D.A. Pennebaker, a filmmaker who captured musical turning points of the 1960s with “Dont Look Back” and “Monterey Pop,” has died. He was 94.
Pennebaker filmed the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in action at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, making them all stars of his movie. “Monterey Pop” gave many Americans their first extended look at the California counterculture; it predated and influenced the wildly popular “Woodstock” concert movie.
But Pennebaker’s best-known work remains “Dont Look Back,” in which he followed a sharp and cynical Bob Dylan on a UK tour in 1965. It opens with the famous music video of Dylan in a London alley, flipping though hard-lettered poster cards containing lyrics from “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The tour footage was used extensively in Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.”
Pennebaker went into both film projects knowing almost nothing about the groundbreaking music created by its subjects.
“I was the most ignorant person there,” Pennebaker said of the Monterey festival. “It was a strange kind of Martian adventure for me.”
The New Yorker’s cinema verite approach provides many of the film’s charms: When Eric Burdon sings “Paint It, Black,” we see Brian Jones walking among the crowd, unheralded. You either get it or you don’t — the camera moves on either way.
“Dont Look Back” entered the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1998, followed by “Monterey Pop” in 2018.
The documentarian also made films about politicians, notably the Kennedys and Bill Clinton. Pennebaker received an honorary Oscar in 2012.
Pennebaker died of natural causes at his home on Long Island on Aug. 1.
Photo by David Shankbone
As a film maker, he was ahead of his time. He will greatly be missed. RIP D.A. Pennebaker.