D.A. Pennebaker is an American documentary filmmaker and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema. In the early 1960s he founded Drew Associates, along with Richard Leacock and Robert Drew who later left to found their own production firm. Pennebaker continued and worked with his wife, and founded a new company Pennebaker Hegedus Films, and made a number of influential documentaries. These films were typically shot with an obviously hand-held camera and the use of voice over narration and interviews. Pennebaker went about his documentaries with a simple portrayal of events typical of the cinema ‘verite’ style, which combines naturalistic techniques with stylised cinematic devices of editing and camerawork to provoke subjects.
Pennebaker is quoted as saying “It's possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don't have to label them, you don't have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it's good for you to learn.” His documentary ‘Don’t Look Back’ - which celebrates Bob Dylan’s tour of England in 1965 – he claimed was “not a documentary at all by my standards.” Pennebaker claims he does not actually make documentaries, but “records of moments”, “half soap operas”, and “semi-musical reality things.”
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