- YEAR THREE - D A PENNEBAKER

DA Pennebaker is the Ur of hand-held fly-on-wall observational/existentialist-type film making - you see the style everywhere, and it is satirized in the visual style of 'The Office' - the floating camera positions the viewer as being like a ghost or an angel in the room with these people. It takes weeks of immersion in these 'situations' to become part of the scenery and get people to relax. Despite that, Bob Dylan is clearly still playing up to the camera. The whole programme - which is very loosely structured around his arrival in London to play a concert at the Royal Albert Hall - is done in their bored-to-death 'so what' style which is hard to capture but highly effective - everything about this type of factual documentary film making is exactly the opposite of what you would do for news reporting. Eg this film is all about trivia - the way the camera follows the movement of the hand when lighting a cigarette to see what brand it is, and the camera lingers lovingly. In contrast the "important" bit of the film - him actually performing (the thing that is the official news agenda, such as it is) is just thrown away in a couple of seconds without comment - Pennebaker just crashes in and out and the camera is static for once - its though he has left the camera on the tripod and gone off for a cup of tea. It has that existential feel we have discussed that the "real deal" is in the mass of detail. In features detail = your friend (you need to pad out); in news detail = your enemy (you need to sum up). Throughout the documentary there's a theme of Pennebaker filming journalists interviewing Dylan and writing typical summary news stories about him which seem absurd and ridiculous once the viewer has been seduced into mise en scene of the film. But certainly Don't Look Back is a film that all documentary-makers know about and really create new stuff by means of measuring similarity or difference to the original. You often see it directly lifted - eg in advertising, especially the silly thing at the start of film where Bob Dylan is throwing away cards with words writen on them (the man with the beard in the picture is Alan Ginsberg, the main poet of the American Beat Poetry or 'concrete poetry' movement, which also has a massive contemporary influence via Jack Karouac and them kind of cats.)

Pennebaker himself got the styling from the French New Wave film movement of the '50s and especially the films of Jean Luc Goddard. So it is all happening art and philosophy wise (and not least fashion wise) in the 50s in Paris and then all those people like Sartre or his followers move it all to New York in the 60s (eg Andy Warhol) et voila - the birth of now.

Alphaville:


Jean Luc Goddard: Breathless:



Andy Warhol : "Interview" (also good practical example of the dangers of 'closed' questions in interview technique)



Andy Warhol: "Sleep" (not very interesting, just a person asleep)