"For me, it was their most influential film."Pennebaker and Hegedus teamed up for The Energy War in 1979, a five-hour series for public television about President Carter's struggle to deregulate natural gas, and made an absorbing study of Bill Clinton's campaign strategy in The War Room (1993). Hegedus vividly remembers the impact of 1963's Crisis: Behind A Presidential Commitment, a Drew Associates production examining the stand-off between John Kennedy's White House and Alabama's segregationist governor, George Wallace. "We could see that the most important things were dialogue and quietness, so you could hear what people were saying. At the time, the kind of documentary films being made were all covered with kind of hymn-like music and everything was virtuous. The idea was to use the documentary concept as evidence of how well your government was treating you. It's called propaganda in many places."Pennebaker's music films, which include 1968's Monterey Pop, Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars and 2000's Down From The Mountain, amount to an impressive body of work in themselves, but they're only one dimension of his career. It was a fundamental step in freeing film-makers from the studio and letting them pursue their subjects wherever the story led."There was nobody else working on a camera that you could haul around with you outside and get sync dialogue," he points out.
But when Pennebaker first started dabbling in it during the late Fifties, its potential had barely been grasped. His background was in engineering, and when he joined the collaborative film-making venture Drew Associates in 1959, with colleagues Richard Leacock, Shirley Clarke and Albert Maysles, he turned his technical skills towards developing a revolutionary 16mm portable camera with synchronised sound, using a Bulova clock movement to ensure accuracy. "There's a theatre downstairs, and they all sat there and dutifully watched the film. Afterwards George Harrison came up and said 'what you've got there is really interesting, I'd like to know how you did it', and as far as I know this was the first time he got interested in films." Pennebaker was in London recently with his wife and film-making partner Chris Hegedus to talk about the DVD release of their 1988 documentary Depeche Mode 101, but he also made time to attend a screening of Concert For George, filmed at the George Harrison memorial concert at the Albert Hall last year. To suddenly find that out years later is the kind of wonderful feedback you get from making documentaries."New developments in lightweight digital equipment have allowed the word "documentary" to be attached to everything from Chris Morris satires to spurious "reality TV", and there's a danger that the true value of the medium is being dissipated. I had no idea that he'd memorised whole sections of Don't Look Back.
Afterwards, he found himself talking to Harrison's widow, Olivia."She was telling me that after George saw Don't Look Back he got a camera and towards the end of his life he was filming every day, documentary material about the family, saying 'this is what you'll have when I die' He was treating it as a kind of history of his life. He can remember the day 30-odd years ago when he hosted a screening of it for Dylan and The Beatles. "It was in this very hotel," Pennebaker explains, gesturing around the lobby of what is now the Radisson Mayfair. Meanwhile the climate for grown-up pictures faces another ice age.d.thomson independent.co.uk. In his 78 years, Donn Pennebaker has made films about politicians, Samuel Beckett and car maker John DeLorean, but he'll always be most readily identified with Don't Look Back, his film of Bob Dylan's British tour in 1965. Peter Jackson can say that they made him an offer he couldn't refuse - though the same man once said that he just wanted to have enough to eat and make his movies And his "people" negotiated this intimidating deal.
