac-
cording to Pennebaker, Godard at that time expressed a desire to make
a film with him and Leacock. Pennebaker’s description of the proposed
project evokes a version of the more elaborate fabrications of so-called
popular factual entertainment before the term was known: “The idea
was that [Godard] would go to a small town in France and he would rig
it with all kind of things happening: people would fall out of windows,
people would shoot other people, whatever. We would arrive one day
on a bus or something with our cameras and then film whatever we saw
happening around us” (qtd. in Phillips). A collaboration between Godard
and Pennebaker was formalized in late 1967 when Godard granted Lea-
cock Pennebaker, Inc., the US distribution rights to his film La Chinoise
(1967). In support of this deal, Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., underwrote a
trip by Godard to the United States to promote the film during the early
months of 1968. On 4 April Godard spoke to film students at New York
University about La Chinoise and other films. The discussion was filmed
by Mark Woodcock in association with Pennebaker and subsequently
released as Two American Audiences (1968). Godard also granted Lea-
cock Pennebaker, Inc., the American distribution rights for his film Un

film comme les autres (1968), which was screened in New York in late
1968 in tandem with Two American Audiences (Brody 658). During his
promotional tour in support of the impending US release of La Chinoise,
Godard began shooting footage for a project intended to document the
condition of American society immediately prior to what he felt would
be an inevitable political revolution within the nation. Further footage
for the resultant film—One A.M.—was shot by Pennebaker and Leacock
working in collaboration with Godard.
The uncompleted film One A.M. (or “One American Movie”) was
conceived by Godard to have a dual purpose: to depict America on the
eve of a revolution led by students and to be a self-reflexive meditation
on the terms of his depiction in the form of an exchange of documen-
tary and fictional modes of representation. Godard intended the film to
consist of ten sequences: five reality scenes, in which subjects recount
their experiences, and five fictionalized counterparts in which actors
would speak a transcript of the words spoken in the “documentary”
scenes. The originating documentary scenes were to include a woman
from Wall Street narrating her experiences, interviews with Tom Hayden
and Eldridge Cleaver, a girl from the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district
of Brooklyn in the streets of Harlem, and a performance by the band
the Jefferson Airplane on a hotel rooftop. The proposed interviews with
Hayden and Cleaver were filmed, as was a scene involving the Jefferson
Airplane playing on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel in New York (Mi-
chael Lindsay-Hogg restaged the scene in Let It Be [1970], in the form
of a concert by the Beatles atop the Apple studio in London). During
filming other aspects of the plan changed. An interview with Carol Bel-
lamy, a lawyer working for the Chase Manhattan Bank, replaced the
idea of an interview with a woman from Wall Street (by interviewing
a woman from a site of US economic power—Wall Street or a major
bank—Godard sought to expose expectations of social status and its
relationship to gender). The scene of a girl in the streets of Harlem was
replaced by a scene with students in the classroom of an elementary
school in the predominantly African American neighborhood of Ocean
Hill–Brownsville. Godard added a scene of the poet Leroi Jones (who
later changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka) reciting his poetry in
a Newark street.
Not all “documentary” scenes were reproduced in fictionalized vari-

ants, and in other ways the footage deviated from this plan. The scenes
counterposed to the documentary footage included the ubiquitous Rip
Torn (from Maidstone) repeating lines from tape-recorded interviews
with the film’s original subjects as he stood in an elevator that ascended
the floors of a skyscraper under construction. Tom Hayden is included
listening to a tape of his interview with Godard. The scene in an elemen-
tary school classroom involved Torn attempting under Godard’s direction
to provoke the students to comment on the nature of power within the
United States. The students astutely recognized the aim of the “exer-
cises” and used Torn’s provocations as an opportunity to comment not
on nationwide experiences as expected by Godard but on local political
issues. Godard intended the process in which an actor “fictionalized” the
experiences of subjects by repeating their speech to be a performance
that would draw attention to the artificial and constructed nature of
representation as well as the ability of representation to reframe and
rewrite “real-life” experiences.
The inherent aspect of representation to rework experience and the
gap between words and actions, as illustrated in the practice of parallel-
ism (the reenactment and direct repetition of recorded speech), were
analyzed by Godard in Un film comme les autres, which he made in Paris
in July and August 1968, soon after les événements of May of that year.
The film consists largely of a discussion between students from Nanterre
and two workers from a Renault factory. The notion of “talking heads”
is wittily redefined, with the interviewees filmed from the neck down.
Their speech is intercut with images from the May events, and over
the discussions Godard plays his recitations from a variety of sources,
including literary texts, radical political speeches and manifestos, and
autobiographical reflections. Image and word interact in a dialectic that
forces the viewer to consider the relationship of word and image and
the effects of representation.
The notion of parallel texts explored in Godard’s filmmaking was
echoed in Pennebaker’s making of the film One P.M. (or “One Paral-
lel Movie,” or, as Godard would allegedly have it, “One Pennebaker
Movie” [1972]), which parallels and informs One A.M. Pennebaker’s
film includes footage Godard planned to use in One A.M., a film he
eventually abandoned. The fact that the anticipated political revolution
did not eventuate was one reason behind his abandonment and eventual

disavowal of the project. Godard also recognized the complexity of the
editorial task before him in bringing together the disparate collection of
scenes, a task that would take an intense investment of time at a period
in his life when he was developing numerous works, many of which
were soon to involve a new collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin. Godard
and Gorin screened rushes of the uncompleted work in the offices of
Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., in March 1970, at which time Gorin declared
the work a “corpse.” In an interview soon after the screening, Godard
accepted that the project was “dead. . . . When [Gorin and I] first arrived
[and looked at the rushes] I had thought we could do two or three days’
editing and finish it, but not at all. It is two years old and completely of
a different period” (qtd. in Carroll 62). In the absence of the revolu-
tion Godard had in 1968 profoundly believed to be in train, the film,
according to Godard, lacked context. Godard didn’t know what would
happen to the footage, though he suggested it be left unfinished, “[o]r
Pennebaker will do his own version” (qtd. in Dixon 110). Pennebaker
had, in fact, already completed his own version, which was eventually
released in 1972. Pennebaker was motivated to complete the film in
order to sign off on a deal struck in October 1968 in which Godard
and Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., loosely agreed to produce a film for the
Public Broadcasting Laboratory (New York’s WNET, Channel 13, the
precursor of PBS). The collaboration between Godard, Pennebaker,
and Leacock in the making of One A.M. led Godard later to complain
that he did not know which camera was shooting what action (McCabe
215). Speaking soon after his abandonment of the project, Godard stated:
“For the moment we prefer to work with steady shots” (qtd. in Dixon
110). His implicit criticism of Pennebaker’s handheld camerawork was
in many respects a repetition of his earlier ambivalence toward direct
cinema techniques. In a sense, Pennebaker’s reply to Godard’s comments
is actualized in the form of his reworking of Godard’s film.
One P.M. maintains certain elements of Godard’s structure, re
arranging some scenes and adding others. The film opens with two
girls singing and skipping in an industrial area. In the scene that follows,
Rip Torn is dressed as a Native American and carries a tape recorder
as he wanders through a wooded countryside. The tape recorder plays
the voice of Tom Hayden, and as the recording progresses Torn stops
the tape and repeats the words verbatim. Torn is next seen in Revolu-

tionary War costume playing Hayden’s words. The source of Hayden’s
taped words becomes apparent in the next scene, in which Hayden is
interviewed at length, discussing the Vietnam War, revolution, and labor
issues. Hayden’s interview is followed by a similar lengthy interview
with Eldridge Cleaver in which he discusses armed revolution and the
US prison system. The middle section of the film alternates scenes of
Hayden listening to recordings of his interview, snippets of an interview
with Carol Bellamy, and shots of Cleaver giving a speech. The scenes of
the last section include Torn, dressed in the uniform of a Confederate
officer, talking to students in a Brooklyn school. Torn repeats Bellamy’s
words to the class, “I am a woman. I work on Wall Street lending money
. . . ,” before returning to the classroom dressed in a contemporary
military uniform. Holding a toy machine gun, he demands money of a
student who, taking the plastic gun, pretends to shoot him. In the final
scenes, members of the Jefferson Airplane play on a rooftop before
being dispersed by police. A shot of a marching band in a city street is
followed by time-lapse shots of the destruction of the Schuyler Hotel,
where the Airplane had earlier performed.
In a revealing commentary on Godard’s methods, Pennebaker in-
cludes in One P.M. shots of Godard directing scenes for One A.M. Among
such sequences are images of Godard instructing Torn in the classroom,
which includes a shot of Godard silently moving around within the
classroom, consulting with Torn, and facing the students. One P.M. ex-
ceeds films devoted to documenting a film’s production—the “making
of” genre. Shots of Godard and of Pennebaker behind the camera (e.g.,
he is heard laughing with the students at Torn’s mock death) contribute
to what is essentially a reflection on the process of filmmaking. More
particularly, One P.M. emerges from the collaboratively shot footage as a
reflexive questioning of what one commentator has called the “relation-
ship of cinema and reality,” the basis and core of the strategies implicated
in the phrase performing the real (Loshitzky 29).
Speaking Positions
Pennebaker’s longest collaborative exchange has been with Chris He-
gedus. Having studied photography and film at the Hartford Art School
and the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, Hegedus’s first job after
graduation was with the University of Michigan Hospital, filming the

techniques of burn surgery. Hegedus moved to New York in 1965 to
pursue a career in art and mixed with a group of artists who shared her
desire to make documentary and independent film. Within this com-
munity she came into contact with Lizzie Borden, and in 1975 she was
a cinematographer for Borden’s film Born in Flames (1983). Intending
to work in documentary film, Hegedus visited Robert Drew seeking
employment. Drew advised her to see Pennebaker, who hired her in
1976 as an editor. Their collaboration was inaugurated when Hegedus
worked with Pennebaker on footage that was eventually released as
Town Bloody Hall. The collaboration, which has continued to the present
day, also includes, among other titles, Elliott Carter at Buffalo (1980),
DeLorean (1981), Rockaby (1981), Dance Black America (1981), Moon
over Broadway, The War Room, Only the Strong Survive, and Kings of
Pastry. During the early years of their working relationship, Hegedus
and Pennebaker shared camera and sound work, while in later years,
Hegedus tended to record sound, and Pennebaker operated the camera.
In yet another arrangement, Hegedus shot most of the recent Kings of
Pastry. As a result of circumstances, a sharp division of labor existed
during the making of Town Bloody Hall. Pennebaker filmed the event
in 1971, and the footage remained untouched until Hegedus edited the
hours of film shot by Pennebaker. The two-year period spent making The
Energy War, followed by the filmmakers’ involvement in other projects,
delayed the release of Town Bloody Hall until 1979, when it premiered
at the Whitney Museum.
The Town Hall event featured a panel of luminaries associated with
the burgeoning women’s liberation movement, including Germaine
Greer, whose book The Female Eunuch had recently been published,
Jacqueline Ceballos, president of the National Organization of Women,
Jill Johnston, an occasional journalist, and critic and author Diana Trill-
ing. Norman Mailer moderated the event. His essay “The Prisoner of
Sex” had recently appeared in Harper’s magazine, and the essay formed
the ostensible focus of a debate during the proceedings at the Town
Hall. Within the film, Ceballos, the first speaker, discusses paid employ-
ment for women; Greer speaks eloquently of the domineering effect of
the male ego on female artists. Johnston rambles almost incoherently
about the liberatory effect of lesbianism before being cut off by Mailer
for exceeding her allotted speaking time, at which point two women

Figure 8. Norman Mailer and
Germaine Greer during the panel
discussion in Town Bloody Hall (1979).
run onto the stage and begin to grope and kiss Johnston. Mailer asks
Johnston to retake her seat so that Trilling can speak, but a petulant
Johnston leaves the stage, accompanied by her friends. Trilling was the
only speaker on the panel to directly address Mailer’s essay, which she
critiques in a formal literary way. Trilling’s presentation is followed by
questions and comments from the floor. Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick,
Betty Friedan, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Hollander, and Anatole Bro-
yard are among those who take the microphone, while throughout the
raucous proceedings, members of the audience shout comments and
invective, mainly at Mailer.
The team recording the event comprised a camera crew of Penne-
baker, Jim Desmond, and Mark Woodcock, with Robert Van Dyke on
sound. Pennebaker, in a comment that clearly recognized the need for
editorial attention to the footage, referred to his camerawork on this
occasion as “pretty ratty, probably as badly shot as anything I’ve ever
done” (qtd. in Gordon). Various restrictions and conditions had an effect

on filming. The Town Hall was, in 1971, owned by New York University.
In the short lead-up time to filming, Pennebaker had failed to secure
clearances from the university to film inside the hall, and as a result
he was removed from the hall a number of times during filming. The
crowded space inside the hall meant that movement was constrained.
Contradicting the rhetoric concerning unobtrusive observational direct
cinema filming, Pennebaker had lit the room with large lights to facilitate
filming. (Diana Trilling, unaware that the event was to be filmed, was
taken aback by the lights when she first took to the stage.) Amidst the
crowded hall the lights provided a focus, orienting camera angles. Pen-
nebaker has said of the chaos and constraints that the “idea of aesthetics
in a situation like that is impossible” (qtd. in Gordon). Nevertheless,
despite the restrictions, the footage shot by Pennebaker and his team,
with its rapid movement from speaker to speaker, emulates the level
of excitement that Pennebaker felt was palpable within the hall during
the event. As with many of his concert films, the cameras in the room
were focused equally on the audience and the invited speakers.
For many critics, a notable feature of direct cinema is the long take,
and a defining moment frequently pointed to in this regard is Albert
Maysles’s seventy-five-second handheld tracking shot included in Pri-
mary of John Kennedy as he walks into a hall crowded with supporters.
Apart from its length, the shot is marked by a fluidity of movement as the
camera follows Kennedy along a corridor, up a short stairway, and into
the hall. In contrast, the brief shots of Town Bloody Hall work against
fluid movement to evoke the chaotic action within the room. Such a prac-
tice runs the risk of an increasing delirium in which the camera oscillates
back and forth between speakers, following and ricocheting off rhetorical
pronouncements, focusing on interjections from the floor and reactions
from the stage in a way that threatens to displace whatever exchange
of ideas there may be between speakers and audience members, the
ostensible reason for the event. The potential for disorder is inherent
in a pronounced use of swing pans, as the camera rapidly moves from
speaker to speaker. However, rather than promoting disorder, the pans
dominantly function to ground the action and reinforce connections
between speakers. Through the use of swing pans, speakers onstage and
members of the audience are identified and located in relation to each

other within the enclosed space of the hall. Attending this function, the
pans replicate cutaways and enact a “dialogue” by linking speaker and
listener within the hall. In doing so, Pennebaker’s filming and Hegedus’s
editing avoid constructing a hierarchy of speakers—the pans (which
Hegedus used as directional markers between speakers when she edited
the footage) continually register comments and reactions, and with the
technique no speaker is privileged through uninterrupted attention, even
if certain speakers (such as Mailer and Greer) dominate the discussion.
In this way, Hegedus’s editing confirms and clarifies speaking and spatial
relationships by foregrounding speakers and their relation to each other.
The result is a document that serves as a matrix of spatialized and gen-
dered speaking positions and performances, including those occupied
by the boisterous Mailer and the witty Greer.
In a certain way, Town Bloody Hall is Pennebaker’s remake of a film
he much admires, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922): Mailer, the
“primitive” or “savage,” amidst a hostile environment. To paraphrase
Pennebaker’s description of Nanook, Town Bloody Hall “has no con-
ventional plot but tells the story of a . . . community through phenom-
enal black-and-white images” (qtd. in Stubbs 56). This description is
informed by the multiple personas contained within the character of
Nanook, a figure played in Flaherty’s film by an Inuit, Allakariallak.
Similarly, Mailer, whose presence in Town Bloody Hall is infused with
aspects of the characters in his novels and films, performs yet another
persona, ironically, the most elusive in his repertoire, that of the “public
Norman Mailer.”
In place of Flaherty, Hegedus has nominated Barbara Kopple as her
favorite filmmaker (qtd. in Stubbs 43). Kopple’s focus in Harlan County,
U.S.A. (1976) on gender and issues of political power—and issues of
gendered power—is directly translated via Hegedus’s editing into the
film Town Bloody Hall. After the apoliticism of the rockumentary genre,
Hegedus’s contribution to Pennebaker’s filmmaking is one of reinscribing
questions of power—and its relationship to performance. The notion of
gender as a performed act is actualized in Town Bloody Hall in the ways
in which Pennebaker and Hegedus align and contrast the various rhetori-
cal and performed positions of Mailer, Greer, and the other speakers and
members of the audience at the New York City Town Hall event.

Face to Face with Another Camera
Beyond the collaboration with Pennebaker (now in its third decade),
Hegedus has worked with other filmmakers, notably, Jehane Noujaim on
Startup.com (2001), a study of a failed Internet company. Hegedus has
also teamed with Nick Doob, a long-standing Pennebaker collaborator,
to make Fox vs. Franken (2004), an episode in The First Amendment
Project series for the Sundance Channel and Court TV, which deals with
Al Franken’s legal battle over his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who
Tell Them, and Al Franken: God Spoke (2006), which traces Franken’s
career trajectory from a comic on Saturday Night Live to Democratic
contender in Minnesota’s 2006 Senate race. During the late 1960s, Doob
was a member of a filmmaking workshop conducted by Allan Siegal at the
Free University of New York, and, among other filmmaking in the 1970s,
he was a cinematographer on the Academy Award–winning From Mao to
Mozart (1979). He was a member of the team that filmed Ziggy Stardust
and the Spiders from Mars, and he worked with Pennebaker and Hegedus
on The Energy War. His long association with Pennebaker and Hegedus
includes collaboration on Moon over Broadway, Elaine Stritch at Liberty,
The War Room, Only the Strong Survive, and Down from the Mountain.
Pennebaker has noted that from the beginning of his working rela-
tionship with Doob on Ziggy Stardust, their filming methods and focus
on a subject have been similar. To exemplify the point, Pennebaker has
referred to a moment during the filming of Ziggy Stardust when he
was behind Bowie. “He was silhouetted and I was filming the back of
his head. Suddenly he moved to one side, and I was face to face with
another camera right in front of [Bowie’s] face. It was [Doob]” (qtd.
in Hodara). Doob agrees with Pennebaker that a documentary is ef-
fective when it develops the “drama” or performance aspect of “real
stories.” For Doob, observationalism is the vehicle that permits such
a development. He credits Pennebaker’s observational methods with
overturning the dominance of narration in documentaries, resulting
in a “much freer way of making films” (qtd. in Berenstein). In turn,
observationalism is not understood as an absence of a point of view (as
Doob’s focus on filming liberal subjects such as Franken bears out).
Further, as Doob argues, it is via observational methods that he finds it

possible to present, as with Franken’s presence in God Spoke, an engag-
ing performance. The position is in line with Pennebaker’s approach,
and the portraits of Franken presented by Doob and Hegedus mirror
Pennebaker’s commitment to portraiture.
Portraiture
The art historian E. H. Gombrich, describing the effect on the viewer of
a portrait painted by Rembrandt, wrote: “We feel face to face with real
people, we sense their warmth, their need for sympathy and also their
loneliness and suffering” (332). In Gombrich’s estimation, the portrait
provides an immediate and transparent relation to the subject, one that
evokes in the viewer identification with the emotions and feelings of a
“real person.” In these terms, Gombrich praises what he sees as the
ability of a portrait to reveal an essential and unified identity.
Such a position can be revised through reference to Pennebaker’s
portraiture, a central focus within his work. Specifically, the performing
subjects within Pennebaker’s portraits complicate the easy assurance
inherent in Gombrich’s claim that a portrait provides access to an es-
sential and immutable identity. Pennebaker’s portraits simultaneously
reflect on, and contribute to, an emergent 1960s culture of celebrity.
Whereas another set of filmic portraits (those produced by Andy Warhol
in the form of “screen tests,” static long shots of the rich and famous who
came to the Factory) reveled in celebrity by presenting subjects as icons
of the age, Pennebaker’s more elaborate portraits represent subjects as
complex, performing personas. Pennebaker’s portrait subjects include,
among others, John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey (Primary), Paul
Crump (The Chair [1962]), Eddie Sachs (On the Pole [1960] and Eddie
[1961]), Susan Starr (Susan Starr [1962]), John DeLorean (DeLorean),
Bessie Schonberg (Bessie: A Portrait of Bessie Schonberg [1998]), and
Elaine Stritch (Elaine Stritch at Liberty). In each film, elements of per-
formance inform the portrait, while in the films examined here—Jane
(1962), You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You (1964), and Dont Look
Back—performance by a subject, together with Pennebaker’s perfor-
mance within and through the act of filmmaking, constitute central
characteristics of the portrait.

Jane and Jason
Jane, a work made by Pennebaker for Robert Drew’s Living Camera
television series, focuses on Jane Fonda as she rehearses the vehicle for
her Broadway debut, a feeble farce called The Fun Couple about two
characters (played by Fonda and Bradford Dillman) who, on a whim,
get married in Tijuana. During the out-of-town tryouts of the play, crit-
ics pan the production, resulting in extensive changes to the script. As
with the later Moon over Broadway, critical reaction to the play forms
one strand of the film’s narrative. When the play reaches Broadway,
it is savaged by the New York critics, including the influential Walter
Kerr, and as a result the play closes after only a brief run on Broadway.
Throughout the play’s provincial tryouts and the Broadway fiasco, Fonda
continues her affair with the play’s director, Andreas Voutsinas. Their
relationship, together with Fonda’s rehearsals, constitute the central
narrative lines of the film. The film’s component footage was shot by a
number of contributors: Richard Leacock photographed Walter Kerr,
Abbott Mills filmed the stage footage, Alfred Wertheimer filmed the
audience footage, and Pennebaker filmed Fonda.
Another member of the Drew team, Hope Ryden, was an important
collaborator on the film, and indeed James Lipscomb, who narrated
Jane, insists that Ryden coordinated the film’s production (62). Ryden,
together with Greg Shuker, recorded sound, organized filming arrange-
Figure 9. Jane Fonda

in Jane (1962).

ments with Fonda and other members of the play, and liaised with Drew
to have the film included in The Living Camera series. The partnership
of Ryden and Pennebaker did not always run smoothly. On reflection,
Pennebaker felt that he and Ryden “were competing with [each other],
trying to make two different kinds of films. . . . I think Hope was com-
ing at it the way a journalist would a story. She was really ready to settle
for much less. . . . I was trying to make a million dollar movie out of it”
(qtd. in O’Connell 138–39). In certain respects, the comment intimates
Pennebaker’s growing dissatisfaction with the methods and approaches
espoused by Drew, which, Pennebaker suggests, Ryden replicated in
her attitude to the film. Pennebaker’s representation of Fonda in Jane
contrasts with the established format of the films produced by Drew.
Jane eschews Drew’s emphasis on reportage, and it refuses the evocation
of suspense typically associated with what is constructed in the Drew
format as a stressful or “critical” situation, in this case, the opening of a
new play on Broadway.
Elements of conflict, confrontation, and crisis function as dramatic
elements within the narrative structure of many of the works produced
by Drew Associates. Numerous critics have interpreted the so-called cri-
sis structure as an organizing principle at the core of Drew’s conception
of direct cinema. Drew preferred the term “turning point” to “crisis,”
and, according to Drew, such a narrative marker refers to the “point
of revelation or the crux of the matter, which [does] not have to be a
head-on crisis. It has to be someplace where the forces that have been
building throughout the story come to some kind of resolution” (qtd. in
O’Connell 131). Drew’s emphasis on the demands of storytelling stresses
the presence of fictional narrative forms as a structural component of
direct cinema techniques. Accompanying the narrative features of a
work is the suggestion implicit in the “crisis structure” that the camera
records transparent or authentic actions. While Drew habitually referred
in his comments on the early films of Drew Associates to the presence
of “story,” it was the narrative formulation of the crisis structure that
was repeated to the point of cliché in the films produced by Drew.
The repetitive reliance on a form of storytelling ostensibly capable of
intimate and unique revelations of character opened the techniques of
direct cinema to various criticisms, one of which took the form of Shirley
Clarke’s film Portrait of Jason (1967).

In 1958 Clarke had worked with Pennebaker and other filmmakers
on the Brussels film loops, and the following year Clarke collaborated
with Pennebaker, Leacock, and Albert Maysles on Opening in Moscow.
Also that year, Clarke and Pennebaker, together with a number of col-
leagues, established the resource-sharing cooperative Filmmakers, Inc.
One outcome of the sharing of ideas and equipment that underpinned
Filmmakers, Inc., was the production of Skyscraper (1959), a work that
involved contributions by Clarke, Willard Van Dyke, Wheaton Galentine,
and Pennebaker. Skyscraper deals with the construction of the Tishman
Building in midtown Manhattan, and in its use of a vibrant montage,
the film innovatively melds captivating images to staged conversations
by construction workers, songs about the building process, and nondi-
egetic music. In its combination of sonic components and, in particular,
an expressive imagery based on urban scenes, the film echoes the ways
in which Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express updates and revises the city
symphony genre of the 1920s and 1930s. Like certain other films within
this genre, Skyscraper tends to overly rely on an image that is often re-
worked through unusual camera angles to emphasize the new building in
its metropolitan context. In an interview published in 1971, Pennebaker
distanced himself from the imagistic film when he called Skyscraper a
“dumb, dumb picture. It’s a bullshit documentary. It’s just pretty pictures”
(qtd. in Levin 249). A year earlier, Clarke had stated in an interview that
her film Portrait of Jason was “made to show Ricky [Leacock] and Penny
[Pennebaker] the flaws in thinking about cinéma vérité. . . . If you take 12
days of shooting and edit only the climax points, you get crap. My theory
was you didn’t take out the ‘boring bits’” (Clarke 20–21).
Portrait of Jason relentlessly scrutinizes Jason Holliday, a thirty-
three-year-old black gay street hustler and aspiring cabaret entertainer
who during the course of the film mixes intimate stories concerning
events in his life with impersonations of characters acted out for Clarke’s
camera. One result of an application of the thesis that “you don’t take
out the boring bits” is the fact that many of Holliday’s confessions are
extended and often monotonous monologues. However, another effect
of the lengthy real-time sequences is to suggest the temporality of every-
day experience, thereby reinforcing the claims of the film to represent
“real life.” The close observation of Holliday’s well-rehearsed routines
and blatant exhibitionism is interspersed with moments in which Hol-

liday verbally interacts with Clarke and her associate Carl Lee, who
are off-camera. Although avowedly seeking to criticize direct cinema
assumptions, Portrait of Jason replicates a central element of certain
direct cinema films—that of the crisis structure, which displaces or
overrides Holliday’s performance and the very idea of performance.
Toward the end of the twelve-hour shoot in Clarke’s apartment, Hol-
liday’s theatrical routines give way to an overt expression of fatigue and
frustration. The resultant crisis is prompted by the voice of an off-camera
interlocutor and prevaricator (presumably that of Carl Lee) demanding
that Holliday “be honest, motherfucker! Stop that act, will you?” and
by Clarke’s insistence in her questions that Holliday express his real
feelings. The critical moment culminates when Holliday—seemingly
goaded by such demands beyond the point of endurance—breaks down
and weeps. Here, supposedly, is the “real Jason,” the man behind the
histrionics. Clarke’s desire in this process to expose what she refers to
on the soundtrack as Holliday’s “lying” endorses the notion that there
is a “true” and “honest” self behind the performance.
In contrast to Portrait of Jason, in which performance is displaced
in pursuit of a legitimate, or authentic, expression of selfhood, Penne-
baker in Jane endorses performance, and he does so in part through a
reconfiguration of “crisis.” In Portrait of Jason a crisis allegedly reveals
transparent (authentic and honest) actions and emotions. In Jane the
deadline for opening night serves as a critical moment, though here the
practice of performing the real revises the function of crisis. Far from a
context for the revelation of a “true self,” the “crisis” functions as a ve-
hicle for Fonda to knowingly perform aspects of character. The resultant
performance supersedes crisis, becoming in itself the focus of attention
and the drama inherent in the portrait. In this way, the film moves from
“documentary” into the styles and modes of fiction film; indeed, Pen-
nebaker has referred to Jane as a “fiction” (qtd. in O’Connell 139).
Within this context, Fonda provides an overt performance. For a
number of years prior to appearing in Jane, Fonda trained in Method act-
ing with Lee Strasberg, who appears briefly in Jane to comment critically
on the play The Fun Couple. In her autobiography, Fonda describes the
Method as an approach that is “about being able to plumb your depths
and expose yourself spontaneously on a personal level” (124). Elsewhere,
Fonda noted that Pennebaker filmed her in Jane “rehearsing and act-

ing, and there were moments when I didn’t know when I was acting
and when I wasn’t” (qtd. in Mamber 91, emphasis in original). Given
Fonda’s continuous performance in Jane, the question is not whether
Fonda is acting but the form and meaning of the performance that is
undertaken. Indeed, moments of expressive performance stand out in
the film. In particular, a scene in which Fonda sits before a mirror in
her dressing room is, as the critic Stephen Mamber notes, “quite unlike
any other in the Drew films, [it is] very close to a sort of actor’s impro-
visation in front of the camera” (95). In this scene, Fonda is depicted
in a long take—and, in line with her interpretation of the Method, she
begins, spontaneously, to emote and express herself through a series of
grimaces, pieces of impersonation, and looks to the camera. In this ex-
traordinary performance, Pennebaker’s camera ceases to be the neutral
recorder that so much criticism of direct cinema continues to insist is
the central technique of the direct cinema observational mode. Instead,
Pennebaker’s camera records Fonda openly improvising and otherwise
performing in response to the presence of the camera.
Beyond this scene, there are shots within Jane when the film seem-
ingly reverts to the available techniques of direct cinema. After the
disastrous Broadway opening of The Fun Couple, Fonda is seen reading
the first adverse reviews of the play. In terms of an interpretation of the
film that upholds traditional notions of direct cinema and its capacity
to provide moments of intimate revelation, this scene reveals Fonda
stripped of performance, caught at a moment when her defenses are
down, her true self exposed before the camera. Such an interpretation
relies on, and draws any of its cogency from, an insistent, recycled appeal
to the critical positions within which direct cinema has been couched.
Beyond such an interpretative straitjacket is Pennebaker’s hint that Jane
is a fiction, a pointer that, in turn, inflects critical understandings of the
scene. In these terms, the scene does not reveal Fonda somehow beyond
performance but suggests the performance-based realm of fiction film,
specifically, “the scene in Citizen Kane of Susan Alexander reading her
bad reviews” (Mamber 94, emphasis in original).
A particularly naive criticism of Jane highlights a basic issue pertinent
to interpretations of the film. Writing soon after the release of Jane,
Peter Graham attempted to summarize the film’s effects. An issue for
Graham in his estimation of the film is that “[t]hroughout, one has the

impression that [Fonda] is acting rather than being” (30–36, emphasis in
original). An almost identical issue troubled another interpreter of direct
cinema portraiture a decade later: “[W]henever a documentary is of the
personality-profile variety, and whenever that performer being filmed
is most aware of the camera filming him . . ., we can be reasonably sure
that we are witnessing a lie and not a reality, an artifice as opposed to a
truth, a performance as opposed to a true personality” (Van Vert 260).
Common to both of the impressions quoted here is the belief that acting
or performance is somehow inappropriate or antithetical to a person’s
“true” identity. Understandings that an identity is actualized through
performance are absent from the comments. It is not necessary to defer
to poststructuralist theories concerning the performance of identity in
analyses of the dialectic of performance and identity. Strasberg’s Method,
as applied by Fonda in her acting at the time, and Pennebaker’s inter-
pretation of this process provide adequate insights into the relationship
of performance and identity; in fact, Strasberg wrote: “We believe that
the actor need not imitate a human being. The actor is himself a human
being and can create out of himself” (qtd. in Naremore 13). Within the
terms of Strasberg’s approach, as James Naremore notes, “actors were
actually schooled in how to perform themselves” (14, emphasis in the
original). However, in Jane a revision of this approach occurs. Here, to
quote Naremore in relation to a different context, “[i]nstead of treating
performance as an outgrowth of an essential self, [the revised approach]
implies that the self is an outgrowth of performance” (13–14). Penne-
baker’s method in Jane enacts a reworked version of the Method, and
one of the techniques through which this is achieved is the close-up of
a subject’s face, the core of portraiture.
According to certain interpretations of the film, such as the analysis
by Peter Graham, the close-ups of Fonda serve as a way of breaking
through, or removing the “mask” of performance, to reveal the “real self”
behind the mask. More appropriately, the close-up in Jane is a vehicle
for the elaboration of “drama” (with elements of suspense), which func-
tions as a platform (or a “stage”) for a performance or overt display. An
example of this process is the close-up on Fonda as she performs for
the camera before a mirror in her dressing room. Pennebaker focuses
on Fonda’s face, generating dramatic tension and suspense during a
long take pregnant with the possibility of a revelation. In Jeanne d’Arc

(1928), Dreyer’s continual close-ups of facial expressions are intended
to reveal a character’s inner self and explicit feelings, resulting in a film
that André Bazin referred to as a “documentary of faces” (109). Jane
inverts this situation: close-ups in this film, ostensibly a “documentary,”
reveal a character’s open and self-aware, and self-actualizing, perfor-
mance for Pennebaker’s ever-present camera. Close-ups are variously
inserted in other works of direct cinema; Leacock’s A Happy Mother’s
Day, for example, includes close-ups of Mrs. Fischer’s face. However,
the frequency of close-ups in Jane isolates the practice to a degree not
common in direct cinema works. The result is that a cold observation-
alism is replaced by a documentary cinema focused on the affect and
sensations associated with performance. In these terms, the insertion of
elements of performance into the documentary frame rewrites extant
understandings of direct cinema as a practice devoid of performance.
You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You

Pennebaker’s experimentation with form in Jane was not without its
detractors. Drew, for example, demanded that a number of scenes be
changed to bring the film’s techniques into line with his expectations
of direct cinema. One such change involved removal of the sound of
the camera from the shots of Fonda before her mirror in her dressing
room. Pennebaker wanted to retain the clearly audible noise of the
camera’s motor on the soundtrack as a way of signaling the presence of
the camera as the instigator of Fonda’s improvised performance before
the mirror. Drew overruled Pennebaker, and the camera is barely heard
in the scene (Mamber 95). In its original version, the extended shot
of Fonda in this scene ran longer, lingering on Fonda’s face, minutely
scrutinizing her actions. Drew cut the shot, reducing the length of the
scene (O’Connell 141). Drew also curtailed the scene in which Fonda
reads critical reviews of the Broadway opening night of The Fun Couple.
Pennebaker was critical of such editorial decisions by Drew. Speak-
ing in an interview recorded in 1971, he declared that The Chair, which
was subject to Drew’s editorial cuts, “is abominably edited, [the film]
was reduced to a kind of straight-line plot analysis when in fact what is
most interesting about the story in the film was the people involved, the
characters” (qtd. in Levin 236). Pennebaker also felt that Drew’s editing
stripped David of its potential complexity. According to Pennebaker,

“David was the most interesting film, the first whole film I did really.
[However, the] film that I’d like to have made was quite different from
the one that was cut. The film that was cut reduces something that is
actually very complicated to a rather prosaic, dull story.” Pennebaker
decried the narration added by Drew as “bullshit stuff. Looking at it
now, that stuff . . . just screams of its wrongness” (qtd. in Levin 257). A
growing disaffection by Pennebaker and Leacock with Drew’s editorial
decisions and with Drew’s reluctance to consider theatrical distribution
for Drew Associates films contributed to the departure by Pennebaker
and Leacock from Drew Associates in 1963. Pennebaker’s film You’re
Nobody till Somebody Loves You, produced soon after his resignation
from Drew Associates, differs markedly from the narrative and editorial
approaches of Drew’s direct cinema. In contrast to Drew’s strong nar-
rative line, in which events and situations move to a clearly established
dénouement or to a moment of “crisis” that, through its resolution, es-
tablishes closure, You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You abjures “crisis”
and the satisfactions and simplifications associated with narrative closure.
Further, Pennebaker’s twelve-minute film eschews the journalistic style
of many works produced by Drew Associates, which emphasized explic-
itly identifiable subjects and the provision of information.
You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You concerns the wedding of
psychedelic guru Timothy Leary and the model Nena von Schlebrügge.
In the absence of opening credits, the film commences with a shot of
an old Buick on a rain-soaked West Side highway in Manhattan. A sign,
“Monte Rock III,” is attached to the rear of the car (presumably so
cameramen Jim Desmond and Nick Proferes, who were filming from
another car, could keep sight of the Buick as it traveled out of the wet
and misty city). The song “You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You”
plays on the soundtrack as the two cars head up the Taconic Highway. In
the backseat of the Buick, filmed by Pennebaker, Monte Rock, cabaret
entertainer and hairdresser to New York’s glitterati, asks the driver, “Are
we getting near?” Also in the backseat are two women, whom Robert
Greenfield, a Leary biographer, identifies as the photographer Diane
Arbus, along for the ride, and Darlene DeSedle, a fashion editor for
Mademoiselle magazine (223). In reply to Rock’s question, the chauffeur
outlines the route to the destination, Millbrook, a mansion in upstate
New York belonging to William Mellon Hitchcock, a prominent stock-

broker. Hitchcock rented the house to Leary and his followers, and it
was here that Leary continued the experiments with psychedelic drugs
he’d commenced at Harvard. The passengers in the Buick discuss bridal
dress, and Rock comments that Leary looks like “Dr. Jekyll” and that
the bride-to-be “looks like a queen.”
The car approaches a stone gateway, the entrance to the estate, and
a woman gets in the car to accompany the passengers to the mansion,
which is at the end of a long, tree-lined driveway. Inside the house,
sitar music plays, and candles light a room in which Rock arranges von
Schlebrügge’s hair. In another room Charles Mingus plays a piano, while
in a nearby room Leary dresses for his wedding, attended by friends,
among them his Harvard colleague and best man, Richard Alpert. The
film crosscuts between the preparations being undertaken by Leary and
von Schlebrügge. Well-wishers call on Leary, and von Schlebrügge sits
quietly in front of an open fire with Leary’s daughter, Susan, who wears
a beatific (stoned?) smile on her face. Rock returns to visit von Schle-
brügge and Susan, while outside the house Leary and Alpert organize
cars to transport guests to the wedding. The film cuts to a vestibule out-
side a chapel (Grace Chapel in Millbrook), where Leary and Alpert await
the ceremony. Von Schlebrügge puts on a veil, and in a final crosscut
Leary and Alpert enter the chapel. The film then cuts to Rock singing
“You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You” at the wedding reception. In
a playful touch, the words to the song appear on-screen, accompanied
by the well-worn device of a “bouncing ball” that skips across each word
of the song in a celebratory sing-along as the end titles scroll on-screen.
While this outline identifies a number of subjects in You’re Nobody
till Somebody Loves You, the film includes few such indications. Beyond
the sign on the back of the Buick that explicitly identifies Rock, the
only other person in the film to be named is Susan Leary. The principal
subjects and a number of the wedding guests were well known to those
associated with Leary and to members of the New York/Cambridge
psychedelic cognoscenti, though not so well known that they didn’t
require introduction to the film’s viewers. We don’t know these people,
we don’t know where the Buick is headed, and we have only a vague
indication of the purpose of the trip. In contrast to a journalistic report
in which time, place, the identity of subjects, and their intentions are
clearly established at the outset, Pennebaker forgoes such markers.

An emphasis on identifying subjects is further disrupted by refer-
ences within the film and by Pennebaker’s approach, through which
identity is rendered changeable and elusive. The theme is established
when Rock describes Leary as Dr. Jekyll, a character who epitomizes
mutable identity. Rock’s description of von Schlebrügge as a queen is
ironic in terms of the fact that Millbrook’s stone gates are replete with
a portcullis—a castle, in effect, in which von Schlebrügge’s transforma-
tion into a queen is complete. As Rock plies his craft, von Schlebrügge’s
natural beauty is enhanced by a new coiffure and flowers in her hair. The
rest of the wedding party are also changed: Leary dresses in a morning
suit, and he comments to a guest that it’s the first time he’s seen her in
a skirt. Another guest highlights the slippage between various identities
and the role of new attire as the sign of new identities when he men-
tions that he’s worn formal wear onstage a number of times (notably, in
a production of Shaw’s St. Joan!). In the Millbrook scenes, the camera
consistently returns to von Schlebrügge, who, like Fonda in Jane, is
frequently filmed in close-up. Once dressed for her wedding, von Schle-
brügge dons sunglasses as she awaits the ceremony. The sunglasses shield
her from the inquisitive close-ups of an otherwise prying camera, with
the result that she remains “hidden.” The outcome is the suggestion of
the inability of the camera to fully reveal a subject, a process that, in
turn, evokes the elusiveness of identity. Albert Maysles, in a brief as-
sessment of Pennebaker’s filmmaking style, refers to You’re Nobody till
Somebody Loves You as a film “about alienation”—an observation that
emphasizes the estrangement of self and identity hinted at in the film
(qtd. in McElhaney 162).
Any sense of reportage and its attendant informational function is
further displaced within the form of You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves
You. In these terms, Pennebaker’s performance as a filmmaker becomes
a radical reassessment of his allegiance to direct cinema. Pennebaker in-
forms his portrait of Leary and von Schlebrügge with elements of a form
that the critical literature on documentary and avant-garde filmmaking
refers to as the essay film. The otherwise loose category of essay film is
contained within the “incompleteness” of the form. As Paul Arthur notes,
the “essay film is a form without pretence to completeness or finality,
claiming an aesthetic (and political) virtue in the fragmentary and the
heterogeneous. . . . Subjectivity as a central problematic is not jettisoned

but rather uncoiled to accommodate . . . dispersion, contradiction, and
multiplicity” (Line of Sight 66). The point is reinforced in Phillip Lopate’s
analysis of the essay film, in which he notes that “an essay is a continual
asking of questions—not necessarily finding a ‘solution’” (245). Rather
than a conclusive portrait of Leary or von Schlebrügge, the film is a
means to another end in the form of a critique of the certitudes of the
journalistic practices of direct cinema.
Pennebaker informs the essayistic basis of You’re Nobody till Some-
body Loves You within and through the form of “personal cinema” as
conceived by Jonas Mekas. For Mekas, at least in his original conception
of personal cinema, the term did not necessarily refer solely to an auto-
biographical work. According to one interpretation, “[p]ersonal cinema,
a major component of what Mekas called the New American Cinema,
referred to low-budget, independently produced films of various lengths
that conceived filmic expression differently from the repetitive and de-
limited narrative-theatrical codings of Hollywood cinema. . . . [T]he term
‘personal’ also evolved in Mekas’ writings toward a notion of autobiog-
raphy marked by images gathered to reveal the maker’s life, his way of
seeing, his thoughts and feelings” (Turim 197). As Mekas continued to
produce and to champion personal cinema, he increasingly included an
autobiographical component, through which personal cinema became
aligned with diary film. For Mekas, “[t]o keep a film (camera) diary, is to
react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get
it now, or you don’t get it at all. To go back and shoot it later . . . would
mean restaging, be it events or feelings” (qtd. in James 109).
As with the features of personal cinema upheld by Mekas, You’re No-
body till Somebody Loves You is a low-budget, independently produced
work that expresses Pennebaker’s particular way of seeing—a mode
of representation that is grounded in this case in an autobiographical
element (Pennebaker knew many of the subjects in You’re Nobody).
Within the terms of such an approach, Pennebaker was permitted access
“behind the scenes,” where the camera focuses on intimate moments.
Mekas’s personal cinema includes Walden (1969), a section of his massive
Diaries, Notes and Sketches, in which he visits a number of filmmakers,
artists, intellectuals, and other public figures, including Leary. Another
example of Mekas’s personal cinema is his film Report from Millbrook
(1966), which also deals with an encounter with Leary. The personal,

autobiographical element of both films operates within the terms of
Mekas’s relationship with Leary and other subjects; however, in both of
Mekas’s films, Leary is positioned as a subject in the manner of a news
report. The title Report from Millbrook points to this approach, which
is reinforced within the film through a distanced observational attitude
toward Leary.
In contrast, the critique in You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You of
reportage and journalistic styles of presenting information is enhanced
in the film’s final scene. In this scene, the camera dawdles outside the
wedding chapel, providing a brief glimpse of the guests assembled in-
side. Leary and Alpert enter the chapel, closing a door behind them—
and thus barring the camera from entry. Here is a wedding film that
doesn’t show a wedding. Pennebaker has said that he filmed You’re
Nobody till Somebody Loves You “as a kind of pageant and edited it
as a mystery” (qtd. in Levin 229). A form of pageantry is evident: the
slow buildup to the wedding, as guests arrive and the principal subjects
carefully prepare for the ceremony, all of which takes place with some
languid pomp in a mansion with high ceilings, stained-glass windows,
and gothic architectural adornments. The mystery, as Pennebaker has
pointed out on the back cover of the DVD version of the film, is that
“we never filmed anyone actually getting married.” Albert Maysles has
called You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You the “most beautiful film
[Pennebaker] ever made” (McElhaney 162), and Pennebaker himself
has said that “[s]ometimes I think it’s beautiful,” adding that “sometimes
I wonder why I did it” (qtd. in Levin 229). Unanswered questions, the
heart of the essay film’s “incompleteness,” hover over Pennebaker’s as-
sessment of a form that, in its multiple interruptions of the conventions
of journalistic accounts and reportage, poses questions of the methods
of direct cinema.
Pennebaker’s performance-based revision of direct cinema in You’re
Nobody till Somebody Loves You is heightened in his next film, Dont
Look Back. In certain ways, the performance of the central subject in
Dont Look Back echoes Fonda’s knowing and self-conscious perfor-
mance in Jane. More particularly, the representation of Dont Look Back
further revises, or overturns, the codes and approaches of direct cinema
within a work that dramatically moves beyond extant documentary rep-
resentation. The means of this achievement, and the basis of the dual

performance of subject and filmmaker, is a marked and heightened col-
lusion between filmmaker and subject that exceeds the relationship of
filmmaker and subject in Jane and You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves
You. Such collusion provides the subject with a warrant or license to
perform, and it is via this vehicle that Pennebaker markedly transcends
the limitations of direct cinema and a strict observationalism.
A Performance by Co-conspirators: Dont Look Back

On a mild early spring day in 1965, a twenty-three-year-old popular
American musician stands in an alley lined with scaffolding and builders’
materials next to London’s Savoy Hotel. He holds a stack of large pieces
of white cardboard on which are handwritten various words and phrases.
When not looking at the cards, he stares at the camera. There is a certain
insouciance in his gaze and an arrogance to his stance, though there is
also at times a mischievous glint in his eye. A raucous song plays on the
soundtrack—a nasal voice is accompanied by chords on an acoustic gui-
tar that give way to electric guitar and drums—as the young man holds
up the first card (inscribed with the word BASEMENT). As the song
progresses, he flips through the cards, dropping each one in turn as the
word or phrase on each card highlights the song’s lyrics (MEDICINE,
PAVEMENT, and so on). To the left of the frame a bearded figure with
a sweater over his shoulders leans on a cane talking to a person just out
of the frame. At the end of the song, with the cards scattered at his feet,
the young man (Bob Dylan) walks off to the left of the frame without
looking back, the bearded man (the poet Allen Ginsberg) walks away to
the right of the frame, and a third man (Dylan’s friend Bob Neuwirth)
appears from out of the frame and walks down the alley. Fade to black.
In a brief two minutes the song (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) and
the set-piece introduction to Dont Look Back have ended.
As Pennebaker has explained in a number of interviews, it was Dylan
who proposed the idea for the sequence, and Dylan’s simple suggestion
evokes a number of allusions. In one way, the scene is reminiscent of a
silent film, with the cards approximating titles, while the unexplained
presence of the two men to the left of the frame echoes the often un-
motivated and curious actions of characters in an early slapstick comedy.
The fact that the silence of this scene is shattered by electrified music
and singing adds a wry touch to this oblique homage to the silent film. In

yet another way, the segment refers to the short 16 mm films screened
on Scopitone jukeboxes. Scopitones, made in France, were popular in
the United States in the early 1960s. The jukeboxes, like the US-made
Panoram “soundie” machines of the 1940s that they replaced, played a
recorded song, and the machine screened a short film that was frequently
based on a narrative that loosely “interpreted” the lyrics of the song or
that featured a dance routine. Dylan had seen such films—precursors
of the music video—and was drawn to the performance routines that
accompanied the songs.
The featured cue card segment is one of three filmed takes of the
sequence. The first take was shot on the Victoria Embankment, behind
the Savoy Hotel, not far from Charing Cross railway station. Dylan, hold-
ing the cue cards, which he prepared with assistance from Ginsberg and
the singers Joan Baez and Donovan, is on the right of the frame, and
Ginsberg, Neuwirth, and a fourth man linger in the background on the
left. The gardens on the Embankment are in flower, and to highlight the
early blooms, paintings on easels are scattered among the flower beds
(a sign, “Display of Paintings,” appears in the background). The filming
was interrupted by a policeman, presumably more intent on ensuring
public access to the flower show than in the actions of the film crew,
and the camera then moved to the alley next to the Savoy. A third take
was filmed later that day on the roof of the Savoy. The spring day in
this version has turned windy, and Dylan wears an overcoat against the
breeze. This time Neuwirth leans on a cane in the background, occasion-
ally conversing with Dylan’s record producer from CBS, Tom Wilson,
who wears a fez and at times stares across the London rooftops, which
are framed in the background. The three takes constitute a process of
rehearsal leading to a consummate performance that is made startling
and unexpected by the fact that the film that is introduced by the seg-
ment is nominally a documentary portrait, a form that, in terms of the
conventions of documentary and Western portraiture, abjures explicit
performance by the subject.
In effect, the cue card routine cues us to a subject’s performance—a
function that has been widely emulated in various genres. Numerous
music video clips since have featured a performer flipping through cards
inscribed with the lyrics of a song (e.g., Michael Hutchence of the band
INXS performs such a routine in a widely shown video of the band’s

song “Meditate”). In the comedy mockumentary Bob Roberts (1992),
Tim Robbins features in the title role as a folksinging right-wing politi-
cian who in one scene flips through cards printed with the lyrics of his
satiric “Wall Street Rap.” During the opening scenes of Almost Famous
(2000), Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical reflection on his early years
as a rock journalist, the lead character, William Miller (Patrick Fugit),
and his mother emerge from a suburban San Diego cinema talking
about the film they have just seen, To Kill a Mockingbird. The cinema
marquee, evident in the background in the scene, advertises Dont Look
Back. A narrative line in Almost Famous concerning good intentions
and worthy acts (alluded to in the reference to To Kill a Mockingbird)
is superseded in the film by one based on the rock-and-roll road trip of
Dylan in Dont Look Back, and soon after the opening scene William is
initiated into rock music through the legacy of his older sister’s record
collection. As he flips through the albums, which effectively constitute
an archive of late 1960s rock, one cover is quickly displayed to reveal
another album cover. William’s transformation from Atticus Finch to
Bob Dylan is complete—the young William is now the young Bob Dylan
flipping through handwritten cards at the beginning of Dont Look Back.
In the biopic I’m Not There, Todd Haynes points to the complexity of
Dylan’s identity by casting six separate actors to play aspects of Dylan’s
life. In his remarkably verbose voice-over commentary for the DVD
version of the film, Haynes says he wanted to inform the representation
of periods in Dylan’s life by replicating aspects of the visual style of the
cinema that accompanied each period. In this way, to evoke events in
Dylan’s life during the mid-1960s, for example, Haynes restages sections
of the Dylan/Pennebaker collaboration Eat the Document in the style
of Fellini. Though Haynes calls Dont Look Back a “beautiful documen-
tary,” he decided not to copy the pronounced visual style of a work that
is readily identified with Dylan’s life and experience, choosing instead
to refashion an image of the Dylan persona based on aspects of Eat the
Document. Despite this decision, Haynes could not refuse reference
to the cue card sequence, which he filmed—with, surprisingly, Cate
Blanchett impersonating Dylan—for inclusion among the additional and
outtake scenes featured on the DVD. Recently, Pennebaker parodied
the cue card sequence from Dont Look Back. In a short promotional
film accompanying a 2010 broadcast on YouTube of a concert film made

by Pennebaker and Hegedus dealing with the band the National, Pen-
nebaker lounges against a garage in the background of the shot while
in the foreground members of the band flip through cards on which are
written details announcing the broadcast. In each context referred to
here—rock clip, mockumentary, fictionalized autobiography, biopic, and
Pennebaker’s own promotional trailer—a cue card sequence is used as
the basis of an overt and explicit performance.
Interestingly, the performances in Dont Look Back were, in certain
respects, preceded by the actions depicted in the Maysles brothers’
What’s Happening (1964), a record of the Beatles’ first tour of the United
States within which the Beatles openly acknowledge the presence of the
camera. Dont Look Back extends and informs varieties of such self-aware
performance. While the Beatles overtly respond to Albert Maysles’s
camera within their actions, Pennebaker and Dylan enact a set-piece
opening segment that approaches the status of scripted performance,
which exceeds everyday action. Further, Dont Look Back establishes
a range of different forms of performance, from the overt, as in the
prologue, to other more oblique and, at times, surreptitious acknowl-
edgments of the camera. In certain moments, Dylan’s recognition of
the camera is revealed, however fleetingly, in glances at the camera. In
one scene, in which Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, evicts a hotel
employee from Dylan’s suite at the Savoy, Dylan looks mischievously to
the camera. On another occasion, while playing music and talking with
Figure 10. Dont

Look Back (1967).

Alan Price of the Animals, Dylan starts a song and then glances directly
at the camera. Dylan appears to be annoyed that Pennebaker is at that
moment still filming when, for once, Dylan would prefer that he wasn’t
being filmed. Further, beyond overt and oblique forms of self-display,
Dont Look Back features performance in the form of Dylan enacting a
persona. As Pennebaker pointed out, Dylan “knew that the camera was
recording [him] in a way which [he] elected to be recorded. [He was]
enacting [a] role . . . very accurately” (qtd. in Rosenthal 192).
Dont Look Back exploits and emphasizes the presence of perfor-
mance within a “documentary” frame, and in doing so it draws on and
functions in relation to a collusion or conspiracy between filmmaker and
subject. The critic William Rothman, in a lengthy and dense analysis of
Dont Look Back, highlights this point when he argues that the purpose
of the prologue is to announce that the film is not merely a “documen-
tary”; it is, instead, a “collaboration in which filmmaker and subject are
co-conspirators” (Documentary Film 149). In this way, the prologue
functions to indicate that the body of the film will also be a “performance
by co-conspirators” (Rothman, Documentary Film 151). This is not to
suggest that Pennebaker consciously set out to defraud or deceive the
viewer concerning the factual basis of the events that are represented in
the film. However, the collusion between Dylan and Pennebaker does
point to a manipulation, or transgression, of the codes of facticity upon
which direct cinema was established. The prologue, as with the rest of
the film, constitutes Pennebaker’s willingness to abandon a strict docu-
mentary representation in favor of a form of representation predicated
on a subject’s performance. Pennebaker has noted that “I recognized
instantly, when I met Dylan and Neuwirth, that they had the same sense
about what they were up to as we did about what we were up to, which
was a kind of conspiracy” (qtd. in Spitz 280). In turn, the “conspiracy” or
compact shared by Dylan and Pennebaker resulted in what is in effect
Dylan’s license or warrant to perform before the camera.
The compact between filmmaker and subject in Dont Look Back
displaces as the key principle informing the film a structural role based
on distinctions between onstage and backstage. While Dont Look Back
replicates the two domains of onstage and backstage, the film doesn’t
indulge a sense of onstage as a public space of self-display or backstage
as the arena in which a subject abandons a performance to reveal an

essential selfhood. Away from the stage Dylan continues to perform,
particularly in the presence of the many interviewers who appear in the
backstage spaces. At certain times Dylan seems to take delight in the
interviews, and at other times he appears to be annoyed by interviewers,
but in both reactions he appears as a masterful role player, indulging in
word games and gambits, willing to spin stories that are clearly fabricated
at an interviewer’s expense. The compact is extended through the fact
that Pennebaker imbues his representation of Dylan’s performing self
with a specific persona. The model Pennebaker selected was Byronic—
the poet as rebel, marked by a “fuck you” attitude. For Pennebaker,
Byron “invented the concept of ‘Fuck you all, I’m above you as an art-
ist, not below you, so screw you.’ . . . I saw Dylan as a Byronesque pop
figure, a guy who was inventing a whole new kind of mood in popular
music” (quoted in Hajdu 249).
Guerrilla Action, Interviews, Hanging Out

The process that culminated in the portrait of Dylan was initiated by Al-
bert Grossman. In March 1965 Grossman visited the offices of Leacock
Pennebaker, Inc., on 43rd Street in Manhattan to inquire if Pennebaker
would be interested in making a film of Dylan’s forthcoming English
tour. The catalyst for the deal was Sara Lowndes, soon to be Dylan’s
wife. Sara Lowndes worked in the offices of Time-Life, and Pennebaker
and Leacock had maintained a working relationship with Time-Life
after leaving Drew Associates. In addition to her office managerial du-
ties, Sara was a liaison contact between Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., and
Time-Life. Dylan was no doubt aware of the films of Drew Associates,
and he’d seen a copy of Daybreak Express provided to him by Sara
Lowndes. She recommended Pennebaker to Dylan and Grossman for
the English shoot.
Having secured Pennebaker’s agreement to film the tour, Grossman
arranged for Pennebaker and Dylan to meet. Pennebaker met Dylan,
who was accompanied by Neuwirth, at the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan,
the preferred bar in New York of Bob Dylan’s namesake, Dylan Thomas.
At the time Dylan was very much taken with verbal games and punning
routines (such games feature in Dont Look Back), which he played on
Pennebaker during their meeting. Pennebaker’s response assured Dylan
that he was a suitable choice for the assignment. Pennebaker recalled that

the games were “an attempt to put me down. In fact, their routines had
a completely opposite effect. . . . We felt as if we were out conning the
world in some kind of guerrilla action and bringing back stuff that nobody
recognized as valuable and making it available” (qtd. in Spitz 280).
A compact—in the form of a conspiracy, collaboration, and collu-
sion—between Dylan and Pennebaker was struck. Grossman planned
to use the film as a way to promote Dylan and as a marketing tool to
sell records. However, according to William Rothman, “Dylan seemed
to have something else in mind. His boyhood idols had included James
Dean and Marlon Brando, after all, as well as Hank Williams, Little
Richard, and Woody Guthrie. He was intrigued that he might have
what it takes to make movies. ‘This was a way to find out about films,’
Pennebaker has suggested. ‘He’d seen a couple of films that we’d done,
so he knew a little that what we did was peculiar and different.’ Who
better to initiate him into the mysteries of filmmaking?” (Documentary
Film 146). Dont Look Back was produced by Grossman, John Court,
and Leacock Pennebaker, Inc. Details of the financing of the film vary.
Speaking to Robert Shelton, a Dylan biographer, Pennebaker mentioned
that “[Grossman] put up an initial three thousand or four thousand
dollars” (qtd. in Shelton 298). In a subsequent interview, Pennebaker
recalled the arrangements differently: “We put up all the money for the
film,” he said. “[T]he idea was that we would get reimbursed out of first
monies up to $100,000—that was the deal. It was just written on a piece
of paper, the bottom of a menu somewhere, it was a handshake deal. I
don’t think we ever had a formal contract between us. Dylan and I shook
hands and that was it” (qtd. in Bauldrie 45). To assist with finances, Pen-
nebaker approached Bob Altshuler, vice president of press and public
affairs at CBS Records, Dylan’s label, “with the idea of supplying some
footage for Columbia. We offered him half of the film for only five
thousand dollars, but Columbia turned it down” (qtd. in Shelton 298).
At this point, Pennebaker realized that “it was going to be a tough one
to sell! And so I went to some friends of mine who were just beginning
to set up 60 Minutes, and a guy named Ike Kleineman said, ‘Well, I’ll
buy some footage from you—maybe $500–$600 worth of footage—if
it’s terrific footage.’ . . . And so I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to
sell [the film]. Then again, none of our films are easy to sell” (qtd. in
Bauldrie 45).

With a commitment from Kleineman for a minimal amount, Leacock
Pennebaker, Inc., funded the rest of the cost of the film, which totaled
approximately $40,000, including editing, rights to music, and laboratory
fees for a blow-up from 16 mm to 35 mm (Shelton 299). Dylan traveled
to London with an entourage that included Albert and Sally Grossman,
Bobby Neuwirth, and Tom Wilson. Pennebaker’s crew comprised Jones
Alk, who recorded sound; her husband, Howard, a friend of the Gross-
mans, who served as a second camera operator; and Robert Van Dyke (the
son of documentary filmmaker Willard Van Dyke), who recorded concert
sound. Dont Look Back was filmed using modified Auricon cameras.
Pennebaker replaced the existing metal gears with nylon gears to reduce
friction on the film, and to further eliminate camera noise and friction he
honed smooth the plate that holds the film in place as it passes the lens.
He also replaced the clutch system for the take-up reel and inserted a
DC-powered motor that responded to a crystal that was synchronized
with the sound recorder. Jones Alk slated by using a small strobe light
attached to the recorder: the sound of the strobe being fired simultane-
ously registered audibly on the recorder’s audio track and visibly on film,
permitting a match of soundtrack and the corresponding images.
Pennebaker had three 16 mm cameras, each of which weighed about
fifteen pounds. The main camera, which included an Angénieux lens
with a 10–150 zoom capacity, weighed in excess of fifteen pounds. Each
camera was capable of shooting only ten minutes of film, and as a result
Pennebaker had “to decide whether I was going to shoot somebody
because I thought something was going to happen, and if nothing hap-
pened, I had to reload. So it was always a guess . . . and you took your
chances, and sometimes you’d have a roll of film that just came out
perfect, so it gave you hope” (commentary to DVD of 65 Revisited).
The limitations of the budget imposed certain restrictions on filming.
As Pennebaker has noted, “I shot about twenty-five thousand feet, at
about two and one half reels a day. I was really hoarding film. I’d shoot a
line of a song here, another line there. When we got down to the editing
. . . I found that we’d wasted very little film” (qtd. in Lee 16).
The restraint in filming is paralleled in the film’s narrative economy.
The center of the film is Dylan, who is followed by the film crew from
his arrival at London’s Heathrow airport, throughout his tour of northern
English cities, to his final concert at London’s Albert Hall. A number of

threads run through the narrative, each one serving as a refrain within
the overall movement of the narrative with its basis in the tour. One of
the earliest scenes deals with a press conference, thereby inaugurating
a theme within the film. Interviews, meetings with members of the
press, and repeated shots of Dylan reading the mainstream press and
music papers situate the media and its representatives as an ever-present
feature within the film. Further, Dylan’s often dismissive responses to
questions posed by various interviewers and Pennebaker’s framing of
Dylan’s interactions with members of the press constitute what is effec-
tively a critique of the corporate media. The first press conference—held
in Heathrow airport on Dylan’s arrival in England—is indicative of the
empty questions asked by journalists and Dylan’s mischievous replies.
Dylan, who holds an oversize industrial lightbulb, is asked by a reporter,
“What’s the lightbulb for?” He replies that it was given to him by a “very
affectionate friend.” (In fact, he’d picked the bulb out of a trash bin
while walking to the interview session.)
The effect of the session is similar to Marlon Brando’s performance
in the Maysles brothers’ film Meet Marlon Brando (1965), a record of a
series of press conferences held by Brando to promote his film Morituri
(1965). Throughout the film, Brando taunts and criticizes interviewers
and reporters. A central thrust of his provocations is that the media con-
tinually misrepresent situations and thereby lie. Not coincidentally, per-
haps, Brando was a boyhood favorite of Dylan’s, who followed Brando’s
career closely. Dylan was no doubt aware of Brando’s tactics in dealing
with the press, and he noted that “Brando pulled through all the bullshit
he had from the press and the public” (qtd. in Shelton 300). Dylan’s
relentless parrying with members of the mainstream media resembles
the ways in which Brando confronted or deflected an intrusive and
mendacious popular press.
In another scene, near the end of the film, Dylan is interviewed by
Horace Judson, the London-based arts correspondent for Time magazine.
Dylan launches a verbal attack on Judson and Time and steps out of the
role of interviewee by asking Hudson unanswerable questions. The scene
is unsettling—not the least because the journalist is so obviously out of
his depth and unable to address the legitimate points raised by Dylan
about Time magazine’s editorial policy. Pennebaker has mentioned that

he read the report written by Judson based on the interview. “He wrote a
very good piece on Dylan. I thought Dylan was kind of nice [toward the
end of the interview]. He made jokes out of [the situation]. . . . [Dylan
isn’t criticizing Time;] he’s trashing a whole system of media. . . . I never
thought of it as mean-spirited” (qtd. in Miranda). Whether or not Dylan
intended the encounter as a critique of Time magazine or the media
generally, the scene depicts a consummate performance by Dylan. Judson
underlined the performance aspect of the session when, on sober reflec-
tion, he felt that the scene was contrived as an entertaining sequence for
the film to compensate for the fact that the recorded interview had gone
flat (Sounes 175).
Numerous scenes in the film depict Dylan and members of his
entourage merely “hanging out”: relaxing, strumming guitars, talking,
joking in hotel rooms or backstage in concert halls. In 1970 Pennebaker
praised the English novelist and film critic Penelope Gilliatt for noting
“something that I hadn’t thought about, but I think she was right on: that
one of the things that comes through in Dont Look Back is the quality
of hanging out, the friendship involved with the people, a quality . . .
I’ve never seen in the movie. In fact, the more I thought about it, the
more I guessed that was one of the most compelling reasons for me to
do it” (qtd. in Levin 263). One sequence of “hanging out” features the
British folk singer Donovan, whose presence forms a subtheme within
the film. Soon after Dylan’s arrival in London, the musician Alan Price
mentions Donovan to Dylan, putting in train a sequence of references
to Donovan that are played out in the film via newspaper headlines,
concert posters, and conversations—all of which culminate in an anti-
climax in the form of Donovan’s meek and fawning presence in Dylan’s
hotel suite in the Savoy.
In the hotel suite, Donovan and Dylan trade musical performances—
Donovan sings his song “To Sing for You,” and Dylan, in reply, sings “It’s
All Over Now, Baby Blue” (a track from his recently released “electric”
album). The exchange is one of many musical performances in the film,
all of which involve abbreviated versions of songs. On a number of oc-
casions, Pennebaker, who filmed all the concert performances, ran out
of film, resulting in a truncated version of a song. However, he didn’t
necessarily want to include complete versions of songs. He felt that a

rendition of a song in its entirety would detract from the focus of the
film—Dylan. “So you’re careful about having anything run to its inevi-
table end,” he said during the commentary to the 2006 DVD version
of the film. “The film is what you’re interested in, not one segment of
it. . . . I didn’t want it to be a concert film. [Even though] the music was
really absorbing, it was new music that people had not heard before.
And I thought that if I start out and make this a film of musical perfor-
mances, it’s not going to be anything else. I want people to think that
they’re seeing behind the music.” For Pennebaker, as he explains in the
commentary to the DVD of the film, the object of making Dont Look
Back was to “see the man responsible for the music.”
Having completed the editing, Pennebaker screened the film for
Dylan in Hollywood. Dylan’s initial reaction was to schedule a second
screening so that he could note changes he felt should be made to the
film. “Of course,” Pennebaker has said, “that made me a little gloomy.
The next night, we assembled again, and he sat in the front with his yel-
low pad. At the end of the film, he held up the pad, and there was nothing
on it. He said, ‘That’s it’” (qtd. in Miranda). The film thus approved by
Dylan premiered on 17 May 1967 in San Francisco at the Presidio, a
porn theater. According to Pennebaker, the arrangement came about
because a “group of Western theaters [called the Art Theater Guild] was
showing porno, and they wanted to upgrade their act” (qtd. in McShane
28). There is a fitting irony here: a porn theater as the exhibition venue
for a film composed of exhibitionism and through which the spectator
is offered certain voyeuristic pleasures.
The idea of performance was present from the start. Pennebaker has
said of his initial reactions to meeting Dylan prior to making Dont Look
Back that he was “acting out his own life. Changing and evolving. I’d be
the not-entirely-dispassionate observer. There was drama coming on. I
could smell it” (qtd. in Spitz 281). The statement is a rich archive relevant
to approaches applied by Pennebaker in his filmmaking. The statement
implicates, first, the productive capacity of representations of “acting a
life” and, second, the filmmaker’s performance, which transcends the
limits of a strict observationalism within and through an acceptance
within nonfictional representation of codes and conventions otherwise
associated with fiction film.

Acting a Life
At the time of making Dont Look Back, Pennebaker was not the only
filmmaker concerned with portraits of subjects “acting a life.” Between
1964 and 1966, Andy Warhol and his associates shot hundreds of so-
called screen tests. Subjects for the one-hundred-foot, three-minute,
black-and-white silent films were asked to sit in a chair and were then
filmed with a static, tripod-mounted camera. Subjects included, among
others, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, Su-
san Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, members of the Velvet Underground, and
Dylan (who was filmed in 1965). People sitting for a screen test were
often told not to move or emote (and were sometimes instructed not
to blink). Within this process the “camera functions as a sort of con-
ceptual machine for the exposé of identity. Facing an unmoving, silent,
continuously running camera and instructed only to be ‘themselves,’
Warhol’s subjects respond with varying and visibly changing degrees of
self-possession, self-consciousness or self-revelation to the existential
challenge of ‘being-on-film’” (Angell 3). In 1964 Jonas Mekas proclaimed
that “Andy Warhol is taking cinema back to its origins, to the days of
Lumière, for a rejuvenation and a cleansing” (qtd. in Arthur, Line of
Sight 7). The reference to the Lumière brothers is instructive. In the
brothers’ film Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), it appears that the
employees exiting the Lumière factory were asked not to act. However,
signs of a performance invade the early footage: the workers feign an
indifference to the presence of the huge camera mounted in the street
outside the large wooden doors of the factory and then subvert their own
apparent nonchalance through sly looks and wry smiles to the camera.
In a similar way, Dylan, sitting in the Factory, is instructed not to
“act,” yet during the three-minute screen test he “puts on a remarkable
minimalist performance composing raised eye brows, and facial tics
and roving eyes. Dylan is rarely totally still, constantly performing yet
opaque—and thereby resisting any sense of a dialectic between surface
behavior and underlying identity that [the] Screen Tests were designed to
uncover” (Angell 3–4). Having sat through Warhol’s screen test, Dylan’s
full-blown performance is represented in Dont Look Back. As Pen-
nebaker has pointed out, Dylan “knew that the camera was recording

him in a way in which [he] elected to be recorded. [He was] enacting
[a] role . . . very accurately” (qtd. in Rosenthal 192).
The capacity and function of representations of a life enacted before a
camera can be gauged via a comparison and contrast of Pennebaker’s por-
trait of Dylan in Dont Look Back and Wim Wenders’s portrait of another
creative individual, Nicholas Ray, in the film Lightning over Water (1981).
In Lightning over Water Wenders follows Ray as he valiantly works on
his film We Can’t Go Home Again (1976) while battling the cancer that
will eventually kill him. Within this master narrative, which includes clips
from Ray’s films together with enacted scenes, is inserted videotaped
“documentary” footage of the interactions between Wenders and Ray.
The representations—Wenders’s account of Ray’s filmic career and the
video record of the exchanges between Wenders and Ray—continuously
and consciously reflect on each other, as in a sequence in which film
footage of Ray, lying on a bed, debilitated by his illness, is aligned with
video footage of Wenders and Ray rehearsing the same scene. The result
is a self-reflexive interaction of fictional or re-created sequences with
“documentary” or nonfictional footage, an exchange that constantly plays
upon the notion that the imminent presence of death overrides all actions
and theatrical “pretense.” The outcome of this position is a return to a
bedrock of representation as documentary—the assertion of the veracity
of the actions depicted (and enacted). At base, the film claims the validity
of documentary representation as a vehicle for the divulgence of identity.
In this way, as James Naremore points out, the “‘plot’ of Lightning over
Water involves a search for a hidden essence of personality, a true self
which is supposedly revealed through documentary” (15). In a similar
way, Dont Look Back grounds its representation in a form that in certain
ways approximates documentary. However, in contrast to Lightning over
Water, Pennebaker’s film eschews an appeal to the essence of identity
or the revelation of a “true self” that is outside or beyond performance.
Within the terms of Pennebaker’s representation of “acting a life,” the
essence of Dylan’s character or identity is performance.
In a related way, Pennebaker’s transcendence of a strict documentary
observationalism recasts assumptions concerning the representational
form of Dont Look Back. Pennebaker challenges the codes of docu-
mentary and replaces them with conventions otherwise applied within
fiction film. The most notable example of this process is the audacious

editorial cut from the question posed by an interviewer (“How did it
all begin for you, Bob? What actually started you off?”) to footage of a
young Dylan performing before a group of black men standing in a field.
(The footage depicts Dylan playing at a voters’ registration rally at Silas
Mage’s farm in Greenwood, Mississippi, on 6 July 1963. Arguably, this
is not “where it all began” for Dylan. Hibbing, Minnesota, as opposed
to Greenwood, Mississippi, would be a more appropriate location for
Dylan’s “beginnings.”) The immediate effect of the inserted footage is
a rendition of the beginnings of Dylan’s politicized folk music. (The
song Dylan sings at the rally, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” deals with
endemic racism as exemplified by the murder of Medgar Evers.) The
footage was shot by Ed Emshiler while working with Jack Willis on a
film dealing with civil rights in Mississippi.
Emshiler did not use the footage, though he recognized its impor-
tance and made it available to Pennebaker for inclusion in Dont Look
Back. During editing of footage shot for Dont Look Back, a revelation
occurred to Pennebaker:
I got my first flush of enthusiasm when the guy says, “How did it all
begin?” And I stopped. . . . And then I saw [the Emshiler footage] sitting
on a shelf, so I decided I might as well look at it. Now when you use a
viewer to edit, you have the viewer and you have a synchronizer sitting
here with a reader . . . and they’re roughly 22 frames apart. . . . So I
had these pieces of film from the last scene still sticking out—“How did
it all begin, Bob?”—and I just spliced the Greenwood film on, just to
look at it, not as part of the film. . . . And when I looked at it, I thought,
“Holy shit!” And I never took it out of the film. (Qtd. in Bauldrie 49)
The cutaway to the Emshiler footage supplants and stands in for

a journalistic report by the interviewer and thereby contributes to the
film’s ongoing critique of the mainstream media and conventional report-
age. In this way, Jeanne Hall concludes that the function of the critique
in Dont Look Back of the “documentary strategies of the mainstream
media [is to] validate Pennebaker’s alternative, cinema verite approach”
(235). In a similar vein, Jonathan Kahana argues: “By leaving the scene
of the BBC interview before Dylan responds to the question and provid-
ing audio-visual evidence of ‘how it all started’ for Dylan, [Pennebaker
asserts] the priority of documentary film over other methods of investiga-

tion” (154). In fact, the editorial cut, which brings together two distinct
types of footage, situates Dont Look Back as a hybrid work that rewrites
documentary representation within and through techniques associated
with fiction film. In this process the effect of the cut is that of a flashback
as deployed in fiction films, an effect that is rendered ironic in terms
of a film that instructs us not to look back. David Bordwell highlights
the narrative function of a flashback in fiction film in his description of
the process as one in which the viewer is permitted to “eavesdrop on
the character’s memory” (79). In contrast to the methods of a classical
documentary, which seek to present an event as “externally focalized;
that is, to present only its public, or intersubjective, aspects” (Branigan
204), the deployment of the flashback in Dont Look Back is an expressive
move that Pennebaker deploys to construct a sense of Dylan’s personal
or subjective point of view in the form of a memory of his beginnings
as a folk music performer.
Pennebaker’s unusual mixing of “documentary” methods and the
techniques deployed in fiction film no doubt contributed to the reception
of the film by critics attuned to recognizable forms and specific generic
categories. A review in the Atlanta Journal declared that the film was
a “[b]oring, off-color home movie of the neighborhood’s biggest brat.”
The film critic for the Kansas City Star found it to be the “worst film
I have ever seen, as organized as a small boy’s room.” A review in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer was especially virulent: “This is a cheap, in part,
dirty movie, if it is a movie at all. It is a chopped up ‘story’ of Bob Dylan’s
stormy visit to England. It is certainly not for moviegoers who bathe
and/or shave. It is ‘underground’ and should be buried at once. Burn
a rag, as was once said of filth. Phew!” (qtd. in Lee 37). It was not only
the heartland press that reacted negatively to the film. Writing in the
Village Voice, Andrew Sarris insisted that Pennebaker could only make
acceptable films when he had outstanding subjects, such as Dylan. As a
result, Sarris argued, Pennebaker was not an artist in his own right (qtd.
in Rothman, Documentary Film 146). Life magazine criticized the film
as an empty portrait: “What we do not see, or feel, is what is going on
inside Dylan” (qtd. in Lee). Inversely, the film was praised by various
sources, including the New Yorker, which admired the fact that “Pen-
nebaker seems to have the born filmmaker’s quality of attentiveness, and
the response that allows things to occur before the camera as richly as

they can in life.” Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote
that “Dont Look Back is the most effective presentation of the quality
of youth attitudes that I have ever seen. It is also one of the best, if not
the very best, portraits of a performing artist to be shown publicly and
it is certainly a magnificent documentation of the poet-performer Bob
Dylan. . . . As film, it is pure art, as a documentary of an artist it is pure
poetry” (qtd. in Pennebaker, Bob Dylan 158).
Reference to Dont Look Back as a documentary—even one that is
“pure poetry”—raises an issue beyond nomenclature. The praise for
Dont Look Back by a critic for Variety is premised on an interpretation
of the film that reinforces generic boundaries. According to Variety,
the film is a “relentlessly honest, brilliantly edited documentary” (qtd.
in Hogenson 25). Pennebaker felt ambivalent about such a comment,
denouncing critics who responded to Dont Look Back as a “documentary
film.” In its resolute focus on “acting a life,” Dont Look Back avoids the
informationalism that marks documentary. Speaking in 1970, Penne-
baker pointed out that “I try not to [make documentary films]” (qtd. in
Levin 234), and he acknowledged that “[m]ost people look at [Dont Look
Back] and say it’s documentary.” However, he insisted: “It is not docu-
mentary at all by my standards. It throws away almost all its information
and becomes purposively kind of abstract” (qtd. in Levin 243). In place
of information, Pennebaker presents performance—a “guy acting out
his life” (qtd. in Levin 240). In the case of Dont Look Back, the practices
of performing the real—with its dual implication of a subject “acting a
life” together with Pennebaker’s filmmaking performance—extend the
range of approaches associated with the representational form known
as documentary.
Rehearsal
Anything acted is, to varying degrees, rehearsed. Rehearsals provide
a broad set of guidelines within which actors consider actions and re-
sponses relevant to the particular parameters of a specific production.
Rehearsal implies repetition of known or recognizable actions, behav-
iors, and gests. Repetition as the basis of rehearsal may be a plodding
reiteration of established dialogue and responses or repeated opportu-
nities to improvise on and around a specific idea or theme. The irony

of the act of rehearsal and repetition is that realistic effects demand
that the performance that is the outcome of rehearsals deny all signs
of premeditation and repetitious display. In these terms, “good” acting
(complicated, responsive, motivated—and rehearsed—action) is that
which seeks to deny all traces of acting.
Repetition in rehearsal provides a pattern through which an actor
or performer understands and communicates a role. Repetition as the
basis of understanding and communication is underscored in certain
theories of signification. The cultural theorist Judith Butler has argued
that signification is a “regulated process of repetition that both conceals
itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substan-
tializing effects. In a sense all signification takes place within the orbit
of the compulsion to repeat” (145, emphasis in original). The insight is
informed within Jacques Derrida’s analysis of J. L. Austin’s interpreta-
tion of performatives—utterances that “perform,” rather than describe,
a particular action. (Austin exemplifies the process through reference to
the practice of saying “I do” in a Christian wedding ceremony—a state-
ment that brings forth and, in this sense, performs or enacts an action.
Other examples of the process are the statement “I now declare this
meeting open” and “I hereby launch this ship.”) Derrida asks, “Could a
performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’
or iterable utterance, in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order
to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable
as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable
in some way as a citation?” (320). For Derrida, the concept of citation
is closely aligned with repetition. An iterable utterance is a replay or
restaging of previous utterances and discursive practices. Rather than
weakening the efficacy of a statement, it is via citation that statements
achieve a communicative effect, which in turn holds the potential and
ability to impact on action. Derrida’s insights into the operation of iter-
ability and citation in discourse provide a basis for a reassessment of
claims made for direct cinema.
In direct cinema (so claims for its original orthodoxy still have it),
the audience accesses immediate profilmic reality beyond rehearsal
and performance. In contrast, performances before the camera can,
through reference to the notion of citation, be understood as constituted
by a set of actions that are always already repeated, thus not unique or

specific to the filmed situation. In this way, Pennebaker’s films restage
authenticity not as an inherent or essential state but as a condition that
is constructed within and through repeated, reiterated, and, in these
terms, rehearsed actions.
Rehearsal, as the repetition and continual slight variation of routines
within a process of arriving at a complete and satisfying performance,
is a feature of many of Pennebaker’s films. Lambert and Co. (1964),
The Children’s Theater of John Donahue (1972), and Rockaby (1981),
together with Jane, Dont Look Back, and numerous scenes in several
of Pennebaker’s concert films, among other works, feature shots of au-
ditions and rehearsals. More particularly, rehearsal is simultaneously
the subject and structuring device of Original Cast Album: Company,
Elaine Stritch at Liberty, and Moon over Broadway, while Pennebaker’s
cinematography and editing reiterate each filmed scene with slight varia-
tions within the mode of observation. As part of this process, the end
of these films is defined as such not necessarily through closure of the
events recounted by the camera (which, in each case, is fully anticipat-
able at the beginning of the films) but via a satisfyingly complete record
of action. In these terms, the reiteration of shots and scenes of rehearsals
produces an accretion of detail that becomes a “documentary” repre-
sentation within and through this attentive validation of the reality of
the events depicted.
The process is replicated in The War Room, the collaborative work
by Pennebaker and Hegedus that details the behind-the-scenes events
and actions of Bill Clinton’s campaign staff during the 1992 presidential
election. As with Moon over Broadway and Company, The War Room re-
plays with minimal variations expressive actions. Scenes within The War
Room are repeatedly performed: telephone conversations, interviews,
late-night informal conferences, all leading to a polling victory or posi-
tive press coverage for Clinton and the Democratic Party, are replayed
along the various stages to final victory. Reiteration and repetition, which
under other circumstances would run the risk of inspiring tedium, are
here dispelled in various ways. Centrally, the task is achieved via nu-
anced revisions of action and the continual “payoff” for the spectator in
the form of the excitement or curiosity generated by imminent election
victory and within and through the overriding attention to the ways
in which a sense of “stardom” is constructed around the film’s central

“characters,” James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. Rehearsal as
repetition and reiteration is also a feature of Kings of Pastry, a recent
film by Pennebaker and Hegedus. The film deals with French master
chefs competing for France’s top honor in the field of pastry-based
cuisine. The preparations for the competition, the run-throughs of vari-
ous recipes, and the structure of a process in which contestants present
variations of a buffet emphasize the place of preparation, rehearsal, and
repeated actions as the basic structure of the film.
Rehearsals as a structuring device feature prominently in numer-
ous films from varying national cinemas. The Hollywood genre of the
“backstage musical,” with its focus on the rehearsals and complications
associated with “putting on a show,” is one example, while films as diverse
as Marcel Carne’s Les enfants du paradis (1945), François Truffaut’s Le
dernier métro (1980), and Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1960),
L’amour fou (1969), and Va savoir (2001) constitute another tradition of
the form. Virginia Wright Wexman, in her analysis of improvised acting
in cinema, draws on a number of films that feature scenes of rehearsals
and in so doing identifies two types of realism, what she calls documen-
tary realism and theatrical realism. According to Wexman, documentary
realism is evoked through a sense of actual people in actual situations.
The effect can be achieved through the use of nonactors who behave
“normally” (as in neorealist films) or through the skill of professional
actors improvising a character (as in Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in
On the Waterfront [1954]). In contrast, theatrical realism is associated
with a group of people gathered to make a film. Wexman here gives an
example from Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), in which
Liza Minnelli says to Robert De Niro, “‘I don’t know what we’re do-
ing now’ (delivered during a scene in which he reads a poem she has
written), thereby drawing attention to their status as actors involved in
making a film rather than as characters in a story” (30).
Wexman notes that at times documentary and theatrical realism
can be combined and illustrates the point through reference to a scene
from Rivette’s L’amour fou in which the actor Jean-Pierre Kalfon, who
portrays the director of a play, improvises a speech to his wife in which he
talks about the necessity of permitting actors a chance to freely express
themselves. In this scene the natural dialogue reinforces the authenticity
of the character, while at the same time the reality of the filmmaking

process is imprinted by the fact that Rivette’s filming allows Kalfon the
actor the freedom he spoke of as the basis of effective acting. Wexman
argues that in certain films theatrical realism can dominate to the point
where documentary realism is displaced, as in Rivette’s Celine and Julie
vont en bateau (1974), a film concerned with questions of performance
and reality. Rivette’s complex, reflexive film is a story within a story, both
of which involve extensively improvised scenes. The framing narrative
focuses on the adventures of the two young protagonists, Celine and Julie
(Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier), who constitute the audience
for the interior story “Phantom Ladies over Paris,” an exaggerated and
fantastic melodrama that is improvised by Celine and Julie/Berto and
Labourier. Wexman makes the point that the dominance of theatrical
realism and the absence of documentary realism in Celine and Julie
vont en bateau are the result of an extensive reliance on improvisation
in Rivette’s film (35).
In contrast to Rivette’s film, documentary realism is foregrounded
in Pennebaker’s depictions of rehearsals and apparent improvisations,
which, in a manner that is more direct than the complexity of Rivette’s
attitude to improvisation, raises questions of authentic behavior and
performance and their relationship. The film theorist Bill Nichols high-
lights the place of authenticity within his analysis of documentary real-
ism (the realism of documentary), which he contrasts to the effects of
fictional texts: “Rather than effortless transport into the nether regions
of fantasy, documentary realism transports us into the historical world
of today through the agency of the filmmaker’s presence” (184). For
Nichols, “[r]ealist style undergoes an inversion in documentary. Rather
than bringing the sensibilities and vision of the filmmaker to the fore, it
situates the filmmaker in the historical world. The helpless, accidental,
humane, interventionist, and professional gazes testify less to a meta-
phorical vision of the world [as in fiction film] than to the real presence of
the filmmaker in the face of historical events beyond his or her control”
(184). By distinguishing realism in fiction and documentary, Nichols
informs Wexman’s distinctions of theatrical and documentary realism,
which tend to place both effects within the realm of fiction film, and he
astutely links the reality effect to the impression of authenticity.
Interestingly, Nichols relates the style of documentary realism—its
various gazes—to circumstances beyond the control of the filmmaker.

The point can be taken further in the recognition that a lack of control
is a prime mark of authenticity. Richard Dyer notes that conceptions
of authenticity are related to three effects: an expression of privacy, a
lack of premeditation, and a lack of control. The film Truth or Dare
(1991) by Alek Keshishian exemplifies the role of privacy in relation to
authenticity. Truth or Dare is a vehicle for Madonna to expose otherwise
intimate experiences for the camera, and in the process she abandons
any notion of privacy. As Warren Beatty says of her in the film, “She
doesn’t want to live off-camera. . . . There’s nothing to say off-camera.”
In contrast to Madonna’s knowingly “inauthentic” attitude, Beatty, who
has long lived in the glare of Hollywood publicity, evades the camera in
Truth or Dare and guards his privacy, which, according to the logic of the
oppositions constructed in the film, marks the boundary of the realm of
the authentic self. Madonna’s calculated and premeditated stance before
the camera—one that, in effect, attracts the camera’s gaze—is another
example of the Material Girl’s expression of a celebratory “inauthentic-
ity” as the product of the attention of the camera she courts in the film.
In contrast, a lack of premeditation bespeaks authenticity, as does a lack
of control. A controlled situation—whether it is the delivery of a political
speech, the faithful rendition of a musical arrangement, or a rehearsal
for a performance—suggests the containment of everyday expression.
A lack of control on the part of subjects within such circumstances is
the moment when adopted positions and polished professionalism are
compromised and dissolved to reveal the authentic self within a con-
trived situation.
Lacking Control, Revealing Selfhood

The process is exemplified in Original Cast Album: Company. The work
was intended for broadcast on television, but negotiations over copyright
and other legal issues meant that such exhibition was delayed; as a re-
sult, it premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1970. The film deals
with a marathon session to record the songs of the Stephen Sondheim
musical Company!, which had just opened on Broadway. The session
involved impromptu rehearsals of songs in the form of run-throughs of
variant takes and an extended sequence focused on repeated attempts
by Elaine Stritch to pin down a recordable rendition of the song “Ladies
Who Lunch.”

The repeated takes involved in recording this song suggest to the
viewer that Sondheim’s music has more depth and complexity than might
at first appear to be the case for a popular and seemingly lightweight
entertainment. In another way, the retakes of the song reinforce the
notion that the resultant soundtrack recording is a closely worked and
faithful transcription of the live versions of the songs. Whereas Walter
Benjamin argued that the technology of mechanical reproduction of a
creative work lessens the aura of authenticity that adheres to an original
performance, the documentary representation of the practice of record-
ing or reproducing a creative project here verifies the authority and
authenticity of the original in a treatment that is reinforced through
reference to the “original cast” involved in the recording. Additionally,
Stritch’s attempts to record the song through a number of retakes and
the mounting frustration and anger that accompany this process suggest
an inability to master or control the song and the situation. Within and
through a focus on a “lack of control” associated with the angst-ridden
activity of achieving a definitive version of the song “Ladies Who Lunch”
and by making this activity the center of Company, Pennebaker exploits
the notion of a lack of control to evoke a sense of authenticity.
In contrast to the notion of a lack of control in the profilmic realm,
Pennebaker’s representation of the recording session is tightly structured
around specific narrative elements. The narrative is based in a clearly
identifiable place and time and moves to a climax in the form of whether
or not the recording session can be satisfactorily completed before the
time allotted for the session runs out. Within this framing narrative is
the question of whether or not Stritch will be able to satisfactorily record
“Ladies Who Lunch” before she is overcome by fatigue. The core of the
narrative is, then, a race against the clock. Pennebaker deploys various
devices to render this theme. “I had the feeling,” he’s said, “that we
wanted to move fast, so I occasionally would drift by mike stands [while
filming] and try and get the sense that we were in a moving situation”
(commentary, Company DVD). In another way, recurring shots of a
clock on a wall reinforce the notion of the passage of time and its toll
on the recording process. At one point Thomas Shepard, the producer
of the record, mentions to cast members that, according to the current
schedule, completion time for the session is 4:00 a.m. A clock on the
wall is featured (it reads 2:30 a.m.). After another take of a song, the

clock is again featured (2:55 a.m.). During repeated takes of “Ladies
Who Lunch,” Shepard comments to Stritch that “it’s getting late.”
During the recording of this song, the passage of time and the late-
ness of the hour are accompanied by fatigue, which translates into a lack
of control on Stritch’s part. Her self is revealed as “authentic”—tired,
frustrated at her inability to “nail” a recordable version of the song, yet,
in the manner of a true professional artist, willing to give “whatever it
takes” to finalize the recording. In a commentary that accompanies the
DVD version of Company, Hal Prince, the producer of the Broadway
musical, suggests that Stritch was acting during the recording session—
playing the part of a tired diva for dramatic suspense within Pennebaker’s
film: “I’ve never accused [Stritch] of deliberately not delivering on that
long, long day [on which the film] was recorded.” (Stritch, in the same
commentary, quashes the suggestion with sarcasm: “Yeah, I planned it.
I planned to nearly die of fatigue [and] embarrassment.”) Prince’s sug-
gestion, though ostensibly unkind, is a backhanded compliment to the
efficacy of Stritch’s skills of performance and the attendant idea that she
could have been acting the part of failing to sing the song to recordable
standard. Prince’s comment embodies the core of performing the real
in this case, namely, that the end of Stritch’s rehearsal is a consummate
profilmic performance.
Unlike Company, there is no sense in Elaine Stritch at Liberty by
Pennebaker and Hegedus of frustration or overwhelming situations.
Elaine Stritch at Liberty mixes the documentation of rehearsals with ex-
tracts from Stritch’s stage show in which she performs songs and routines
she has made memorable during her long stage career, including “Ladies
Who Lunch,” which is presented here as her polished signature tune. In
Elaine Stritch at Liberty, even the rehearsals are accomplished affairs
that connect seamlessly with the professional ease with which Stritch
presents the rehearsed scenes and songs onstage. Within its sense of a
smooth, untroubled, and controlled professionalism, Elaine Stritch at
Liberty becomes a career-capping promotional piece. Pennebaker was
attracted to making the film because of his admiration for Stritch’s tal-
ent, and the resultant film is the equivalent of a commissioned portrait,
a representation intended to depict a subject in a positive way. Such a
portrait of an actor in charge of her craft dispels a sense of a lack of con-
trol, though intimations of authenticity are not entirely abandoned in the

process. In fact, the fascination in watching the film is implicated with
questions of authenticity, in particular, the place of authenticity within
performance by a subject who, Pennebaker acknowledges, is always act-
ing (qtd. in Phillips). The question is resolved through the recognition
that the two conditions—performance and authenticity—mirror each
other in Pennebaker’s films. In the case of Elaine Stritch at Liberty, as
with Company, the “true self” and performance are inextricably aligned.
A “lack of control” is a foundational trope of Moon over Broadway, a
film by Pennebaker and Hegedus that documents the problem-plagued
production of Moon over Broadway, a limp stage farce. The notion of
a film that follows the behind-the-scenes activity involved in producing
a stage play has echoes of Lloyd Bacon’s 42nd Street (1933), though
Pennebaker and Hegedus had long been captivated by Moss Hart’s
memoir Act One (1959), a work that, in its rich account of Broadway
theatrical life, was an inspiration to the filmmakers. The play Moon over
Broadway, which opened at the Martin Beck Theater in October 1995,
featured Carol Burnett and Philip Bosco as lead actors and marked
Burnett’s publicized return to the stage after thirty years devoted to
television work. It was originally intended that the film would exclusively
concentrate on Burnett, though the focus was widened to include other
members of the play’s cast, together with the play’s director, Tom Moore,
producers Heidi Ettinger, Rocco Landesman, and Elizabeth Williams,
and the playwright Ken Ludwig. Within the expanded scope of the film,
the trials and tribulations of Burnett’s move back to the stage form part
of the wider and arguably more engrossing problems facing the lengthy
rehearsal process involved in the Broadway production.
The opening sequences include footage from Burnett’s successful
television program, inserted to accompany comments made by selected
members of the cast and the production team. The excerpts depict an
accomplished actor expertly presenting comedic routines. It becomes
obvious in the course of the production of the play Moon over Broadway
that Burnett’s televisual skills must be rethought and reworked for the
theater. Tom Moore’s damning criticism of Burnett’s first run-through
of the play, which, according to Moore, produces an effect that is more
appropriate to television than theater, is a sign that the rehearsal pro-
cess will not necessarily be a smooth one. Compounding matters, Ken
Ludwig acknowledges, after the initial reading of the play, that the script

Figure 11. Carol
Burnett in Moon over
Broadway (1997).
requires revisions. Continual revisions and rewrites of the script, with

the actors receiving new sections at short notice, is a source of ongoing
disruption for the cast of the play. At a later rehearsal, Philip Bosco
reacts to Moore’s comment that “[t]his play will not be improvised” by
testily querying whether or not Moore wants or values input from the
actors. The sense of frustration and anger in this scene, which involves
Moore, Ludwig, Bosco, and Burnett, is palpable. The ongoing problems
in rehearsal are capped in an out-of-town preview when a stage winch
jams, stalling the production and forcing Burnett and Moore onstage
to appease and entertain the audience.
The issue of “control” in relation to rehearsals is further evoked by
Pennebaker through references to reviews and assessments of the play
in the press. Comments by reviewers quoted by cast members, inter-
views conducted with the leading actors by critics from major newspa-

pers, anxious inquiries by Landesman on the Broadway opening night
concerning advance responses to the play, reflections by Landesman,
Moore, and Ludwig on potential reviews, the presence of critics at the
Martin Beck Theater for Critics’ Night, a shot of one of Landesman’s
assistants collecting a copy of the New York Times from the offices of the
newspaper in the early hours after opening night, a reading of reviews at
a post-opening-night meeting of the play’s producers and management
are among the various ongoing references in the film to reviews and
reviewers. In these ways, reviews function as a structural device through
which, in search of a favorable critical response that would validate the
rehearsal process, the actors and, importantly, the film’s viewers gauge
the degree of control exercised over the play’s production process. The
fact that the reviews are, in the main, critical of the production validates
the notion of a lack of creative control within the rehearsal process. In
turn, notions of authenticity attendant upon an environment character-
ized by an absence of control or structure are reinvoked here. Within the
context of these connections, the actions witnessed within the rehearsal
process are unstructured, unruly, and uncontrolled and, in these terms,
authentic. More particularly, the narrative tension between repeated
rehearsals (and a seeming lack of control within rehearsals) and reviews
(as the measure of the degree of control exercised over the production)
foregrounds authentic performances of the real as the core of Moon
over Broadway.
A Star Is Born in The War Room

The focus in Moon over Broadway on critical reviews carries with it
a comment on the media’s effect on public perceptions, in this case,
perceptions and assessments of a theatrical production. The theme—
the role of the media in opinion formation—is extended in The War
Room. The “war room” of the film’s title refers to a rented space in
an old newspaper building in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, used
during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign as the headquarters
from which James Carville, Clinton’s campaign manager, and George
Stephanopoulos, communications manager, steered Clinton’s electoral
victory. The media dominate this space—Carville and Stephanopoulos
are frequently depicted interacting with members of the media cover-
ing the presidential campaign, preparing press releases, and watching

television coverage of events related to the forthcoming election, includ-
ing the first televised debate between Clinton and George Bush. The
presence of the media at the campaign headquarters is included when
Stephanopoulos emerges from watching the first debate to announce
to the assembled press a victory for Clinton.
The project that became The War Room was initiated when R. J.
Cutler and Wendy Ettinger, who together with Frazer Pennebaker
would serve as the film’s producers, approached Pennebaker and He-
gedus about making the film. Originally it was conceived that the film
would follow Clinton during the electoral process (which, no doubt,
would have resulted in a film that was strikingly similar in its intention
to Primary). A lack of access to Clinton led to a revision of the original
idea, resulting in the focus adopted in The War Room. Again, access to
leading players was a key to the success of such a project, and Cutler
and Ettinger sought out numerous contacts in their attempts to secure
permission to film inside campaign headquarters. The point of access
was Stephanopoulos, who agreed to allow Pennebaker and Hegedus,
together with Nick Doob and David Dawkins and other members of the
film crew, into the “war room.” Access to Clinton was not guaranteed
(he is glimpsed only in a couple of brief shots). Filming proceeded over
four months and included the Democratic National Convention, three
presidential debates, Clinton on the campaign trail in North Carolina,
five trips by the filmmakers to Little Rock, and the final days preceding
the election. The War Room was released in October 1993, almost a
year after Clinton’s victory. Nevertheless, as one reviewer wrote in the
New York Times, the film “manages to coax cliffhanging suspense out
of a fait accompli” (Maslin).
Having constructed a narrative in which a certain degree of suspense
or tension is generated by the movement through events to the election
(the outcome of which was known by the time of the film’s release), the
structure of the ending of the film had to be addressed in a specific way.
Within the “crisis structure” of many direct cinema films, an ending is
achieved via a satisfying representation of the resolution of the crisis.
In The War Room the known outcome of the election dissipates a crisis
structure and with it any assurance through the conventions of the narra-
tive structure of a certain form of ending. This is not to say that The War
Room is open-ended: it achieves resolution within a particular, acutely

observed “ending moment.” Hegedus described this moment when she
commented that “it was very hard to get the exact payoff moment we
needed for James and George in our film. And what we needed was to
see them with Clinton, election night, and have Clinton acknowledge
their accomplishment. And we got to the front of the stage to film, but
ran out of film right before [Clinton] was going to come down from the
stage and hug them. So we never got that moment.” Feeling depressed
over a missed opportunity, Hegedus thought: “[W]e don’t have the end
of the movie. . . . And then later, I found that on the way to the speech
we had filmed George on the phone to Clinton, and for me that was the
ending moment, because it was a very personal moment with him” (qtd.
in Hansen). In this scene Stephanopoulos is on his cell phone to Clinton
advising him “to say whatever you want to say tonight,” although he adds
that Clinton should “be careful about being too programmatic.” Here,
in what the film presents as the crucial resolution of events, Clinton is
advised to be spontaneous and to improvise but to avoid the appearance
that the improvisation is programmatic or rehearsed.
The allusion in the phone call to an avoidance of rehearsed perfor-
mance is ironic in relation to a film within and around which rehearsal
as repetition, reworking, and recycling prominently features. Within this
context, the subject of The War Room can be interpreted as a variant—
a replay, a reworking, and, in these terms, another rehearsal—of the
contents of films and television series on similar topics. The Candidate
(1972), Wag the Dog (1997), Spin City (1996–2002), and Robert Alt-
man’s Tanner 88 (1988), among other works, similarly concentrate on
behind-the-scenes representations of the campaign process. Primary
is an early documentary example of the form. Beyond the similarities
based on content, The War Room shares with Primary an emphasis on
extreme close-ups of participants’ reactions and emotions. In another way,
The War Room includes two lengthy handheld tracking shots of Stepha-
nopoulos and a tracking shot of Stephanopoulos and Carville running
along corridors, each of which recalls Albert Maysles’s masterful handheld
shot in Primary as he followed Kennedy into a hall of supporters.
The War Room also features references to Crisis. The telephone con-
versation in Crisis between Nicholas Katzenbach and Robert Kennedy
is, to a degree, reworked and replayed in the ending of The War Room
in the form of the cell phone conversation between Clinton and Stepha-

nopoulos. Further, the focus in The War Room on Stephanopoulos and,
in particular, on Carville, the manager of Clinton’s election campaign,
points to connections between the film and Leacock’s Campaign Man-
ager (1964), a study of John Grenier, executive director of the Republican
Party Committee. Leacock’s film follows Grenier in his daily activities,
highlighting his coordination of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential
campaign. Campaign Manager, at a brief twenty-six minutes long, lacks
the aspirations of the feature-length The War Room, though in a number
of its approaches it contains elements of structure and organization that
are productively adopted and adapted to inform The War Room. Images
of the Democratic contender are not included in Campaign Manager,
just as in The War Room the Republican opposition is absent. Goldwater
is seen only briefly in a couple of shots, just as Clinton rarely appears
in The War Room. Grenier’s bland personality fails to inspire interest, a
point that Pennebaker and Hegedus addressed in The War Room through
a focus on Carville, who exhibits intense and engaging personal traits.
Recycling, as a practice aligned with the repetitive core of rehearsal, is
extended in The War Room through the inclusion of recycled footage.
Figure 12. George Stephanopoulos and James

Carville (foreground) in The War Room (1993).

Much of the opening footage in the film prior to Clinton’s nomination
at the Democratic Convention, including shots of Carville speaking to
campaign workers in New Hampshire, came from the film Feed (1992)
by Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway, which, in turn, edited and reused
footage from television news and other sources.
The intra- and extratextual repetitions that inform The War Room—
through which any sense of a “crisis structure” is replaced by a structure
grounded in the processes of rehearsal—operate on two levels in relation
to the construction of political image. On one level, the documenta-
tion of the actions of Clinton’s campaign staff provides insights into
the ways in which Clinton’s image is manipulated and massaged. On
another level, the film partakes of an image-making process, constructing
a particular image around and of the political strategist as star. In doing
so, a sense of authenticity accrues to the resultant performance. Given
that Clinton rarely features in the film, it is James Carville, more than
Stephanopoulos, who occupies the center of attention and attraction.
Carville is the focus of an image of the political campaign manager as
a person who, in an expression of authenticity, is simultaneously direct
and replete with quirks and foibles. He is also charismatic and capable of
bravura performances—characteristics of “star quality.” In these ways, to
paraphrase Richard Dyer, the whole film shifts between acknowledging
the manufacture of an image as the role of political campaigning and
asserting the authenticity of the image of a particular figure involved
in the campaign (138). Extracts from Dyer’s analysis of the function of
the star image and its relation to authenticity in George Cukor’s A Star
Is Born (1954) offer a useful interpretative gloss on the connections
between these features in The War Room.
Dyer outlines the ways in which a vocabulary of immediacy, sincer-
ity, and believability is used in relation to assessments of “authenticity.”
According to Dyer, the peculiarity of “these words is their application
to individual persons as the criteria for truth or validity of social affairs.
To put it another way, the truth of social affairs has become rooted not
in general criteria governing social behavior itself but in the performers
themselves and, at the same time, the criteria governing performance
have shifted from whether the performance is well done to whether it is
truthful, that is, true to the ‘true’ personality of the performer (I mean
performer here in both its theatrical and sociological usages)” (138). The

operations of the media complicate this process. As Dyer points out, “no
aspect of the media can be more obviously attended by hype than the
production of stars; there is nothing sophisticated about knowing they
are manufactured and promoted.” However, “in the very same breath
as audiences and producers alike acknowledge stars as hype, they are
declaring this or that star as the genuine article. Just as the media are
constructed as the very antithesis of sincerity and authenticity, they are
the source for the presentation of the epitome of those qualities, the
true star” (Dyer 135).
Following Dyer, the representation of Carville’s presence in The
War Room grounds him as the “real thing,” the “genuine article,” whose
directness and quirks are presented as expressions of an essential, “true,”
authentic personality. The process of converting image into authenticity
outlined by Dyer is extended in the case of The War Room through the
fact that the film is identified as a documentary, and as such it draws
on the genre’s associations with the real. Interestingly, within its use of
documentary representation, The War Room explicitly identifies Car-
ville as a “star,” a term otherwise reserved for performances in fiction
film. The opening credits of the film stretch common approaches to
the “social actor” within documentary by announcing that the “stars” of
the film are James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. Here, as Dyer
notes, the media attend the process of evoking authenticity. Reviews in
newspapers of the film frequently referred to Carville’s “performance”
and his “starring role” in the film, thereby emphasizing Carville’s on-
screen presence in language reminiscent of descriptions of Hollywood
legends. Such references are dual edged: on the one hand, by equat-
ing a political strategist to Hollywood stars, the reference alludes to a
bankrupt or cynical political process that exploits surface over substance.
On the other hand, such references explicitly recognize performance
by a subject as an inherent feature of documentary representation. The
tension between these two positions is, in effect, resolved within and
through a form of representation that acknowledges, if not provokes, a
performance that embodies the “real thing” and that extends the extant
practices of observational filmmaking.
In opposition to the claims made about subjects in observational
direct cinema, Carville at times openly acknowledges the camera’s pres-
ence. He, clearly, plays to the camera and loves an audience. In contrast

to critical positions that insist that, when filming, the observational direct
cinema filmmaker is unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, Pennebaker
freely accepts his part in Carville’s performance. Pennebaker admits
that “being in the room focused James in a way that he wouldn’t have
been focused if we hadn’t been making a film” (qtd. in Berenstein).
For Pennebaker, the camera is not a neutral recorder but an instigator
of that which it records. Within such a position, assertions concerning
direct cinema rectitude are replaced by the provocational practices of
cinema verité, as espoused by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin and applied
in their film Chronique d’un été (1960), in which the presence of the
camera is used as a catalyst for action.
In an overt form of reflexivity unusual in documentary film, Rouch
and Morin document reactions by the film’s subjects to a screening of
footage shot for the film. Pennebaker and Hegedus replicated a version
of this practice when they screened The War Room for Carville, an event
reported by a journalist for the Washington Post: “‘People always tell
me, “You’re intense,” but I didn’t realize I was that intense,’ Carville
says, on watching his movie self shriek profanely over the phone at the
editor of The Washington Post” (qtd. in Grove). Throughout the report
the “viewing self” legitimates—and authenticates—the performance of
the “movie self.” In another instance Carville is quoted as saying, “It’s
weird looking at your own handwriting in a movie” (qtd. in Grove), and
like handwriting, a mark of signature and self, The War Room is an
emblem of an authentic James Carville.
Pennebaker underlines the function of a “star” performance in rela-
tion to Carville’s “authenticity” in his comment: “I think James has an
ability to enact what he’s thinking for people. So they watch, and then
he enacts back, and it’s an incredible kind of performance. . . . And
that’s what you want to film!” (qtd. in Grove). Carville adds, validating
the representation of his ever-present on-screen presence: “Not a lot
of people, even actors, ever really get to look at themselves . . . [or]
see themselves in a movie. All my life my mother always said: ‘Son, . . .
[y]ou just pop up all the time.’ And until now, I never understood what
people were talking about. And I just saw it [watching The War Room]”
(qtd. in Grove). Carville’s performances, and the process of comment-
ing on action, are replayed in Return of the War Room (2008), in which
contemporary reflections by subjects of The War Room, among others,

are complemented by footage from the original film. The War Room is
a dense text in which image, authenticity, and performance coalesce.
Within the film various shots and scenes of rehearsals (run-throughs,
repetitions, replays) of performative action connect to the construction
of image. In turn, image as the ineffable “special presence” associated
with “star quality” is made flesh within and through Pennebaker’s docu-
mentation of Carville’s expressive performance of the real.
Observation, Drama, Performance: Kings of Pastry

After The War Room Pennebaker and Hegedus sought to make a film
about Q School, a tournament in which golfers who have unsuccessfully
tried to enter the PGA tournament attempt to requalify for the competi-
tion. The idea of making a film based on a competitive challenge obvi-
ously appealed to the filmmakers. Though the proposal for the golf film
languished due to difficulties in securing funding, the basis of the idea
was translated into Kings of Pastry, a work that documents a prestigious
and grueling culinary competition. In Kings of Pastry sixteen of France’s
leading pastry chefs compete for the accolade of a “collar,” the blue,
white, and red striped collar that signifies the wearer’s admittance to the
Société Nationale des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (National Society
of the Best Craftsmen of France). Each round of the MOF for pastry-
based cuisine, an event held every four years, has a different theme, and
the topic for the round documented by Pennebaker and Hegedus was
marriage. Over the three days of the competition, contestants were re-
quired to design and complete a buffet to accompany a wedding. Among
the sixteen competing chefs is Jacquy Pfeiffer, an award-winning chef
from Alsace and a founder of Chicago’s French Pastry School. Pfeiffer
prepares for the competition by returning to an Alsatian village to work
in the kitchen of a bakery owned by Pierre Zimmerman, a childhood
friend. There Pfeiffer tests his recipes using local ingredients. With the
competition looming, Pfeiffer falls behind his preparation schedule and
is forced to rethink the complex sugar sculpture and elaborate wedding
cake he’d originally planned as entries in the competition. Paralleling
Pfeiffer’s preparations, the film follows two other finalists, Regis Lazard
and Philippe Rigolot, as they test their recipes prior to the competition.
During the competition, held in Lyon, the finalists create an array of
pastries, cakes, cream puffs, desserts, and sugar sculptures. In addition

to preparing dishes for their planned buffet menus, the chefs must make
a special dessert devised by the judges. The lavish recipes form only one
part of the competition; contestants are also judged on the amount of
waste involved in their cooking and the neatness of their work stations.
Time limits and other pressures throughout the competition take their
toll on the chefs (in one scene, shot by Hegedus, a contestant drops
a lavish pastry sculpture and bursts into tears at the loss of his work).
Within the contextualizing framework of the competition, the pres-
ence of rehearsal and repetition are emphasized as basic structural de-
vices within the film’s narrative. Pfeiffer, Lazard, and Rigolot rehearse
their recipes prior to the competition, and as each of the finalists pre-
pares a seemingly endless array of visually attractive sugar-based deli-
cacies (the phrase “eye candy” is particularly apt here), an element of
reiteration becomes a feature of the narrative. In another way, repetition
is associated with the representation via the fact that Kings of Pastry
replays and reworks various antecedents, among them the long tradition
of television cooking programs and recent variants that include cooking
contests, as featured, for example, in the program Iron Chef America
(2004– ). The recent forms in particular displace an emphasis on the
provision of information within the exploitation of a focus on entertain-
ment, excitement, and spectacle. Through the term “popular factual
entertainment,” such programs are aligned with so-called docusoaps,
televisual products in which a denatured informationalism is married
to a serialized, sensationalized form characteristic of the soap opera.
A certain deployment in the docusoap of observational filming tech-
niques places such works as crude descendants of observational direct
cinema. In his analysis of factual television, the British academic Jon
Dovey notes that during the 1960s and 1970s the tradition of obser-
vational filmmaking “became naturalised as the dominant form of TV
documentary film-making—so much so that ‘observational’ and ‘docu-
mentary’ were barely distinguished. . . . However, during this process
of naturalisation the original Direct Cinema principles of observational
film-making . . . began to mutate. Contemporary observational film-
making on TV has very little in common with its roots” (138). To carry
the point, Dovey contrasts two works on the subject of prisons: one
adopts an established observational style, and the other is characterized
by the contemporary hybridization of the observational tradition. The

first work is concerned with constructing an argument and presenting
ideas about the institution of prisons, while the second work seeks to
exploit the entertainment derivable from a narrative focus on issues in
people’s lives. The latter work displaces the long take traditionally associ-
ated with observational filming with a rapid succession of images. The
shots frequently feature close-ups of three subjects whose experiences
form the basis of an ongoing dramatic narrative. The hybrid form of
such a work is characterized as such through a combination of handheld
and tripod-mounted shots and a mix of observational sequences, direct
address by subjects, and voice-over commentary. The focus of filming,
and the impetus for the narrative, is performance—in the form of the
ways in which subjects express their stories and present their experi-
ences. For Dovey, this position contrasts to the ways in which “classic”
observational work maintains the integrity of the real event and eschews
instances of overt performance (147).
According to such distinctions, Kings of Pastry is positioned between
the extremes of the forms set out by Dovey. Pennebaker’s narrativized
observationalism exhibits a certain faithfulness to the real-life events it
depicts, even as it maximizes expressions of skill and frustration as per-
formances by subjects as the basis of an entertaining spectacle. While
it refuses the overwrought theatrics of the docusoap, Kings of Pastry
indulges a situation that lends itself to performance. Elements of the
direct cinema crisis-laden narrative adhere to the representation of a
competition marked by demanding tasks and impending deadlines.
However, the direct cinema assumption that a subject preoccupied by
a profilmic crisis would overlook the presence of a camera, resulting
in unfeigned action, is openly contradicted in Kings of Pastry, which
exploits a “critical” situation as the trigger or impetus for entertaining
performances to be recorded by the camera. Pennebaker emphasized
the constructive place of entertainment in documentary when he asked,
“Why can’t we have a true theater of documentary (non-fiction) film-
making that entertains and excites rather than explains[?]” Such a form
would, as Pennebaker mentions, eschew explanation and argument (qtd.
in Macdonald and Cousins 390).
Argument, according to film theorist Bill Nichols, is the basis of
documentary representation, a form that he insists is characterized by
a discursive sobriety (111). In place of such strategies and outcomes,

Pennebaker’s work represents the real through entertaining stories based
on the lives of subjects. The new documentary cinema envisaged by Pen-
nebaker in response to his own question concerning the future potential
of documentary production could be as “big and bright as any narrative
fiction film, it would be filmed from reality not scripts, and its protago-
nists would be the villains and heroes around us that we only come to
know through the press. . . . Instead of pedantic charades on wildlife and
government prudence we could . . . create a new and different sort of
theater that searches for its plots and characters among the real streets
and jungles of our times. Instead of editing testimonials to our more
virtuous citizens we could watch those around us get through or attempt
to get through their complicated, normal lives” (qtd. in Macdonald and
Cousins 390).
Pennebaker’s reference here to unscripted narratives returns us to
the notion of rehearsal. Typically, rehearsal is understood as a compo-
nent of a performance that follows, adapts, and remakes a text or script.
In Pennebaker’s films the text that is reconstituted is, as Erving Goff-
man would argue and as Pennebaker’s comments here reveal, quotid-
ian experience—the real in the form of the “already established skein
of collective representations” that comprise the self and culture, “the
universe of basic narratives and codes and the cookbook of rhetorical
configurations from which every performance draws” (Alexander 529).
Released from the need to offer a “balanced” account in the manner
of film or televisual reportage, Pennebaker’s films entertain by indulg-
ing a sense of “real drama,” a characteristic he has consistently argued
is the basis of his filmmaking. Pennebaker dominantly represents such
stories via an observational mode of filmmaking that overcomes and
exceeds the austerity and minimalism of the mode within and through
an ongoing process of what Pennebaker refers to as “mak[ing] a piece
of theater” (qtd. in Berra). The basis of this theater, the stories that
comprise it, and the ability of a work to entertain or engage an audience
is performance—by the subjects recorded by Pennebaker’s camera and
by Pennebaker as a filmmaker.

Interview with D.A. Pennebaker
The following interview was conducted by Jonathan Marlow in March

2006 during a tribute to Pennebaker at the Documentary Film Institute
(San Francisco).
jonathan marlow: Your first film, Daybreak Express, is arguably
one of the most stunning shorts ever made.
d.a. pennebaker: I have to freely admit that it owes a little some-
thing to [Duke] Ellington!
jm: At what point did you decide to use Ellington as the springboard?
dap: I began by wanting to use that song and that’s why the film
has no title. It’s known as Daybreak Express but that’s the title of the
song. I didn’t want to co-opt the song to my little film. I had to show it
to Ellington because, at the time, I didn’t know anything about making
a film. I didn’t make a print or anything. I took the original stuff, which
was Kodachrome . . .
jm: Was it reversal or negative?

dap: Reversal. You bought it for ten dollars a roll at the drugstore.
You sent it to them and they processed it and sent it back. The short took
about three or four rolls. Since a roll is about three-and-a-half minutes
long and the record was about three-and-a-half minutes long, in the
beginning I thought that, if I’m really smart and can start and stop that
camera accurately, I could do it all on one roll. Of course, you could
never do that! When the rolls came back, I didn’t even know how to
fasten the film together. I knew that I had to do it somehow so I did it
with adhesive tape. It looked terrible! Actually, I liked the effect of the
sudden “slug” at the cut.
A few years later, I made a film called Company. I had a guy working
for me as a kind of apprentice. His father was a sculptor and I thought
quite highly of him. I had to go away somewhere and I left him with
the problem of cutting the original film into what is called “A” and “B”
rolls. By having them run, first one and the other, on your print, you
manage to cover up the splice. He got confused and made the splices
so that, instead of covering them, they doubled. He thought that it was
a disaster. When I looked at it, I thought that there wasn’t anything we
could do. We couldn’t change the music. There wasn’t any way to extend
or change the shots. We were stuck with it! I showed it over the course of
the next week or two. Nobody noticed except the producer and he said,
“Why do you have those funny blips between each cut?” I said, “Because
I think it kind of ups the excitement.” And he said, “Great idea!” The
Canadians later wanted to know if I had some kind of “splice master”
that I’d used. I’ve lived with it ever since! Most people don’t notice but
it’s like a little time clock going off in the back of their head. It makes
it look more exciting but you would never want to do it. I would never
do it again.
Daybreak [Express] had that quality. I had to show it to Ellington in
his office on a little projector with a tape recorder to run the sound. By
present standards, it would have been unbearable but it looked great.
He loved it.
jm: Was it this experience that made you decide to pursue a career
as a filmmaker?
dap: I actually decided before that. Not long before. I had built a
setup in my New York apartment with a projector in a wooden booth
and, underneath, I had a turntable. I could show films and play music

[for accompaniment]. On a Sunday afternoon, if it were raining, we
would get old movies and play Jelly Roll Morton. Francis Thompson
came to show a film he had been working on for a long time called New
York, New York—NY, NY.
I was an engineer, actually. I have an engineering degree from Yale.
I assumed that I’d be an engineer for some time. After about a year
of it, I realized I didn’t want to do that anymore. I had a writer-friend
who said, “You’ve got to quit. You can’t do that.” At the time, I thought
I would become a writer. We were sharing an apartment and I wondered
how I would pay the rent. He said, “Don’t worry about it because what
you’ll learn is how to live in New York without a job.” And, indeed, I
did. I’ve never had a job since. But the whole idea of being a writer . . .
I started a novel and I got about a third of the way through but it was
clear to me, upon sober reflection, that it was going to be just another
book. I wasn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald.
jm: It wasn’t the great American novel.
dap: There was no way I was going to write This Side of Paradise.
Anything short of that would have been a disappointment so I thought
I’d better think this writing thing through. When Francis showed me
the work print [of NY, NY], he also had a record playing with it—[Béla]
Bartok. I had never heard Bartok before although I knew quite a bit
about music. I’d spent time in music school during my senior year at
Yale. The combination [of image and sound] was terrific. The picture
was very artistic. It was all abstractions, quite beautiful, but that wasn’t
what interested me. What interested me was that he’d made this film
all by himself. I had no idea how movies were made before that. I’d
never thought about it much. As a result, in about fifteen minutes I saw
right away that filmmaking was what I was going to do for the rest of my
life. Little by little, I weaseled my way into the world of independent
filmmaking in New York. It was a very haphazard thing at that time but
there were a number of people who were making films for a very small
audience. There was no television to speak of. I guess that I was very
naïve. I assumed, having the benefit of several years of college as a result
of the G.I. Bill, that everything would sort of work out. You develop that
theory even though, if you look around America, that’s not realistically
the case.
jm: You owe your career to naïveté.
Interview | 131

dap: I owe my career to being a slow learner. Entirely.
jm: How did you meet Robert Drew?
dap: After a few years of doing some films, I went to Russia for
three months to make a film that was set up there by George Nelson
involving Nixon and Khrushchev. I’d actually shot Daybreak but I hadn’t
released it. I didn’t know what to do with it. Willard Van Dyke, who
Ricky [Leacock] worked with sometimes, came to me. I guess that he
had seen a screening of Daybreak. He had to do a series for the [1958]
Brussels World’s Fair of “loop” films and he talked to me about doing
a few. I said that I’d be happy to do it. There was not much money and
it involved about a year of traveling around the US to shoot them, but
it sounded exactly like what I should be doing. In the course of that I
got to meet Ricky since he made one of them [known as “Brussels film
loops”; Shirley Clarke and Wheaton Galentine also participated] and
he was doing this project with Drew. While I was in Russia, [Leacock]
came over with Lenny Bernstein and they shot a concert of the New York
Philharmonic and the Russian Philharmonic there. [Leacock] brought
with him a very haphazardly constructed sync-sound thing. That was a
big problem. You could shoot films with a tape recorder, the same type
of wind-up tape recorder on which I had run the track for Ellington to
show him Daybreak, but there was no way to go out in the field with the
camera and shoot the sound of people with dialogue. It was impossible.
You had to do it on a set, plugged in to the wall. You had to go through
the whole process. While we were there, he had this thing and it took
three of us—Al Maysles was with me—to carry it. Long wires and a bat-
tery about the size of a Volkswagen, we would be following [Bernstein]
down halls . . .
jm: Did you do this with a cart behind you? How did you carry all
this stuff?
dap: We had a microphone that was maybe this long. A directional
mike . . .
jm: On a boom?
dap: Not on a boom. The tape recorder made quite a bit of noise,
a terribly noisy thing, and the camera shot only a hundred feet of film.
That was all it shot and then you had to reload. We had to be following
Lenny who would be complaining bitterly that we were messing up
his life with this stupid contraption. It didn’t look like it had much of a

future. We set it down in this hall where Lenny was going to entertain
some party officials and, in the course of it, I remember that he sat down
and started to play current American music because that’s what they
wanted to hear. He wasn’t going to play anything very complicated for
them. It isn’t my favorite music but I do know when it’s good. Lenny was
a fantastic piano player and I thought, “I’ve got this machine here that
should be able to sync.” I shot two rolls of film and that made me think,
“That’s what we have to do! We’ve got to figure out how to get this thing
to work because it’s always the thing that you don’t expect that you want
to film.” When we got back to New York, Drew had asked Ricky to do
this balloon ascent out in South Dakota or North Dakota. They had shot
once before and the balloon hadn’t gone up due to weather conditions
or something. Ricky couldn’t go so Drew asked me to do it. By then,
Ricky and I had sort of formed a partnership with Shirley Clarke and
Willard Van Dyke. The four of us shared a little office in New York.
I went out and spent a couple of months trying to film this bal-
loon taking off. Drew, meanwhile, had persuaded Time-Life to put up
money for a program involving filmmakers like ourselves doing a kind of
projected series—a kind of candid series [entitled Living Camera] like
they had done for still photography. Drew, who had come down from
the Nieman Fellowship [at Harvard], had seen Ricky’s film called Toby
and the Tall Corn, and he’d fallen in love with it. I had seen it and I’d
also fallen in love. Daybreak Express was my attempt to become a cin-
ematographer overnight. It was also my expression of affection for John
Sloan [of the Ashcan school of American painting], who loved elevators
and did these fantastic pictures of New York which I’ve always adored.
He is the New York painter of all time. That was my little offering to
him. I didn’t want to make little, contrived, funny movies and so I never
really tried to make Daybreak again or anything like it.
By now, we set out with Time-Life to really design a camera that would
be quite portable and work anywhere. We had [Stefan] Kudelski, who
developed the Nagra, and we got to know him pretty well. We started
out by putting Bulova watches—Accutron watches—on the Nagra and
then one on the camera. If the two were keeping the same time . . .
jm: . . . then they were in sync.
dap: They could be made to drive the two things. In the case of
the tape recorder, it could simply lay down a signal in the middle of the
Interview | 133

tape. In the camera, it drove a rather complicated thing that was very
inefficient but, little by little, over the next couple of years we managed
to get a more efficient system of driving the DC feedback system. We
stopped using the clocks because we could get crystals that were just
as accurate. In the end, we designed and built about five cameras that
were hand-made from existing Auricon cameras but they had very little
Auricon stuff in them anymore. We chopped off the tops and raked the
magazines so that they sat back on your shoulder. You could hold the
camera with a handle, kind of like what you get in video cameras now.
We were the only ones that had equipment like this. We made maybe
a dozen films as part of this deal but I could see that Time-Life wasn’t
going to get them into any kind of real distribution. That is, they were
limited to TV when the ads were thrown in. They were much too short—
you couldn’t develop a character in forty-five minutes. You needed that
ninety minute span that the movies have trained everybody to expect. I
quit Time-Life and Ricky joined me. In the beginning, we had a couple
of projects but they didn’t turn out to be big money makers.
After [Leacock’s] Happy Mother’s Day was finished, the Saturday
[Evening] Post decided that they didn’t like it. They wanted to change
it so we had to buy it back from them. I did a film with a Prime Minister
in Canada. Another person later edited it and together we saw that it
was not satisfactory. I determined that I wasn’t going to shoot films that
someone else edited because it didn’t make use of what we thought we
were doing. By then, we were renting the cameras out and that irritated
the Film Board [of Canada] a lot because we had to pay duty every time
we came into Canada. But they had no other camera that was quiet and
did what this camera was able to do! We sort of survived for a year or
two doing a lot of little short films. One with Dave Lambert [Lambert
and Co.] and another with Timothy Leary [You’re Nobody till Somebody
Loves You], films that were maybe fifteen minutes long and which we
could shoot in one day. We didn’t know what else to do. We had no
market for them. Certainly television was never going to be a market
for us. I could see that fairly quickly. I couldn’t even get people to look
at Happy Mother’s Day.
jm: How much of your work with Drew, Leacock and the Maysles
was a matter of being in the right place at the right time? Primary is

certainly of a particular moment. A few years later, Albert Grossman
offered you Dont Look Back [under similar fortuitous circumstances]?
dap: In the beginning, Drew could go to the Kennedys by way of a
Time-Life reporter in Washington. He could get to Kennedy and asked
if we could be with him. We got a kind of uncertain “go ahead” on that,
so we were able to shoot Primary. . . . I worked with Drew for three
years. The last film we did was Crisis. It was an extraordinary film. We’ll
never do another film like that again.
jm: Certainly, no one would give you that kind of access again.
dap: The most interesting thing for me was Jane Fonda [in Jane]. I
could see that if you understood what the limitations were in the process
and didn’t try to make it via a Hollywood movie, you could make a real
drama that you could also distribute theatrically. The stuff was there to
do it if you did it right. That convinced me this was the way we had to
go. The fact that we had Jane Fonda was interesting. Because you had
a real actress, you saw her. But she was over-acting! It wasn’t necessarily
a film that was like Hollywood films. It just was like something that you
knew had a real nest to go to. After I’d left Drew, within a couple of
years Albert [Grossman, Dylan’s then-manager] came and asked, “Would
you want to go with [Bob] Dylan?” I didn’t know that it was going to be
a feature film but that was the way I intended to shoot it. And I didn’t
even know that much about Dylan . . .
jm: I think that helped.
dap: It was really kind of gratuitous. But, when I was asked to do
Monterey Pop, I thought immediately [that I had to shoot it the same
way]—even though it wasn’t intended for the theater—it was intended
as an ABC show. ABC was putting up money for it . . .
jm: And, once again, they rejected it.
dap: In the end, they rejected it because television wasn’t ready
for Jimi Hendrix and Janis [Joplin]. That was the conflict between the
“popular mode” and the perceived “family popular mode.” It was really
quite wide then but, within a couple of years after it had been rejected,
they bought it as a movie because they didn’t have any problem with
that. That was somebody else’s “egg.” So it sort of solved itself and we
were able to distribute it theatrically. Distributing the first two films,
Dont Look Back and Monterey Pop, was fairly easy at the time because
Interview | 135

of the way that the country was set up for theatrical distribution. There
weren’t many insurgents like us coming in with these fly-by-night mov-
ies. The country was divided into six areas and each area had some old
couple running it. They determined which theaters would get which
films and in what order.
jm: Did Leacock-Pennebaker act as a distributor for the films?
dap: Yes, we did. That was one of the very first. Nobody had really
tried to distribute an independent film before because nobody had re-
ally thought to do it. It didn’t seem like a reasonable idea! We were so
completely unknowledgeable about the whole thing. It just seemed to
me that if you fish and you catch a big fish and you don’t want to eat it,
you take it to your local fish store and they buy it. I thought that movies
would be that way but it turned out that they weren’t. Over a long period
of time, people came to us with other ideas. Company was like that and
then the Bowie film [Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars] was
kind of like that. People assumed that we had some magic way of getting
into the theater.
jm: It does appear that way . . .
dap: The importance of getting into the theater wasn’t that you
made a lot of money, although Dont Look Back and Monterey Pop did
do very well. Eventually, the organized people out in Hollywood closed
in and made it so that it would be hard to do. They wanted to make that
money and they didn’t want any insurgents taking it away from them!
As we got better at making the films, the distributors kind of appeared.
The Bowie film never got a distributor, as such, but it started with RCA
and they didn’t expect to distribute it. I made a 35mm feature film out
of it and [Bowie] helped me. We did it just to do it.
jm: What was RCA intending to do with it?
dap: It was originally a test for this video record [SelectaVision Vid-
eoDisc] that RCA was coming up with. It was only supposed to be a half-
hour but that concert was so amazing that I said, “This is a feature film.
I don’t know why I know that but I know it.” We made it into a feature
film although it took a while before it got distributed. When I took Dont
Look Back around to the two or three people distributing films, they had
no idea what to do with it. They couldn’t even bother. They wouldn’t even
look at it. It seemed too ratty for them to be a real movie.
jm: It was very rough.

dap: Nobody was looking for us. We somehow escaped attention.
jm: The editing for Dont Look Back is fairly unconventional. At
what point did you decide to start with the pseudo-Scopitone and then
include The Times They Are A-Changin’ in three different sections of
the film?
dap: I didn’t think of it that way. With the editing, I didn’t have a
flatbed. Every time that I’d edited before that, all of our editing had been
on viewers. We worked out a whole scheme for editing Primary mostly
where you’d have a viewer and you’d have a synchronizer and you had
them twenty-two frames apart. When a frame [of the mag track] was in
the synchronizer, twenty-two frames later would be the picture. That
was your sound-advance. You’re always working with the sound-advance
so that you could see both. You could run it very fast on your rewinds
so it was a very easy way to edit, actually. I edited it all that way . . .
jm: Very tactile.
dap: You could go fast down to the stuff that you wanted and then
you could build the film up. I think it probably didn’t take me more than
three or four weeks to cut Dont Look Back. I didn’t try to organize it,
particularly. I simply did it in the kind of order that it happened origi-
nally. I was initially considering opening with him in his dressing room
and he sort of says, “You start out standing.” He was rhyming the words
to one of his songs and I thought, “Well, that’s a good way to start.” I
didn’t think any more about it but, when I looked at the work print after
it was pretty much assembled, I realized that you didn’t know who he
was. You hadn’t seen him on stage at all. Here was this guy singing this
barely heard phrase and then, bang, you’re in the movie! I thought that
it wouldn’t work. When I first met him down at the Cedar Tavern in New
York, Dylan had an idea to write out some of the lines to the song. It was
kind of like the Ready Steady Go! stuff that the Beatles had been doing,
which was all sort of faked, but they liked doing it. They figured that
they had to do it, even though they didn’t get paid for it, because that’s
what they were supposed to do in order to sell records. Dylan thought
that was kind of funny and this was a kind of take on that. We hauled
[the cue cards] around and we finally did that little scene in one take.
We did another take somewhere else that wasn’t too good. A policeman
was hitting me on the shoulder while we were shooting . . .
jm: How did [Allen] Ginsberg get involved? Was he around?
Interview | 137

dap: He was around. At that moment, he was just stopping by.
Ginsberg was sort of a friend. I’d known him for a long time. He used to
hide his marijuana in my girlfriend’s bureau! [Bob] Neuwirth, of course,
was there because he was the road manager. I didn’t quite know what
we were doing except that it was Dylan’s idea and I thought that it was a
good one. We set up to do it in the alley [next to London’s Savoy Hotel]
and they were just hanging around. I didn’t think about whether they
were in or out of the picture. I was hardly aware of them!
When I saw that the film couldn’t begin with the backstage footage,
I took this thing out and put it on the beginning of the film. It never
came off because that was really what it needed! It was chance.
jm: With Dont Look Back and then Ziggy Stardust, you’re capturing
artists in a period of transition. What is it about working with people at
that stage in their careers that appeals to you?
dap: One of the ideas that we’d fallen on with Drew, when we used
to have discussions, was, “How do we know if this is a story?” Where
do we look for stories? Of course, we had all of these materials from
all over the world. They were sending back these sheets on various
news—situations and people—and we would look at them. Like Paul
Crump getting the electric chair in Chicago . . .
jm: Right, The Chair [produced by Robert Drew in 1962] . . .
dap: We decided to go and see if there was a movie there. Ricky
[Leacock, cinematographer on the film] fell on the guy [Louis Nizer]
who was [Crump’s] lawyer. That developed into a film but it started
because we had these reporters as a resource. When I quit [Drew As-
sociates], I didn’t have that resource anymore. I was at the mercy of
people coming to me as a result of the movies that they’d seen or what
they thought we could do and that’s been the case ever since. The mov-
ies pretty much come to us. We don’t really go out and search for them.
When you’re planning a movie, you’re trying to decide whether or not
the person is interesting to you. That’s important. But also you have to
decide whether they’re at a moment in their life that is purposeful—that
they’re going around some kind of corner and that they’re going to find
out something that is going to enable them to make important decisions.
Whatever it is, something important has to happen.
jm: It seems that your process on Monterey Pop was different.
dap: That was different.

jm: In this case, your focus isn’t a particular individual but the musi-
cal turning point of an era. Out of this one event, you had a wealth of
material that you’ve kept returning to—the Otis Redding short [Shake!
Otis at Monterey], the feature-length Jimi Hendrix film [Jimi Plays
Monterey, all eventually compiled together by Pennebaker and Criterion
as The Complete Monterey Pop Festival with an additional two hours of
outtakes] . . .
dap: But those come later . . .
jm: The music festivals at Monterey and Woodstock were such re-
markable events on their own. Is their legend and legacy partially a
result of being extremely well documented?
dap: For Monterey, you have the emergence of two or three enor-
mous talents that just defy description. You didn’t have to go through the
sociology of interviewing them to find out what their motivations were.
The performance alone was enough! We could have done backstage
stuff—in fact, we did and then we threw it out because you only could
have so many songs in a ninety-minute film. I wanted each song to be
complete or at least have the audience think that they’d heard the whole
song. Some of them had to be cut for various problematic reasons but,
in general, I wanted it to be a series of full-length songs done by people
who would do them in some unique fashion, building up to a dramatic
ending with the Ravi Shankar performance. That was really the whole
basis for the film.
Since then, perhaps the form of the film was interesting for people.
It’s easy to watch. It’s colorful and it moves fast but I think the fact is
that most people go to the film because of Hendrix or because of Janis
[Joplin] or because of Otis. There’s not a lot of footage around of those
people. It also isn’t a setting that tries to fulfill some sort of sociological
exploration. I just thought that was not our role. I think that this is one
of the problems with [the film] Woodstock. The reason that I didn’t do
Woodstock was because there was so much money riding on it. The
managers were so involved and hustling for position that a lot of the
good bands and good music wasn’t even going to be there. I knew that
Albert [Grossman] wasn’t going to let Dylan or the Band perform. It
didn’t seem to me that, musically, it would be interesting.
jm: The structure of Monterey Pop is relatively the same as Down
from the Mountain.
Interview | 139

dap: Or Daybreak [Express], really. It’s like a remake of Daybreak!
jm: How did One P.M. come about? How did you end up making a
film with [Jean-Luc] Godard?
dap: When I was in France at one point, I knew a number of French
filmmakers and I loved going out to dinner with them. They’d all speak
French and I don’t speak French so I was just trying to soak it up in some
way and understand what they were talking about. [Henri] Langlois was
the major force among them all and, at one point, I ran across Godard
and we talked about doing a film. He wanted to do a film with us. The
idea was that he would set up some little town somewhere in the south
of France and Ricky and I would arrive on a set date and we wouldn’t
know how anything had been set up. We would try to film and see if
we could film what he had set up. Bodies could fall out a window or
whatever. It’d be sort of a whodunit but we would be the audience. We
would come in and see what we could find, not what he intended us to
see. He thought that this was a great idea, mostly because he thought
he was going to get some money from it. Somehow, he assumed that
we had a lot of money!
Then they came over to America and changed the idea. PBS had
decided by this point that they wanted to put up some money for a Go-
dard special. We were going to shoot it and Godard was going to direct.
In the opening, it’s explained to us what he intends to do and then we
did it. What interested me was watching Godard and he began to notice
that I was watching him. I think he was a little suspicious. The film wasn’t
turning out as he intended but the money made it work for him. He
didn’t care. We’d actually sent him around the country so he was happy.
He eventually ended up here [in the Bay Area] with Tom Luddy and we
did the interview with Eldridge [Cleaver], which got Eldridge out of the
country and in to Mexico. That’s how he escaped—from the money we
paid him for that interview. It had a lot of peculiar political overfalls . . .
jm: Implications, absolutely.
dap: But it never got finished because Godard, I think, got bored
with it! It wasn’t the movie that he’d intended, or he didn’t see how to
finish it, so he left. He and [Jean-Pierre] Gorin went off to do Wind
from the East [Le vent d’est] instead. I was stuck with this thing and PBS
was saying, “Where’s our film? You signed a contract . . .” [laughs] We
hadn’t! Neither one of us had signed it. Still, I had to sit down and edit

a version of it. The original film was called One A.M. and this became
One P.M. or, as Godard called it, One Pennebaker Movie. We called it
One Perfect Movie.
As I edited, something about it really intrigued me. It was accidental
in many parts but there was something about the kind of structure that
Godard provided—not just in what he had told us to do but the fact that
he was ministering over it. He had everybody’s attention and they thought,
“This guy knows what he’s doing so let’s just do it.” I’m not sure whether
he knew what he was doing or not but it didn’t matter. As time went by,
it interested me more because it was a look at a peculiar moment in this
country’s political history when everybody was scared shitless of what
might happen. Students were getting shot. This country was not turning
out the way everybody thought it would be. This movie has a sense of
that in it, of the crazy left wing and the sort of malaise that was grabbing
everybody. Rip [Torn] was great at capturing it. I got to know Rip very
well and I got to really like him a lot. At the end, that thing just happened
with the building coming down. It was so axiomatic of what was going
on. I remember the name of the company that was tearing the building
down was the Wrecking Corporation of America. I thought, “That’s what
this film is about—the Wrecking Corporation of America.”
jm: . . . with that great WCA sign in the background.
dap: Eventually, we finished it. When they showed it out here in San
Francisco, it was an enormous success. Everybody thought that I had
made it as some sort of [provocation to a] revolution, which I hadn’t. I
was just watching Godard dominate a situation and that was interesting
to me.
Interview | 141

Filmography
Pennebaker’s career spans close to sixty years of filmmaking, and across

this period he has made innumerable films within a variety of production
contexts. This filmography includes major and lesser-known work, but,
perhaps inevitably, given the length and complexity of Pennebaker’s
career, it is not a complete list of his work.
1953 (completed 1957)

Daybreak Express
Filmmaker: D.A. Pennebaker
5 minutes
color
1954
Baby
6 minutes
black and white
1958
Gas Stop (aka Brussels Film Loop)
Producer: US State Department
2.5 minutes
color
Balloon (aka Balloon Ascension)
Producer: Robert Drew
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Derek Washburn
Sponsor: Time, Inc.
28 minutes
black and white

1959
Opening in Moscow
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Shirley Clarke, Albert Maysles
Editors: Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker
45 minutes
color
1960
Yanki No!
Producer: Robert Drew
Coproduced by: Time, Inc., and Drew Associates
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles
Reporters: William Worthy, Quinera King
Narrator: Joseph Julian
55 minutes
black and white
Primary
Producer: Robert Drew, for Time-Life Broadcasting
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Terrence McCartney-
Filgate, Albert Maysles, Bill Knoll
Writer: Robert Drew
52 minutes
black and white
On the Pole
Executive Producer: Robert Drew
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, William Ray, Abbott Mills,
Albert Maysles
Correspondents: James Lipscomb, Gregory Shuker
52 minutes
black and white
1961
Adventures on the New Frontier
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, Kenneth
Snelson
Correspondents: Lee Hall, Gregory Shuker, David Maysles
51 minutes
black and white
144 | Filmography

Eddie (aka Eddie Sachs)
Coproduced by: Time, Inc., ABC News, and Drew Associates
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, Abbott
Mills, William Ray
Correspondents: Robert Drew, Gregory Shuker, James Lipscomb
52 minutes
black and white
David (aka Synanon)
Producer: James Lipscomb
Coproduced by: Time-Life Broadcasting and Drew Associates
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Gregory Shuker, William Ray
Correspondent: Nell Cox
57 minutes
black and white
Mooney vs. Fowle (aka Football)
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, James Lipscomb, William Ray, Abbott Mills,
Richard Leacock, Claude Fournier
Correspondents: Hope Ryden, Peter Powell
black and white
54 minutes
1962
Blackie (aka Airline Pilot)
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, William Ray
Correspondents: Gregory Shuker, Peter Powell
53 minutes
black and white
Susan Starr
Producers: Hope Ryden, Gregory Shuker
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Hope Ryden, Claude Fournier, Peter Eco,
James Lipscomb, Abbott Mills, Richard Leacock
Correspondents: Hope Ryden, Patricia Isaacs, James Lencina, Sam Adams
53 minutes
black and white
Filmography | 145

Jane
Producer: Hope Ryden
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Abbot Mills, Al Wertheimer
Editors: D.A. Pennebaker, Nell Cox, Nancy Sen, Eileen Nosworthy, Richard
Leacock, Hope Ryden, Betsy Taylor
Sound: Hope Ryden
Narrator: James Lipscomb
51 minutes
black and white
The Chair (aka Paul)
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Gregory Shuker, Richard Leacock
Correspondents: Gregory Shuker, Robert Drew, John MacDonald, Sam
Adams
58 minutes
black and white
On the Road to Button Bay (aka The Road to Button Bay)
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Stanley Fink, Abbott Mills, Hope Ryden,
James Lipscomb, Richard Leacock
55 minutes
black and white
The Aga Khan
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Gregory Shuker, Richard Leacock
57 minutes
black and white
1963
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment
Producer: Gregory Shuker
Produced by: ABC News in association with Drew Associates
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, James Lipscomb
52 minutes
black and white
146 | Filmography

1964
You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You
Producer: Leacock Pennebaker, Inc.
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Michael Blackmore, Jim Desmond, Nick
Proferes
Editor: D.A. Pennebaker
12 minutes
black and white
Jingle Bells
16 minutes
black and white
Lambert and Co (aka Lambert, Hendricks and Co.)
15 minutes
black and white
Breaking It Up at the Museum
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock
6 minutes
black and white
1965
Elizabeth and Mary
60 minutes
black and white
1966
Herr Strauss
30 minutes
black and white
Filmography | 147

Rookie
Producer: Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., for CBS
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Jim Desmond
20 minutes
color
1967
Dont Look Back
Producers: Albert Grossman, John Court, Leacock Pennebaker, Inc.
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker
Assistant Photography: Howard Alk
Sound: Jones Alk
Concert Sound: Robert Van Dyke
Footage of Dylan in Greenwood, Mississippi, shot by: Ed Emshiler
96 minutes
black and white
1968
Monterey Pop
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Barry Feinstein, Richard Leacock, Jim
Desmond, Albert Maysles, Roger Murphy, Nick Proferes
Music Director: Bob Neuwirth
Editor: Nina Schulman
Stage Sound: John Cooke
Local Sound: Tim Cunningham, Baird Hersey, Robert Leacock, John
Maddox, Nina Schulman
Concert Recording: Wally Heider, Robert Van Dyke
Production Assistants: Pauline Baez, Peyton Fong, Brice Marden
Unit Manager: Peter Hansen
98 minutes
color
Rainforest (aka Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest)
Producer: David Oppenheim
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Roger Murphy
Editor: Patricia Jaffe
Sound: Robert Leacock, Nina Schulman, Robert Van Dyke
27 minutes
color
148 | Filmography

1970
Alice Cooper
15 minutes
color
Original Cast Album: Company
(aka Company: Original Cast Album; Company)
Executive Producer: Daniel Melnick
Producer: Chester Feldman
Associate Producer: Judy Crichton
Produced by: Leacock Pennebaker, Inc.
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Jim Desmond
Sound: Robert Van Dyke, Robert Leacock, Kate Taylor, Mark Woodcock
68 minutes
color
Sweet Toronto
Producers: David McMullin, Mark Woodcock, Peter Hansen, Chris
Dalrymple
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Roger Murphy, Jim
Desmond, Barry Bergthorson, Randy Franklin, Richard Leiterman, Bob
Neuwirth
Sound: Robert Leacock, Bob Van Dyke, Kate Taylor, Wally Heider
135 minutes
color
1972
One P.M. (aka 1 p.m.; One Parallel Movie; One Perfect Movie)
Producers: D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock for Leacock Pennebaker,
Inc.
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker (with Richard Leacock and Jean-Luc Godard)
95 minutes
color
Filmography | 149

The Children’s Theater of John Donahue
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Jim Desmond
28 minutes
color
Keep on Rockin’
Producers: David McMullin, Mark Woodcock, Peter Hansen, Chris
Dalrymple
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Roger Murphy, Jim
Desmond, Barry Bergthorson, Randy Franklin, Richard Leiterman, Bob
Neuwirth
Sound: Robert Leacock, Bob Van Dyke, Kate Taylor, Wally Heider
102 minutes
color
1973
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
Executive Producer: Tony Defries
Associate Producer: Edith Van Slyck
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Nick Doob, Jim Desmond, Mike Davis,
Randy Franken
Editor: Larry Whitehead
Unit Manager: Stacy Pennebaker
Concert Sound: Ground Control
Concert Recording: Trident Studios
100 minutes
color
1978
The Energy War
Executive Producer: Edith Van Slyck
Producer: Pat Lowell
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Pat Lowell
292 minutes (3 parts: part 1, 88 minutes; part 2, 87 minutes; part 3, 118
minutes)
color
150 | Filmography

1979
Town Bloody Hall
Producers: Shirley Broughton, Edith Van Slyck
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Marl Woodcock, Jim Desmond
Sound: Robert Van Dyke, Kathy Desmond, Mary Lampson, Kate Taylor
Editor: Chris Hegedus
88 minutes
color
1980
Elliott Carter at Buffalo
Producers: Pennebaker Hegedus Films, New York University
45 minutes
color
1981
DeLorean
Producer: D.A. Pennebaker
Associate Producers: Shirley Broughton, Gayle Austin, Bernice Sherry, Judy
Freed
53 minutes
color
Rockaby (aka Billie Whitelaw in Rockaby; The Making of Rockaby)
Executive Producers: Daniel Labeille, Patricia Kerr Ross
Associate Producer: Saul Elkin
Produced by: BBC
Editors: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, David Dawkins
60 minutes
color
Dance Black America
Producer: Frazer Pennebaker
Commentary: D.A. Pennebaker
90 minutes
color
Filmography | 151

1986
Jimi Plays Monterey
Executive Producer: Frazer Pennebaker
Producer: Alan Douglas
Coproduced by: Are You Experienced, Ltd., Pennebaker Associates, Inc.
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, David Dawkins
Editors: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, David Dawkins, Alan Douglas
Opening Sequence: directed by Peter Rosenthal
48 minutes
color
1987
Shake! Otis at Monterey
Producer: Alan Douglas
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Jim Desmond, Barry Feinstein, Richard
Leacock, Albert Maysles, Nick Proferes
Editor: Nina Schulman
30 minutes
color
Suzanne Vega (aka Open Hand)
30 minutes
color
1989
Depeche Mode 101 (aka 101)
Executive Producer: Bruce Kirkland, Daniel Miller
120 minutes
color
1990
Jerry Lee Lewis: The Story of Rock and Roll (aka Jerry Lee Lewis)
52 minutes
color
152 | Filmography

1991
Comin’ Home
28 minutes
color
Little Richard
Producers: Mark Woodcock, Peter Hansen
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Jim Desmond, Richard Leacock, Roger
Murphy
Sound: Robert Leacock
30 minutes
color
1992
Branford Marsalis: The Music Tells You
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob, Ronald Gray,
Crystal Griffiths
60 minutes
color
1993
The War Room
Executive Producers: Wendy Ettinger, Frazer Pennebaker
Producers: R. J. Cutler, Wendy Ettinger, Frazer Pennebaker
Associate Producer: Cyclone Films
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Nick Doob
Sound: Chris Hegedus, David Dawkins
Assistant Editor: Rebecca Baron
Associate Editor: Erez Laufer
96 minutes
color
1994
Woodstock Diary (aka Woodstock Diaries)
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Erez Laufer
Editor: Erez Laufer
180 minutes
color
Filmography | 153

1996
Keine Zeit
92 minutes
color
1997
Victoria Williams: Happy Come Home
28 minutes
color
Moon over Broadway
Producers: Wendy Ettinger, Frazer Pennebaker
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Jim Desmond, Nick Doob
Sound: Chris Hegedus, John McCormick
Associate Editors: David Dawkins, Erez Laufer, John Paul Pennebaker
97 minutes
color
1998
Bessie: A Portrait of Bessie Schonberg
58 minutes
color
1999
Searching for Jimi Hendrix
Producers: Alan Douglas, Frazer Pennebaker
60 minutes
color
2001
Down from the Mountain
Executive Producers: T Bone Burnett, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Producers: Bob Neuwirth, Frazer Pennebaker
Associate Producer: Rebecca Marshall
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob, Jim Desmond,
Joan Churchill, Bob Neuwirth, Jehane Noujaim, John Paul Pennebaker
154 | Filmography

Editors: D.A. Pennebaker, Nick Doob
94 minutes
color
2002
Only the Strong Survive
Executive Producers: Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein
Producers: Roger Friedman, Frazer Pennebaker
Associate Producer: Rebecca Marshall
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob, Jim Desmond,
Erez Laufer, Jehane Noujaim
Editors: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Erez Laufer
Sound: Chris Hegedus, John Paul Pennebaker, Kit Pennebaker
98 minutes
color
2004
National Anthem: Inside the Vote for Change Concert Tour
Producers: Frazer Pennebaker, Joel Gallen, Maureen Ryan
Associate Producers: Walker Lamond, Rebecca Marshall
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Chris Hegedus, Antonio
Ferrera, Nick Doob
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles
Editor: David Dawkins
Assistant Editor: Sabine Kertscher
Associate Editor: Christine Park
Production Assistants: Rod McDonald, Aronya Waller
315 minutes
color
Elaine Stritch at Liberty
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob
94 minutes
color
2006
Assume the Position with Mr. Wuhl
Executive Producer: Robert Wuhl
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob
Filmography | 155

Screenwriters: Allan Stephan, Rebecca Reynolds, Robert Wuhl
30 minutes
color
65 Revisited
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Howard Alk
Editors: D.A. Pennebaker, Walker Lamond
65 minutes
black and white
2007
Monterey Pop: The Summer of Love (aka Monterey 40)
Produced by: Pennebaker Hegedus Films
Executive Producers: Brad Abramson, Shelley Tatro, Michael Hirschorn
Producer: Erik Himmelsbach
Supervising Producer: Mark Anstendig
Associate Producers: Ken Shapiro, Abigail Parsons
Filmmakers: D.A. Pennebaker, Erik Himmelsbach
60 minutes
color
Addiction: The Supplementary Series: Opiate Addiction: Understanding
Replacement Therapy
Produced by: Home Box Office
Executive Producer: Sheila Nevins
Producers: Frazer Pennebaker, John Hoffman, Susan Froemke
Coproducer: Micah Cormier
19 minutes
color
2008
The Return of the War Room
Producers: Pennebaker Hegedus Films, McEttinger Films
82 minutes
color
2009
Kings of Pastry (aka The Collar)
Producers: Flora Lazar, Frazer Pennebaker
156 | Filmography

Associate Producers: Rebecca Lando, Patricia Soussloff
Produced by: Pennebaker Hegedus Films in coproduction with BBC, VPRO,
Danish TV, SBS Australia, YLE Finland
Filmmakers: Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker
Additional Photography: Nick Doob
Editors: Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker
84 minutes
color
2010
The National
Produced by: Vevo
Filmmakers: Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker
67 minutes
color
Other projects
1956
Widening Circle
Writer: D.A. Pennebaker
Sponsor: YWCA
Wider World
Writer: D.A. Pennebaker
Sponsor: Girl Scouts of America
Suez
Producer, Writer: D.A. Pennebaker
Sponsor: Julien Bryan
14 minutes
color
1957
Your Share in Tomorrow
Assistant Director, Camera: D.A. Pennebaker
Sponsor: New York Stock Exchange
1958
Highlander
Sponsor: Highlander School
Filmography | 157

1958
Skyscraper
Filmmakers: Shirley Clarke, Willard Van Dyke
Photography: Shirley Clarke, Willard Van Dyke, Wheaton Galentine, D.A.
Pennebaker
Sponsor: Tishman Realty
1960
Christopher and Me
Writer (song for titles): D.A. Pennebaker
Sponsor: Edward Foote
Mardi Gras
Sponsor: Walt Disney
1962
Mr. Pearson
Sponsor: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
1964
Timmons
Photography, Editor: D.A. Pennebaker
Sponsor: Granada Television
Casals at 88 (aka Casals at Eighty-Eight)
Photography and Sound for Budapest Sequences: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard
Leacock
Sponsor: CBS
1966
Van Cliburn
Sponsor: AT&T
1967
Wild 90
Producers: Norman Mailer, Supreme Mix
Director: Norman Mailer
158 | Filmography

Editors: Norman Mailer, Jan Pieter Welt
90 minutes
black and white
1968
Two American Audiences
Filmmaker: Mark Woodcock
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Mark Woodcock
40 minutes
black and white
Beyond the Law
Producers: Buzz Farber, Norman Mailer
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Nick Proferes, Jan Pieter Welt
110 minutes
black and white
McCarthy
Photography, Editor: D.A. Pennebaker
Sponsor: McCarthy Headquarters
1970
Maidstone
Producers: Buzz Farber, Norman Mailer
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Jim Desmond, Nick
Proferes, Sheldon Rochlin, Diane Rochlin, Jan Pieter Welt
Editors: Jan Pieter Welt, Lana Jokel, Norman Mailer
Associate Editors: Harvey Greenstein, Lucille Rhodes, Marilyn Frauenglass
Sound: Nell Cox, Robert Leacock, Nina Schulman, Kate Taylor, Mark
Woodcock
110 minutes
color
John Glenn
Sponsor: Glenn for Senator Campaign
Robert Casey
Sponsor: Casey for Governor Campaign
Filmography | 159

1971
One A.M. (aka One American Movie)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock
unfinished
color
1972
Eat the Document
Director: Bob Dylan
Sound: Jones Alk, Bob Neuwirth, Bob Alderman
Editors: Bob Dylan, Howard Alk, Robbie Robertson
44 minutes
black and white
1987
Dal polo all’equatore (aka From Pole to Equator; From the Pole to the
Equator)
Filmmakers: Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi
1997
Sessions at West 54th (series)
Executive Producer: Jeb Brien
Produced by: Automatic Productions for American Program Service for PBS
Photography (interview segments): D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus
10 episodes; 10-minute interviews (approx.)
color
Producer
2001
Startup.com
Executive Producer: Jehane Noujaim, Frazer Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus
Producer: D.A. Pennebaker
Associate Producers: Rebecca Marshall, Ed Rogoff
Produced by: Pennebaker Hegedus Films/Noujaim Films
Filmmakers: Chris Hegedus, Jehane Noujaim
Photography: Jehane Noujaim
160 | Filmography

Editors: Chris Hegedus, Jehane Noujaim, Erez Laufer
103 minutes
color
2003
The Cutman
Executive Producer: D.A. Pennebaker
Producers: Yon Motskin, Michael Shemesh
Associate Producer: Christina De Haven
Director: Yon Motskin
Writer: Yon Motskin
27 minutes
color
2004
Fox vs. Franken (episode in The First Amendment Project series)
Filmmakers: Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob
30 minutes
color
2006
Al Franken: God Spoke
Filmmakers: Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob
90 minutes
color
2008
Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie
Executive Producer: D.A. Pennebaker
Producer: Michelle Esrick, David Becker
Director: Michelle Esrick
Photography: Daniel Gold
Editor: Karen Sim
Consulting Editor: Emma Joan Morris
86 minutes
color
Thank-yous
1976
Harlan County, U.S.A.
Filmmaker: Barbara Kopple
Filmography | 161

2001
Startup.com
Filmmakers: Chris Hegedus, Jehane Noujaim
2004
Control Room
Filmmaker: Jehane Noujaim
2005
No Direction Home
Filmmaker: Martin Scorsese
D.A. Pennebaker appears in

1968
Norman Mailer, Wild 90
As the character “Al”
1982
Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: The Cinema of Edwin S. Porter
As voice for “Film as a visual newspaper” segment
1999
Peter Wintonick, Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment
As interview subject
2000
Aiyann Elliott, The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack
As interview subject
2002
Gerold Hofmann, See What Happens: The Story of D.A. Pennebaker and
Chris Hegedus
Edith Becker and Kevin Burns, Hollywood Rocks the Movies: The Early
Years (1955–1970)
As interview subject, uncredited
162 | Filmography

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Index
ABC network, 3, 5, 6, 11, 41, 57, 61, 62 Blues Project, The, 37

Adler, Lou, 37 Bob Dylan Live 1966: The “Royal Albert
Adventures on the New Frontier, 55 Hall” Concert, 48
Aga Khan, The, 6 Bob Roberts, 94
Agee, James, 45Alderman, Bob, 59 Bogdanovitch, Mitch, 7
Al Franken: God Spoke, 78, 79 Borden, Lizzie, 74
Alk, Howard, 59, 62, 99 Born in Flames, 74
Alk, Jones, 59, 99 Bosco, Philip, 115–16
Almost Famous, 94 Bowie, David, 36–38, 42, 78, 136
Alpert, Richard, 88, 91 Brakhage, Stan, 16
Altshuler, Bob, 98 Breer, Robert, 37
L’amour fou, 110 Brel, Jacques, 38
Antonio, Emile de, 18 Brig, The, 19
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 32 Broomfield, Nick, 4
Autumn Fire, 16 Brown, Bruce, 41
Brown, Kenneth, 19
Bacon, Lloyd, 115 “Brussels film loops,” 16, 82, 132
Baez, Joan, 93 Buena Vista Social Club, 45
Battle for Chile, The, 26 Buffalo Springfield, 47
Bazin, André, 86 Buñuel, Luis, 65
“being there,” 52–54 Burnett, Carol, 115–16
Bell and Howell Company, 5 Burnett, T Bone, 44
Belle de jour, 65 Burton, Michael, 19
Bergthorson, Barry, 33 Burton, Philip, 19
Berkeley in the Sixties, 26 Butler, Jerry, 45
Bernstein, Leonard, 5, 132, 133 Byrds, The, 47
Berry, Chuck, 34, 36
Bessie: A Portrait of Bessie Schonberg, 79 cameras: Arriflex 53; Auricon 7, 53, 99,
Beyond the Law, 2, 64 134
Big Brother and the Holding Company, Campaign Manager, 120
47 Candidate, The 119
Blackie, 5 Capote, Truman, 29
Blow-Up, 32, 33 Carne, Marcel, 110

Carville, James, 110, 117–24 Le dernier metro, 110
Cassavetes, John, 18, 19, 20 Desmond, Jim, 28, 33, 40, 75, 87
CBS network, 5 Diaries, Notes and Sketches, 90
CBS Records, 98 Diller, Barry, 41
Ceballos, Jacqueline, 74 direct cinema, 6–12, 15, 18–20, 35, 52–
Celine and Julie vont en bateau, 111 54, 60, 63, 64, 68, 69, 72, 76, 81, 83–87,
Chair, The 79, 96, 138 89–92, 96, 108, 118, 122, 123, 125–26.
Children’s Theater of John Donahue, The See also observational mode
109 Donovan, 93, 101
La Chinoise, 4, 69, 70 Dont Look Back, 2, 3, 12, 13, 48–51, 58–
Chronique d’un été, 123 62, 79, 91, 92–107, 109, 135, 137, 138
cinéma vérité, 6–7, 19, 35, 82, 105, 123 Doob, Nick, 40, 44, 52, 78–79, 118
City, The, 17 Doors, The, 34, 35, 46
city symphonies, 16 Down from the Mountain, 2, 27, 44–45,
Clair, René, 4 78, 139
Clarke, Shirley, 16, 17, 18, 81–83, 132, Drew, Robert, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 52–54, 57,
133 58, 74, 80, 86–87, 132–35
Cleaver, Eldridge, 73, 140 Drew Associates, 2, 4, 6, 56–57, 69, 81,
Clinton, Bill, 109, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 87, 97
Coen, Joel and Ethan, 44, 45 Dreyer, Carl, 86
collaborative filmmaking, 51–78 Dylan, Bob, 2, 12, 31, 48–52, 58–63, 76,
Complete Monterey Pop Collection, The, 92–107, 135, 137–39
46–47, 139
concert film, 2, 3, 13, 21–50, 60, 63, 76, Eat the Document, 51, 58–63, 94
94, 102, 109. See also rockumentary Elaine Stritch at Liberty, 2, 78, 79, 109,
Conner, Bruce, 64 114–15
Cooper, Alice, 34 Electric Flag, The, 47
Country Joe and the Fish, 47 Ellington, Duke, 15, 129, 130, 132
Court, John, 98 Elliot, Cass, 29, 30, 47
Court TV, 78 Elliott Carter at Buffalo, 74
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commit- Emshiler, Ed, 105
ment, 54–58 Endless Summer, 41–42
“crisis structure,” 55, 81, 83, 118, 121 Energy War, The, 3, 39, 74, 78
Crosby, David, 42, 47 Les enfants du paradis, 110
Crump, Paul, 79, 138 Engel, Morris, 7, 69
Cukor, George, 121 Epstein, Jean, 24
Cutler, R.J., 118 essay film, 90
Ettinger, Heidi, 115
Dance Black America, 74 Ettinger, Wendy, 118
Darwin’s Nightmare, 4 Evans, Walker, 45
David, 5, 86
Dawkins, David, 39, 40, 118 Farber, Bernard “Buzz,” 64
Daybreak Express, 2, 3, 15, 16, 18, 51, 82, Federal Communications Commission,
129–30, 132, 133, 140 9, 11
DeLorean, 74, 79 Feed, 121
Demme, Jonathan, 24, 29 Feinstein, Barry, 28
DeMott, Joel, 39 Fellini, Federico, 4
Depeche Mode 101, 2, 27, 38–41, 43, 74 Fiddler on the Roof, 23
172 | Index

Un film comme les autres, 70, 71 vs. Franken; Jimi Hendrix at Wood-
The First Amendment Project series, 78 stock; Jimi Plays Monterey; Shake! Otis
Flaherty, Robert, 4, 5, 77 at Monterey; Monterey Pop: The Last
Fletcher, Andrew, 38 Performances; Town Bloody Hall
Fonda, Jane, 80, 83–86, 91, 135 Heider, Wally, 42
42nd Street, 115 Hendrix, Jimi, 30, 31–33, 47, 139
Fox vs. Franken, 78 Holliday, Jason, 82–83
Frank, Robert, 18 Humphrey, Hubert H., 53, 79
Franken, Al, 78–79
Franklin, Randy, 33 Ianelli, Fons, 7
Fricke, Ron, 17 I Know Where You’re Going, 4
Friedman, Roger, 45 I’m Not There, 60, 94
From Mao to Mozart, 78 In the Year of the Pig, 26
Funny Girl, 23 Iron Chef America, 125
Ivens, Joris, 51
Gahan, Dave, 40
Galentine, Wheaton, 16, 82, 132 Jagger, Mick, 31, 50
Garcia, Jerry, 37 Jane, 2, 6, 79, 80–81
Gas Stop, 18 Jarmusch, Jim, 24
Gimme Shelter, 24, 31, 50 Jazz on a Summer’s Day, 19, 27–28
Ginsberg, Allen, 92, 93, 103, 137–38 Jeanne d’Arc, 85
Godard, Jean Luc, 3, 4, 52, 58, 68–73, Jefferson Airplane, 47, 70, 73
140, 141. See also La Chinoise, Un film Jerry Lee Lewis: The Story of Rock and
comme les autres, One A.M. Roll, 35
Goffman, Erving, 12, 13, 127 Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, 48
Goldwater, Barry, 120 Jimi Plays Monterey, 47, 139
Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 72, 140 Johnston, Jill, 74
Grateful Dead, The, 47 Joplin, Joplin, 21–22, 26, 29, 47, 139
Grateful Dead Movie, The, 37 Judson, Horace, 100–101
Greer, Germaine, 74, 77 Jules and Jim, 4
Grenier, John, 120
Grossman, Albert, 60, 61, 95, 97, 98, 99, Katzenbach, Nicholas, 55, 119
135, 139 Keep on Rockin’, 35–36
Kennedy, John F., 12, 52–54, 55, 76, 79,
Happy Mother’s Day, A, 11, 86, 134 119
Hart, Moss, 115 Kennedy, Robert, 55, 65, 119
Haynes, Todd, 60, 94 Keshishian, Alex, 112
Hard Day’s Night, A, 60 Kings of Pastry, 3, 74, 110, 124–26
Harlan County, U.S.A., 77 Kitchen, 63
Harris, Emmylou, 44 Kleineman, Ike, 98, 99
Hayden, Tom, 71, 72–73 Knoll, Bill, 53
Hayes, Isaac, 45 Knox, Mickey, 68
Heart of Gold, 24 Kooper, Al, 47
Hegedus, Chris, 3, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, Kopple, Barbara, 77
48, 52, 77–79, 95, 109, 110, 114, 115, Koyaanisquatsi, 17
118–20, 123–25; early career, 73–74; Kramer, Robert, 58
and Pennebaker Hegedus Films, 3, 35. Krauss, Alison, 44
See also Al Franken: God Spoke; Fox Kreines, Jeff, 39
Index | 173

Kudelski, Stefan, 133 Mamas and the Papas, The, 47
Maysles, Albert, 6, 9, 10, 19, 28, 53, 69,
Lambert and Co., 109, 134 76, 82, 89, 91, 119, 132, 134. See also
Landesman, Rocco, 115, 117 Gimme Shelter; Meet Marlon Brando;
Langlois, Henri, 140 What’s Happening
Last Days, 63 Maysles, David, 9, 10, 24, 31, 50
Last Waltz, The, 24, 50 McCartney-Filgate, Terence, 53
Leacock, Richard, 3, 6, 9–11, 16, 19, 20, McClure, Michael, 67
28, 30, 33, 41, 53–54, 56, 70, 80, 82, Meet Marlon Brando, 100, 110
132–34, 138, 140; and Drew Associates, Mekas, Adolfas, 18
3, 6, 87; and Robert Drew 5, 52, 54, Mekas, Jonas, 18, 20, 63, 103. See also
57; and Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., 3, The Brig; Diaries, Notes and Sketches;
11, 42, 69, 72, 97, 98, 99, 136; and new Report from Millbrook; Walden
camera technology 7–8, 69. See also Method acting, 83–84, 85
Campaign Manager; Crisis: Behind a Le million, 4
Presidential Commitment; A Happy Mills, Abbott, 54, 80
Mother’s Day; Jane; Monterey Pop; One Minow, Newton, 9, 10
A.M.; Opening in Moscow; Primary; Moby Grape, 47
Sweet Toronto; Toby and the Tall Corn Monterey Pop, 2, 3, 19, 21–24, 27–31, 33,
Leacock, Robert, 33 35–36, 40–44, 50, 135, 136, 138, 139
Leary, Timothy, 87–90, 134 Monterey Pop: The Last Performances,
Lee, Carl, 83 48
Lennon, John, 34, 35 Mooney vs. Fowle, 5
Lester, Richard, 60 Moon over Broadway, 2, 74, 78, 109,
Let It Be, 70 115–17
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 45 Moore, Sam, 45
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 34 Moore, Tom, 41, 115–16
Leyda, Jay, 16 Morin, Edgar, 123
Lieterman, Dick, 33 MTV, 39–40
Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, The, 4 Murphy, Roger, 28, 33
Life magazine, 4, 5, 106
Lightning over Water, 104 Nanook of the North, 77
Lindsay-Hogg, Michael, 70 National Association of Broadcasters, 9
Lipscomb, Jim, 54, 80 National Film Registry, 3
Little Richard, 34 Naudet, Jules and Gédéon, 4
Little Richard, 35 NBC network, 5
Live Peace in Toronto, 35 Neon Signs, 17. See also “Brussels film
The Living Camera series, 5, 6, 81, 133 loops”
long take, 15 Neuwirth, Bob, 33, 59, 61, 62, 92, 93, 96,
Louisiana Story, 5 99, 138
Lowndes, Sara, 97 New American Cinema, 18, 19, 20
Ludwig, Ken, 115, 116 New York, New York, 110
Lumière brothers, 103 9/11, 4
Lund, Mort, 54 No Direction Home, 50–51
Noujaim, Jehane, 78
Maidstone, 2, 63–68 À nous la libertè, 4
Mailer, Norman, 2, 3, 52, 58. See also NY, NY, 16, 131
Beyond the Law; Maidstone; Wild 90 Nyro, Laura, 47
174 | Index

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 44, 45 Rafelson, Bob, 41
observational mode, 11, 14, 15, 24, 39, Rafferty, Kevin, 121
125–26, 127 Rawls, Lou, 47
One A.M., 68–73, 141 Ray, Nicholas, 104
One P.M., 71–73, 140, 141 RCA, 43, 136
Only the Strong Survive, 2, 27, 44, 45, reality TV, 39
74, 78 Real World, The, 39
On the Pole, 5, 79 Redding, Otis, 24, 25, 31, 139
On the Waterfront, 110 Red Shoes, The, 4, 21, 22
Opening in Moscow, 5, 7, 82 Reggio, Godfrey, 17
Original Cast Album: Company, 2, 109, rehearsal, 107–28
112–14, 130, 136 repetition, 107–8
Report from Millbrook, 90, 91
Paint Your Wagon, 23 Return of the War Room, 123
Panoram jukebox, 93 Ridgeway, James, 121
Paris nous appartient, 110 Rivers, Johnny, 47
Paris vu par . . ., 69 Rivette, Jacques, 110, 111.
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, The, 29, 47 Road Rules, 39
PBS network, 51, 72, 140 Robertson, Robbie, 60, 62
Pennebaker, D.A.: and Drew Associates, Rockaby, 74, 109
3, 4–6; and Robert Drew, 4–6, 52, 132; rockumentary, 15, 23, 26, 27, 44, 50, 77.
early career, 3–4; and Filmmakers, See also concert film
Inc., 82; hand-held filming, 20; and Rouch, Jean, 123
Leacock Pennebaker, Inc., 3, 11, 42, Route One, USA, 58
69, 72, 97, 98, 99, 136; and Pennebaker Ryden, Hope, 54, 80
Hegedus Films, 3, 35. See also indi-
vidual films Sachs, Eddie, 5, 79
Pennebaker, Frazer, 45, 118 Saturday Evening Post, 11, 134
“personal cinema,” 90 Sauper, Hubert, 4
Phillips, John, 47 Schlebrügge, Nena von, 87–90
photogénie, 24 Scopitone jukebox, 93
Pickett, Wilson, 45 Scorsese, Martin, 24, 50–51, 110
Plastic Ono Band, The, 34, 35 “screen tests,” 79, 109
portrait, film, 79–106 Shadows, 18, 19
Portrait of Jason, 81, 82–83 Shake! Otis at Monterey, 48, 139
Powell, Michael, 4, 21 Shankar, Ravi, 23, 29–30, 46, 139
Powell, Patricia, 54 Shuker, Greg, 54, 80
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Siegal, Allan, 78
The, 12 Simon and Garfunkel, 47
Pressburger, Emeric, 21 65 Revisited, 48–49
Price, Alan, 96 Skyscraper, 82
Primary, 3, 5, 19, 52–54, 55, 59, 119, 134, Sloan, John, 15, 133
135, 137 Sondheim, Stephen, 112–13
Prince, Hal, 114 Sorenson, Theodore, 55–56
Proferes, Nick, 28, 87 sound recorders: Nagra, 7, 133;
Pull My Daisy, 18 Perfectone, 7, 53
Spin City, 119
Quicksilver Messenger Service, 47 Stanley, Ralph, 44
Index | 175

Star is Born, A, 121–22 Wadleigh, Michael, 23
Stasberg, Lee, 83, 85 Wag the Dog, 119
Steiner, Ralph, 17 Warhol, Andy, 63, 79, 103. See also
Stephanopoulos, George, 110, 117, 118, Kitchen; “screen tests”
119, 120, 121, 122 War Room, The, 3, 78, 109–10, 117–24
Stern, Bert, 19, 27 Walden, 90
Steve Miller Band, The, 47 Wallace, George, 54
Stop Making Sense, 24, 29 Washburn, Derek, 16
La strada, 4 Wasn’t That a Time, 19
Stritch, Elaine, 79, 112–14 Weddings and Babies, 7, 69
Sundance Channel, 78 Weinberg, Herman G., 16
Susan Starr, 5, 79 Welch, Gillian, 44
Sweet Toronto, 2, 23, 27, 33–36 Wenders, Wim, 22, 45, 104
Wertheimer, Alfred, 80
Tanner 88, 119 What’s Happening, 95
Thomas, Rufus and Carla, 45 White, Tony Joe, 34
Thompson, Francis, 3, 16, 131 Who, The, 47
Time, Inc., 5, 6 Wild 90, 2, 64
Time-Life, Inc., 4, 5, 57, 97, 133, 134, Williams, Elizabeth, 115
135 Wilson, Mary, 45
Time-Life Broadcasting, 3, 4 Wilson, Tom, 49, 93, 99
Time magazine, 7, 100–101 Wonder Ring, 16
Tiny Tim, 47 Woodcock, Mark, 69, 75
Toby and the Tall Corn, 5, 133 Woodstock, 23, 29, 139
Torn, Rip, 65, 67, 71, 72, 73, 141 Word is Out, 26
Town Bloody Hall, 1, 3, 74–77 Workers Leaving the Factory, 103
Trilling, Diana, 74, 75, 76
Truffaut, François, 4 Yanki No!, 6
Truth or Dare, 112 Yardbirds, The, 32
Two American Audiences, 69–70 Year of the Horse, 24
You Know Something is Happening, 51,
Van Dyke, Robert, 75, 99 61
Van Dyke, Willard, 17, 82, 133 You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You,
Van Sant, Gus, 63 2, 79, 87–92, 134
Va savoir, 110
Le vent d’est, 40 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from
Vincent, Gene, 34 Mars, 2, 27, 36–38, 40, 41, 42, 43,
Visconti, Tony, 43 46–47, 78, 136, 138
176 | Index

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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C O N T E M P O R A R Y F I L M D I R E C T O R S

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The Contemporary Film Directors series provides

A list of books in the series appears

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Frontispiece: D.A. Pennebaker,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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performing the real | 1

interview with d.a. pennebaker | 129

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I would like to thank James Naremore, director of the Contemporary

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With Robert Drew

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The Presentation of (the Performed) Self

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Showing: Beyond Documentary Representation

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with Pennebaker, into twelve loops. Pennebaker individually compiled

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Ansara’s example stresses the place of the body in performance

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