D.A. Pennebaker, director of Bob Dylan’s Dont Look Again, useless at 94
D. A. Pennebaker with Bob Dylan
D.A. Pennebaker, the Oscar-winning director and cinematographer behind many iconic music documentaries and live performance movies, together with Bob Dylan’s Dont Look Again, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and Monterey Pop, has died on the age of 94.
In keeping with Selection, Pennebaker handed away from pure causes on Thursday, August 1st.
A local of Evanston, Illinois, Pennebaker served within the Navy throughout WW2 after which studied engineering at Yale College. Within the early 1950s, impressed by experimental filmmaker Francis Thompson, Pennebaker started to make his personal films. His first, 1953’s Dawn Categorical, was a five-minute wanting the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York Metropolis, set to a recording of Duke Ellington’s recording of the identical identify.
In 1959, he joined the Filmakers’ Co-op collective and started capturing political movies on behalf of ABC Information and Time-life. Their collective’s first manufacturing, 1960’s Major, documented John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey’s campaigns within the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Major election. It was the primary movie to supply a complete take a look at the day-by-day operations of a presidential race, and was later chosen as a historic American movie for inclusion within the Library of Congress’ Nationwide Movie Registry.
In 1963, Pennebaker caught the eye of Bob Dylan after making a movie about jazz vocalist Dave Lambert. Dylan’s supervisor, Albert Grossman, approached Pennebaker about documenting Dylan’s 1965 live performance tour in England. The consequence, 1967’s Dont Look Again, is broadly thought of one of many best music documentaries in historical past, and was later chosen for preservation in the US Nationwide Movie Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed “culturally, traditionally, or aesthetically vital.” The movie’s opening scene, which depicts Dylan holding a variety if cue playing cards bearing lyrics from his track “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, additionally served as its music video.
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