-
Performing the Real
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Performing the Real I remember it well. It was early spring, and I was sitting in the Electric 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, bemused , 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 varying 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. i-xii_1-180_Beattie.indd 1 7/14/11 10:38 AM 2 | D.A. Pennebaker 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 filmmaker “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), Depeche 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. i-xii_1-180_Beattie.indd 2 7/14/11 10:38 AM [34.231.109.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:08 GMT) Performing the Real | 3 Donn Alan Pennebaker was born on 15 July 1925 in Evanston, Illinois . 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...