D. A. Pennebaker by Keith Beattie (review)

The idea of “performance” permeates every chapter of a new book exploring the career of documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, the latest in the Contemporary Film Directors series published by University of Illinois Press. What at first seems an odd framing device for a direct cinema pioneer becomes glaringly appropriate and enlightening as an effective mode of categorization.

Even as D. A. “Penny” Pennebaker’s films employ an observational style, author Keith Beattie notes that those in front of the camera are uniquely “performing the real”—an implicit, often-unspoken interaction between filmmaker and subject, standing out as the hallmark of Pennebaker’s nearly sixty-year body of work.

From concert films (clearly performed) to celebrity portraits (can famous people ever be “real”?) to experimental collaborations that blur the line between documentary and fiction (where real people “act” as other real people), D. A. Pennebaker is a master at capturing those who provide him access to their inner selves, personas that are nonetheless often specifically enacted for the camera. But doesn’t this notion of “performance” defy the tenets of observational cinema? Does this make the document less true? Not so, Beattie posits throughout D. A. Pennebaker. Rather, “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 . . . is that the performed self is the real or authentic self ” (14).

This thesis is demonstrated clearly in concert films such as Monterey Pop (1968), Ziggy Star-dust and the Spiders from Mars (1973), Sweet Toronto (1971), Depeche Mode 101 (1989), Down from the Mountain (2000), and Only the Strong Survive (2003). The sheer number of these classic music documentaries is enough to justify a retrospective examination, yet they encompass simply the most easily defined arena where “performance” heavily plays out in front of the Pennebaker team’s multiple cameras.

Beattie delights the reader with a breakdown of who shot what, where, and with what tricked-out 16mm camera. Pennebaker’s rock-umentaries had direct cinema pioneer Albert Maysles wielding his signature handheld style in front of the stage or roaming through the crowd, with partner Ricky Leacock filming from rooftops, while Pennebaker stayed onstage to capture audience reactions and remain close to the performers.

And the list of performers is astonishing: John Lennon, David Bowie, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ralph Stanley, Bo Diddley, Emmylou Harris, Wilson Pickett, Ravi Shankar, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, and of course, the holy trinity captured in Monterey Pop—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding—whose short careers were launched by vanguard performances at the festival. For Redding, who died before the film was released, Monterey Pop stands as a rare document of an extraordinary talent, one not filmed extensively. And as Pennebaker candidly notes in an interview at the end of the book, “television wasn’t ready for Jimi Hendrix and Janis” (135). Although the film was originally made for ABC, the network rejected Monterey Pop, declaring it “didn’t meet industry standards. Leacock’s reply—‘I didn’t know you had any’ sealed the fate” (41), spurring the entrepreneurial documentary team of Leacock and Pennebaker to undertake a successful independent self-distribution strategy, at a time when few filmmakers knew how to do this.

Beattie extensively examines Pennebaker’s classic film Don’t Look Back, made with a twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan, providing cogent insight into the filming itself. More importantly, he directly addresses canons of documentary by underscoring a clear-eyed understanding between filmmaker and subject: “A compact—in the form of a conspiracy, collaboration, and collusion—between Dylan and Pennebaker was struck” (98).

The book also reveals what might be some of the first hybrid films, some made with Norman Mailer in his grandiose late 1960s prime, a collaboration that “constituted for Pennebaker a radical experimentation far removed from established codes of direct cinema” (63). The major resulting film, Maidstone (1970), was one where “Mailer sought to create an edgy and tense...