Richard Leacock Obituary

[Source: The Guardian, by Ronald Bergan, March 24, 2011]

Fine film-maker whose subjects ranged from Kennedy to Hendrix

If you remember the 1960s, you may well remember the documentary films shot by Richard Leacock, notably Monterey Pop (1968). This concert film, made in the summer of 1967 at a music festival in California, featured the Animals, Canned Heat, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, the Who and Ravi Shankar, among others. Leacock, who has died at age 89, was one of six cinematographers on the film – including its director, D.A. Pennebaker – and had already established himself as a leading figure in the "direct cinema" movement, the American version of cinéma vérité, which was characterised by filming events as they happen without interpretive editing or narration.

"I don't like being told things," Leacock said. "I like to observe." To this end, he was instrumental in perfecting a lightweight, handheld 16mm camera, synced to a quiet sound recorder, which allows the filmmaker to intrude as little as possible into the lives of those being filmed. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he headed the department of film in the 1970s and 80s, he also developed Super 8 sync-sound equipment.

Born in London, Leacock was excited by film at the age of 11 when "one day, at school, something very exceptional happened. They showed a 35mm Russian documentary [Victor Turin's 1929 film Turksib] about the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. I was astounded. I said, 'I can do that, I just need a movie camera.'" He proved it when, three years later, he made a 12-minute, 8mm silent documentary called Canary Island Bananas (1935), about the workers on his British father's banana plantation in Las Palmas, where he and his older brother, Philip – who also became a filmmaker – were brought up. Leacock said he made the film to impress his friends at Bedales, his boarding school in Hampshire. "It tells you all you need to know about growing bananas," he said.

He moved to the U.S. in 1938, studied physics at Harvard University and, in 1941, married the anthropologist Eleanor Burke. After serving as a combat photographer during the second world war, he got a job as cinematographer on the director Robert Flaherty's penultimate film, Louisiana Story (1948), which had a lasting influence on him. Shot over 14 months deep in the Louisiana bayous, it was a tough apprenticeship because the heavy camera on a tripod made spontaneous location shooting difficult. "Flaherty knew more about filmmaking than anybody I've ever worked with," Leacock recalled. "He developed and printed all his films himself on location."

Leacock and another cameraman, Albert Maysles, then joined up with the Time-Life journalist Robert Drew, who hoped to adapt Life magazine's candid photo style to filmmaking. Armed with new, lightweight, handheld cameras and sound recorders, they followed the U.S. senators Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy as they campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Kennedy was impressed enough by the result, Primary (1960), to give Drew and Leacock access to the Oval Office after he became president, for Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963). The crisis came when Kennedy had to implement a federal court order to allow two African-American students to enroll at the University of Alabama in the face of defiant governor George Wallace."I just put the sound recorder behind [Kennedy's] chair and put the little microphone in the ashtray – he kept tapping his cigar ashes on it," Leacock said. "And I sat down in a corner with my camera. I'd promised no interviews, no questions. And it turned out beautifully." Leacock was the cinematographer on Drew's The Chair (1963), which followed a team of Chicago lawyers working to get a man off death row, and shot and co-directed, with Joyce Chopra, Happy Mother's Day (1963), about the effect of the birth of quintuplets on a small town.

Leacock left Drew to join Pennebaker in forming a New York-based production company. Their biggest success was Monterey Pop; ironically, Leacock was a classical music addict and cared little for pop. Despite Leacock having shot Hendrix setting fire to his guitar, he later remarked: "I didn't appreciate that kind of bullshit." As for Joplin: "She was always just full of drugs and alcohol. I remember her coming to look at the film afterwards at our place in New York. She was lying there stone drunk, sucking on a bottle of Southern Comfort."

Leacock then had to put up with the egocentric excesses of Norman Mailer, who was directing the fictional feature Maidstone (1970), in which the author starred as a film director running for president. Shot over a hedonistic weekend in the Hamptons, New York, it had an unplanned denouement when Rip Torn struck Mailer with a hammer, and Mailer responded by trying to bite Torn's ear off, all of which Leacock captured on film. Torn, declaiming radical speeches in various uniforms, also appeared in One AM (One American Movie) directed by Pennebaker and Jean-Luc Godard, and shot by Leacock in the U.S. featuring late 60's cultural icons such as Eldridge Cleaver. When Godard abandoned it halfway, Leacock and Pennebaker used the footage to put together One PM (One Parallel Movie) in 1972. A real curiosity, it showed Godard directing and Leacock photographing.

Leacock was able to make a few documentaries that were more in line with his interests, such as his fascinating interview with the actor Louise Brooks in Lulu in Berlin (1984) and A Musical Adventure in Siberia (2000), which he had shot in 1996 when the conductor Sarah Caldwell was battling with a Russian director during rehearsals of a previously banned 1936 Prokofiev symphonic drama based on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. The film, which was shot using only three mini digital cameras, no tripods and no boom mikes, was co-directed by the French filmmaker Valérie Lalonde, whom Leacock had met in Paris. (He and Burke had divorced in 1962.)

Leacock, who lived with Lalonde in France, kept up with the latest technology: "I've sold my movie camera. I'll never use film again. Digital technology is everything I ever dreamed of, and it gets better every day. We can make movies out of our own pockets."

He is survived by Lalonde and his children, Elspeth, Robert, David, Claudia and Victoria.