Richard Leacock, who, with Robert Drew, Albert Maysles and DA Pennebaker, helped revolutionize documentary filmmaking with a dynamic, transformational style known as cinema vérité, has died. He was 89, and he lived in Paris.
According to his website, Leacock was born in London in 1921 and grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands-which was the inspiration for his first documentary, made at the age of 14, called Canary Bananas. "I made my first film, aged 14, in 1935," he writes on his website, "and I have been at it ever since, striving to give my viewers a sense of ‘being there.'"
He later graduated from Harvard University, with a degree in physics-which he used "to master the technology of filmmaking." He worked as a combat cameraman in Burma and China during World War II, and later shot Robert Flaherty's seminal Louisiana Story. "More difficult for me to explain is Flaherty's way of looking at things," Leacock writes. "We were constantly panning, tilting, moving the camera, searching. There is rhythm in the filming, rhythm in the captured movements and compositions that are completely at odds with the compositions that work in static imagery. I once went through Louisiana Story looking for stills that could illustrate what I am talking about and found very, very few good stills. What is there is pure film magic constantly in motion."
In the 1950s, with television in its nascent stages, Leacock was invited to make a film for the cultural program Omnibus. The film, Toby and the Tall Corn, documented a traveling tent show in Midwest; it would be his first film since Canary Bananas-and "my final attempt to make a documentary using classical film industry techniques."
Filmmaker Roger Tilton, a fellow veteran combat cameraman, invited Leacock to film at a jazz club in New York's East Village, and encouraged him to shoot as they had during the war: "We shot wild! NO tripod! Move! Shoot! I was all over the place, having the time of my life, jumping, dancing, shooting right in the midst of everything. We spent a fabulous evening shooting to our hearts' content. Roger and his editor Richard Brummer laid these fragmentary shots in synch with the four pieces of music selected for the film; slow, medium, fast and faster! It worked! On a big screen in a theater, WOW! You were there, right in the midst of it and it looked like it was in synch... it was in synch! We couldn't film dialogue or sustained musical passages this way. But it gave us a taste, a goal."
The quest was on: "I needed a camera that I could hand- hold, that would run on battery power; that was silent, you can't film a symphony orchestra rehearsing with a noisy camera; a recorder as portable as the camera, battery-powered, with no cable connecting it to the camera, that would give us quality sound; synchronous, not just with one camera but with all cameras. What we call in physics, a general solution. Filming an orchestra with two or three cameras, all in sync with a high-quality recorder and all mobile... This became a goal that took another three years of intensive effort to achieve. Remember that the transistor, without which none of these goals could be achieved, was still in its infancy."
By this time, Leacock had found a kindred spirit in Robert Drew, a reporter for Life Magazine, who himself was exploring a less verbal approach to television reporting, without interviews or narrators-purely observational. Leacock had also met DA Pennebaker, who had majored in electrical engineering at Yale University, so with their science degrees they spent the next few years with Drew developing portable synchronous equipment. They were later joined by Albert Maysles, and the four of them headed for Wisconsin to follow Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey in their quest for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
"We were breaking all the rules of the industry," Leacock writes. "We were shooting and editing our own footage on location. The people taking sound were not ‘sound men'; they were reporters, journalists, trained in finding and telling stories. It was a collaborative work, filmmakers and journalists; not cameramen and soundmen.
"There were no interviews and little narration," Leacock continues. "Bob Drew was executive producer and had final say; he bore the burden of responsibility for the outcome, he worked with us and took sound and sweated over the editing. Primary was shot in about five days with four two-man crews; no script, no lights, no tripods, no questions, no directions, never ask anyone to do anything. Just watch and listen. Then the same people that shot moved into a hotel suite and edited with little film viewers and sound heads. We worked hard and fast, I think we had a cut of the long version in about two weeks."
Over the next four years Drew Associates would continue to raise the bar for documentary filmmaking. Leacock and Pennebaker would later form their own company and produce such classics as Dont Look Back and Happy Mother's Day. Leacock would later film Pennebaker's Monterrey Pop and Company.
In 1968, Leacock and Ed Pincus were invited to create a new film school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and over the next 20 years his students would include Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Steve Ascher, Jeff Kreines, Joel DeMott, Michel Negroponte, Mark Rance, and many others.
Leacock retired in 1989 and moved to Paris, where he met and married Valerie Lalonde, who would be his filmmaking partner. The couple embraced the digital revolution, beginning with the Video-8, and continuing with every versatile, cost-efficient piece of equipment that followed. "With this new equipment it is possible to make not just documentaries... fiction... whatever you want for very little money. What we will then need is a distribution system more like the book industry, a whole infrastructure that must and will be developed. Then we can make shows that are more than a stop-gap in an entertainment industry. Works that can combine written and motion-picture material in a complex manner that can be savored, thought about and enjoyed where the dreadful People that run Hollywood and Television will have no influence whatever."
In his last years, Leacock was working on his memoir, The Feeling of Being There, a transmedia project that would include a book and a Digital Video Book. For more on that project, click here.
Richard Leacock took us there.