The film-maker DA Pennebaker has died aged 94.
He died of natural causes on Thursday, his son, Frazer Pennebaker, told the Hollywood Reporter.
The concert film Monterey Pop was a record of the 1967 Monterey International Pop festival that launched the careers of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, while Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars captured on film the night in July 1973 that David Bowie “killed off” his alien alter ego.
Pennebaker received a lifetime achievement award Oscar in 2013 – the first documentary-maker to do so – honouring his contribution as a pioneer of cinéma vérité film-making, a movement that originated in France and, featuring natural actions and authentic dialogue, showed subjects living their day-to-day lives.
Pennebaker made his first film, Daybreak Express, in 1953. In 1960, he worked on Primary, which captured John F Kennedy’s run in the presidential primary against Hubert Humphrey.
He returned to politics with The War Room (1993), co-directed with his wife, Chris Hegedus, with whom he made most of his films. Their behind-the-scenes documentary looking at Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign received an Oscar nomination in 1994.
Perhaps his most famous film, however, is Dont Look Back (sic), released in 1967, which depicts Bob Dylan’s last acoustic concert tour of the UK in 1965. It broke box-office records at the time, and is considered a benchmark in rock documentary.
In an interview with Time in 2007, Pennebaker reflected on Dylan’s reaction to the film. “He saw it out in Hollywood at a dreadful screening. Afterward, he said: ‘We’ll have another screening and I’ll write down all of the things we have to change.’
“Of course, that made me a little gloomy. The next night, we assembled again and he sat in the front with this yellow pad. At the end of the film, he held up the pad and there was nothing on it. He said: ‘That’s it.’”
In an interview with the website Film Comment in 2017, Pennebaker said: “Half the things that happened to me, that I look back on and were really good, were all kind of I think of as luck. Chance.”
