The D.A. Pennebaker Centennial

Born 100 years ago today, documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (Donn Alan Pennebaker, 1925-2019).

Like most moderately well-educated Americans of my age, I have seen most of Pennebaker’s major films more than once. In going back and reconnecting with them for this post, I had the realization that you could actually trace the history of the rise and fall of post-war progressive America using his films as stepping stones, which is quite extraordinary. I don’t think he set out to do precisely that; you’d have to be clairvoyant. He simply recorded what was happening, and had a knack for knowing where the action was.

Pennebaker’s patented method was hypnotic, a mixture of verite and cinematic dream-logic. Using mostly handheld cameras, he would let his subjects speak and act for themselves. No narration or other commentary would be interposed, although sometimes he would get creative with lenses, lighting, or other aspects. For the most part he made his statement in the editing room. It was in how the pieces were assembled that he made his point. He was an extremely gifted storyteller using reality as his raw material.

Anyway, the rise and fall of a generation:

Primary (1960)

I discovered this movie quite recently, and in the best way possible — it happened to be playing on the Criterion Channel and I simply stumbled on it. It chronicles the 1960 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, where then-Senator Hubert Humphrey, from nearby Minnesota, was the man to beat. Coming up on his flank, though, is upstart John F. Kennedy. The Humphrey operatives seem to figure they have it in the bag. You get the sense that they’ve been doing this forever, that they are just going through their usual motions. The Kennedy people seem contemptuous of the old ways, and are out to shake things up. When Kennedy takes the contest, it’s an upset, and you can sense a realignment, a dawning awareness that he’s going to be a formidable force going forward.

The movie is still powerful to watch because Pennebaker’s techniques were new at the time. It’s a very intimate, warts and all look at what goes on in political campaigns, one of the earliest such glimpses. It’s startlingly contemporary even though we are watching events from over six decades ago. And we see the politician who inspired a generation start to come into his own. (There is a kind of foreshadowing in the film, too, as Humphrey would later be Johnson’s Vice President and emerge as the party’s candidate in 1968).

Don’t Look Back (1965-67) and Something’s Happening/ Eat the Document (1966)

Don’t Look Back is the ultimate portrait of peak Bob Dylan, just as he was transitioning from being a folk musician to a rock star. It documents his 1965 English tour from within his entourage, taking us in and out of hotel rooms, limousines, dressing rooms, and the stages of concert halls. For a documentary, it is amazing how much it resembles The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night, released the year before. It captures Dylan pulling the legs of reporters, and debating and jousting and kidding with friends and colleagues. Occasionally he lets his mask slip and he lets go of his cool — usually it’s to show his boyish enthusiasm for some piece of music a friend springs on him. The folks surrounding him include his manager Albert Grossman and roadie Bob Neuwirth; singer Joan Baez, with whom Dylan is just winding down an affair; Holy Man of the Beat movement Allen Ginsberg; and peers like Alan Price of The Animals, Donovan, Marianne Faithfull; and John Mayall. Dylan is by turns hilarious, savage, indecipherable, elusive, serious, and vain. It’s a portrait of a genuinely transformative artist in his own element, such as we are rarely lucky enough to get.

Pennebaker also shot Dylan’s fully electric English tour of the following year. He assembled it into his own unreleased film Something’s Happening, but Dylan preferred to edit it his own way, which became the scarcely released, apparently incoherent Eat the Document. The raw footage from this project was later plundered for Martin Scorsese’s doc No Direction Home. Which was like a coming full circle: Scorsese had worked on Woodstock and directed The Last Waltz starring The Band, none of which would have happened without either the early stardom of Dylan and his decision to go electric, or the pioneering examples of Pennebaker’s films.

Monterey Pop (1967-68)

I re-watched this movie the other day and found myself bawling uncontrollably. It’s what gave me the idea for this post. So much has been lost. It feels like everything has evaporated. And this movie captures the moment when hope and optimism were at their peak. The horrible assassinations and Chicago riots of 1968 were in the future. Very shortly afterwards, many of the key artists in the film would be dead, and the vaunted Haight-Ashbury scene rapidly devolved into sordid squalor. But in the Summer of 1967, all of that was in the future. The over-riding feeling of the event, as captured by this film, is one of discovery. All of these musical innovators and virtuosi were gathered in one place, and essentially DEBUTING these remarkable acts they had been working on to a wider audience. Band after band comes out and does something astonishing. The showmanship! Janis Joplin’s voice! The Jefferson Airplane’s light show! The Who smashes all their instruments! Jimi Hendrix reinvents how to play the electric guitar, and then he humps it, and then he lights it on fire! The harmonies of The Mamas and The Papas! And Indian music by Ravi Shankar! And the film hints at the cultural atmosphere that spawned all this creativity. The theatre and poetry and styles and philosophy of San Francisco.

When you look at the full roster of acts that played in the three day Monterey Pop Festival you see how Pennebaker crafted this story by selecting the most extraordinary and envelope-pushing acts. Even the worst performance in the film, Eric Burdon and the Animals covering “Paint It Black”, is clearly there as a clever way of underline the fact that Brian Jones was at the festival, though purely as an attendee. As it happens, there were several “straighter” acts in the festival as well, they’re just not in the movie. This was a film about possibility, and an explosion of creativity.

Why’d I weep? So many of that generation I love and revere so much are dead, and the world they hoped to build seems impossible, and the little they were able to build is in the process of being destroyed. In 2025, if you’re not crying, you’re crazy.

Wild 90 (1967-68) etc

Pennebaker shot this completely improvised experimental movie starring Norman Mailer and his friends. He followed it up with Beyond the Law (1968) with Rip Torn, and Maidstone (1970) with Torn and Ultra Violet. That’s the one where Torn and Mailer got into a real fight, right on camera, with the ear biting, and the hitting with a hammer. I think one of them was on LSD.

One PM (1968-1972)

Pennebaker collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard on what they hoped would be a record of a revolutionary time in America. It didn’t quite turn out that way. They started shooting in 1968, but after all of the unrest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, middle-of-the-road Humphrey became the party’s candidate, only to lose subsequently to conservative Republican Richard Nixon. The anti-war and black power movements remained at the fringes. Godard lost interest, but Pennebaker finished his own version of the film, which includes such significant figures as Godard himself, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Eldridge Cleaver, Tom Hayden, and The Jefferson Airplane.

Sweet Toronto (1969/1971)

The Beatles weren’t at Monterey or Woodstock, though the presence of Ravi Shankar at the former would never have happened without the pop culture influence of George Harrison. And then John Lennon did play the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, which was held about a month after Woodstock in fall 1969. It was a much smaller event than those other two great convergences, and the line-up consisted of mostly ’50s rockers, apart from some newer acts like The Doors, Alice Cooper, Chicago and John Lennon with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band. The unannounced, last minute appearance by the latter is all anyone has ever talked about with respect to the concert. Context and timing are everything. If John had shown up with Yoko and done their howling in a bag thing at Monterey, I honestly think it would have gone over like gangbusters (Yes, I know they weren’t together yet). But at an oldies concert, at which even Lennon’s set was mostly oldies, the avant-garde performance seemed like an intrusion. And can you imagine if Lennon has done “Give Peace a Chance?” at Woodstock? Though it certainly went over well in Toronto, and Lennon got a live album out of it.

The chief significance of what Pennebaker captured is the moment when Lennon decided to mothball The Beatles. For real. Lennon saw he could make it on his own in Toronto, and within a week he disclosed his withdrawal from the band to the other three members.

Later, Pennebaker’s legs would appear in John and Yoko’s experimental film Up Your Legs Forever (1971).

Town Bloody Hall (1971-79)

Again, Pennebaker was at the center of the cultural action. Kate Millett’s 1970 book Sexual Politics had been deeply critical of the machismo and misogyny in Norman Mailer’s work (and frankly in his behavior as well). Taking the bait, Mailer responded with his own countervailing take on feminism, The Prisoner of Sex (1971). At around the time of its release, Mailer held a debate at New York’s Town Hall, taking on prominent feminist writers and thinkers Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling, and Jacqueline Ceballos. Again, Pennebaker’s film captures a moment in time, when things start to pivot away from the universal progress people were expecting from a time. Though the film was shot in 1971, Pennebaker didn’t finish it and release it until the end of the decade, around the time that the Equal Rights Amendment finally petered out. It was a very sad time for many reasons.

The War Room (1993)

You can see the seeds of destruction of the movement in all the previous films. But in this one, to use Malcolm’s aphorism, the chickens have come home to roost. In some ways it’s like we come full circle back to Primary.The War Room is a film about Bill Clinton’s run for the Presidency, engineered by political operatives James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, who both became national figures largely through their appearance in the movie. This ought to have been the big moment, right? The moment when the peace and love generation got their hands on the reins of power and finally transformed the country? But that’s not what we got. And not only was that not the end product of Clinton’s eight years in office, we KNEW that was how it was going to go before he even became President — if we were paying attention to this film. Clinton and his cynical machine sickened me. They literally drove me out of the Democratic Party. (Don’t worry, they didn’t drive me to the Republican Party. I was and pretty much still am essentially a Left Libertarian Independent with socialism rising who caucuses with Democrats out of desperation.)

To return to the peace and love thing. The film shows Clinton betraying those ideals repeatedly. Pressed on the Vietnam War, he was squirrely about being accused of being a “Draft Dodger” instead of forthrightly saying “Yes, that’s right! That war was wrong and I opposed it and I’d do it again!” Ultimately, he went and employed the U.S. military on multiple quasi-wars over the course of his Presidency. He later passed draconian “anti-crime” laws that would exceed the policies of Richard Nixon. As for love? Um, what about all those “affairs” he lied about? Wasn’t sex supposed to be beautiful? Wasn’t that the hippie dream? Sex with multiple partners, no hang ups? Here he proved his hypocrisy yet again, turning his nocturnal activities into this dark, closeted, ugly, shameful thing. Later of course his famous LGBT rights policy was that gay soldiers and sailors should remain closeted in the military. And what about his querulous answer that he didn’t inhale the pot smoke? He sort of publicly denied everything he was supposed to stand for, and was accused of standing for. Didn’t he? And to what end? TO WIN AN ELECTION. The War Room is an endless picture of Clinton’s people angling, conniving, prevaricating, and above all demonstrating that they stand for nothing except winning power for its own sake. Not truth, or liberalism, or human values. Just “our brand needs to beat their brand”. It’s all in there. Later, Pennebaker followed it up with a sequel, The Return of the War Room (2008). How I wish there was one for the current era; what it would reveal. But I am firm in my assertion, and I have been asserting it for ten years now, that Clinton paved the way for Trump just as much as Reagan did. It’s all in this film.

So…that was a selective sampling of Pennebaker’s output, intentionally selected and arranged a certain way, much as Pennebaker might organize shots and moments in one of his films, in order to tell a story. There are many “out takes” if you will! Films he made that are outside my little historical narrative. Lots of rock documentaries that have less of a sociological component, for example. And there are a couple of theatre ones, Original Cast Album: Company (1971) and Elaine Stritch: At Liberty (2008). And with comedians like Al Franken and Robert Wuhl. And lots of others.

What a great chronicler and storyteller. We’d have understood America very differently without him.