RICHARD LEACOCK

Leacock Circa 1982

Born in London, July 18 1921, Leacock grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands till shipped off to boarding schools in England at the age of eight. He had no way of telling his schoolmates what it was like to live in the Canary Islands.

He took up photography with a glass plate camera, built a darkroom, developed his pictures but was not satisfied. At age 11 he was shown a silent film "TURKSIB" about the building of the Tran Siberian Railway. He was stunned, and said to himself "All I need is a cine-camera and I can make a film that shows you what it is like to be there".
Aged 14, he made CANARY BANANAS (10 min. 16mm, silent) scripted, directed, filmed and edited by him. It tells you all you need to know about growing bananas but did not, in his opinion, give you "the feeling of being there".

He spent the rest of his life trying to achieve this goal.

Having filmed in the Canary Islands and then in the Galapagos Islands, (1938-9) for ornithologist David Lack's expedition, he moved to the USA and majored in Physics at Harvard in order to master the technology of filmmaking. Meanwhile he worked as cameraman and assistant editor on other peoples films, notably TO HEAR YOUR BANJO PLAY 1941, filming a folk music festival atop a mountain in south Virginia where there was no electricity, with a 35mm studio camera and 35mm film sound recorder, a rare achievement at that time. Three years as a combat Photographer in Burma and China followed by 14 months as Cameraman on Robert Flaherty's LOUISIANA STORY, an extraordinary experience of immense value to his future work.

Many relatively conventional jobs followed, till 1954. He was then asked to make a reportage on a traveling tent theater in Missouri: the first film that he wrote, directed, photographed and edited himself, since Canary Bananas.

This film, TOBY AND THE TALL CORN, went on the cultural TV program, OMNIBUS, in prime time and brought him into contact with Robert Drew, an editor at Life Magazine in search for a less verbal approach television reportage. Another stranger, Roger Tilton wanted to film an evening of people dancing to Dixieland music spontaneously. Leacock filmed JAZZ DANCE for him, using hand held combat techniques. It resulted in a superbly edited film that really did give you the feeling of being there, and still does.

But you could not film dialogue this way.

The search for high quality, mobile, synchronous equipment to facilitate observation was on. It took time, money ,and physics to solve the problems. By 1960 this was achieved and resulted in Robert Drew's film PRIMARY, an intimate observation of a primary election with JFK and Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin. A new way of making films that did, indeed, give you the feeling of being there. Including synchronous dialogue.

An avalanche followed of wonderful films, made with Drew, Pennebaker, Maysles et al. But the US networks were not impressed, whereas in France at the CINEMATHEQUE FRANCAISE when Drew and Leacock screened PRIMARY and ON THE POLE, Henri Langlois introduced the films as "perhaps the most important documentaries since the brothers Lumiere"!

After the screening, a monk in robes came up to them and said, "You have invented a new form. Now you must invent a new grammar!"

When Drew went to work for ABC TV, "Leacock Pennebaker" was formed and produced HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, DON'T LOOK BACK, MONTEREY POP, A STRAVINSKY PORTRATI and many others ending with the remnants of Jean Luc Godard's 1-AM. --- 1-PM.

In 1968 he was invited to join Ed Pincus creating a new film school at MIT. Small but geared to their ways of working. Since 16mm filming was becoming so expensive they developed super-8 film synch equipment with modified mass-produced cameras that were much cheaper. It worked but was not really satisfactory.

Many excellent filmmakers emerged including Ross McElway (SHERMAN'S MARCH), among others.

1989, retirement and a move to Paris where he met Valerie Lalonde and, together, they made LES OEUFS A LA COQUE DE RICHARD LEACOCK, (84 minutes) the first major film shot with a tiny Video-8 Handycam to go on prime-time television in France.

A combination of talent and love that continues into the digital age with both of them making films of their own choice without the pressures of TV producers, films that finally do give you "the feeling of being there".

RICKY LEACOCK - HONOREE
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Leacock spent a career hoping “to be able to create sequences, that when run together will present aspects of my perception of what took place in the presence of my camera.” As he wrote in 1997 in A Search for the Feeling of Being There, “The making of sequences is, for me, at the heart of film making.”

“The gang” and other legendary documentarians are known for developing the film art form, cinéma vérité or "direct cinema” - a form of documentary film which emerged in the late 50s and the 60s whereby the filmmaker was fully immersed in their subject’s lives becoming an invisible bystander, waiting for crisis and only taking advantage of available events.” The movement was fueled as much by technological as artistic developments, many of which were developed by Richard Leacock and Robert Drew. Maysles said it best. “The Hollywood film is an escape of one sort or another. But our films make it damn near impossible to escape.” Their ground breaking story telling techniques led to award winning films that captured the hearts and imaginations of audiences; GREY GARDENS, BOB DYLAN: DON’T LOOK BACK, GIMME SHELTER, and PRIMARY. And, that’s just the tip of the ice-berg.

Join Ricky Leacock in a special Master Class What's in a Sequence? July 21st from 4-6 p.m. and join Ricky, his friends and students for a very special panel discussion, Life Cinema: What's Next?" on Saturday, July 22. Check out the film schedule for further details regarding the exciting line-up of films to honor Ricky and his special guests, (most followed by Q&A!). Visit www.plyfilmfest.org today. This summer visit Plymouth, Massachusetts between July 20th and July 23rd to network and learn from the legends of documentary film.

ALBERT MAYSLES BIOGRAPHY
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"… the dean of documentary filmmakers, Albert Maysles." NY Times, May 6, 2002
Two of America's foremost non-fiction filmmakers, Albert Maysles and his brother David (1932-1987) are recognized as pioneers of "direct cinema," the distinctly American version of French "cinema verité." They earned their distinguished reputations by being the first to make non-fiction feature films - films in which the drama of human life unfolds as is, without scripts, sets, or narration.

Born in Boston of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Albert received his B.A. at Syracuse and his M.A. at Boston University where he taught Psychology for three years. He made the transition from Psychology to film in the summer of 1955 by taking a 16mm camera to Russia to film patients at several mental hospitals. The result, PSYCHIATRY IN RUSSIA, was Albert’s first foray into filmmaking. Several years later, the Maysles brothers made a motorcycle journey from Munich to Moscow and along the way shot their first collaborative film on the Polish student revolution.

In 1960, Albert was co-filmmaker of PRIMARY, a film about the Democratic primary election campaigns of Kennedy and Humphrey. The use of hand-held cameras and synchronous sound allowed the story to tell itself. With their fine-tuned sense of the scene-behind-the-scene, the Maysles brothers made MEET MARLON BRANDO (1965) and WITH LOVE FROM TRUMAN (1966). Then they came out with the landmark non-fiction feature film SALESMAN (1968), a portrait of four door-to-door Bible salesmen from Boston. It won an award from the National Society of Film Critics and is regarded as the classic American documentary. In 1992, the Library of Congress saluted the film for its historical, cultural and aesthetic significance.

Albert was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1965. His next two films became cult classics. GIMME SHELTER (1970) is the dazzling portrait of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones on their American tour which culminated in a killing at the notorious concert at Altamont. GREY GARDENS (1976) captures on film the haunting relationship of the Beales, a mother and daughter living secluded in a decaying East Hampton mansion. These films, like SALESMAN, were released theatrically to great acclaim.

Maysles Films Inc. has produced many films on art and artists, including a long-standing collaboration of celebrated artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose monumental environmental projects were documented in Academy Award-nominated CHRISTO'S VALLEY CURTAIN (1974), RUNNING FENCE (1978), ISLANDS (1986), CHRISTO IN PARIS (1990), and UMBRELLAS (1995) - which won the Grand Prize and People's Choice Award at the Montreal Festival of Films on Art.

Albert's forays into the world of music range from WHAT’S HAPPENING! THE BEATLES IN THE USA (1964) to films on Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Vladimir Horowitz, Mstislav Rostropovich and Wynton Marsalis, several of which have received Emmy Awards. In 1994, Albert filmed an up-to-date portrait of the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ROLLING STONES (broadcast on VH-1).

Albert worked with Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson on ABORTION: DESPERATE CHOICES, which examined one of the most controversial topics in America (broadcast on HBO in 1993). In 1996, LETTING GO: A HOSPICE JOURNEY told the stories of three terminally ill patients and their experiences with hospice care. Albert collaborated with Susan Froemke and Bob Eisenhardt on CONCERT OF WILLS: MAKING THE GETTY CENTER (1997). Shot over twelve years, the film chronicles the development of the Los Angeles Center from concept through construction. Most recently, Albert joined with Froemke and Dickson again for the HBO commissioned project LALEE'S KIN: THE LEGACY OF COTTON, a story of one family's struggle to break free from the cycles of poverty and illiteracy in the Mississippi Delta.

In 1994, the International Documentary Association presented Albert with their Career Achievement Award. He has received S.M.P.T.E.’s 1997 John Grierson Award for Documentary, the American Society of Cinematographers’ 1998 President’s Award - given for the first time to a documentarian, the Boston Film and Video Foundation’s 1998 Vision Award, Toronto's Hot Docs 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1999 Flaherty Award and the Thessaloniki 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1999 Eastman Kodak saluted Albert as one of the 100 world's finest cinematographers.

In 2001 Albert received the Sundance Film Festival 2001 Cinematography Award for Documentaries for LALEE'S KIN: THE LEGACY OF COTTON. In 2001 LALEE’S KIN was nominated for an Academy Award and in 2004 the film received the DuPont Columbia Gold Baton Award.

Albert received exclusive access to the Dalai Lama and filmed his visit to New York in the summer of 2003 and is currently producing THE GATES, a documentary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s latest art piece, THE GATES - A PROJECT FOR NEW YORK CITY which will take place in February 2005.

In addition, Albert is working with Antonio Ferrera on a documentary about the Klezmer musician David Krakauer as well as on the making of Wes Anderson’s latest feature film THE LIFE AQUATIC starring Bill Murray.

ROBERT DREW BIOGRAPHY
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As an editor at LIFE, Robert Drew specialized in the candid still picture essay. As a Nieman Fellow at Harvard he worked out theories for a film making based on candid photography in motion pictures. He assembled a group of journalists and film makers -- among them Richard Leacock, Gregory Shuker, D.A. Pennebaker, James Lipscomb, Hope Ryden, Mike Jackson, Tom Bywaters, Anne Drew. Robert Drew managed the engineering of lightweight cameras and recorders and developed editing techniques to allow stories to tell themselves through characters in action.

In 1960 Robert Drew planned, produced and managed the editing of "Primary", the first film in which the sync-sound motion picture camera was able to move freely with characters throughout a breaking story (John F. Kennedy in Wisconsin). "Primary" was recognized as a breakthrough in documentary film making (Robert Flaherty Award, American Film Festival Blue Ribbon).
Robert Drew expanded on his ideas by forming Drew Associates and producing films that have become known, along with "Primary", as the foundation of cinema verite' in America --"On the Pole", "Yanki No!", "Crisis: Behind A Presidential Commitment", "The Chair" (1st Prize Cannes), "Faces of November" (1st Prize Venice).

With producer Anne Drew, Robert Drew extended his candid film making into the ARTS: "On The Road With Duke Ellington"; "Man Who Dances: Edward Villella" (Emmy Award).

Anne Drew produced many Drew films, most notably "Kathy's Dance" (New York Film Festival Blue Ribbon), "Herself, Indira Gandhi", "Life and Death of a Dynasty" (co-produced with the BBC). In the field of the SCIENCES, the Drews produced "Men Encounter Mars"; "Who's Out There?" (NASA); NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS: "Nehru", "Men of The Tall Ships", "London to Peking", "My War, Mother and Ernie Pyle"; NATURE: "River Of Hawks" (Geographic Explorer); "Messages From The Birds"; "Black Market Birds" (Audubon - Turner).

For this body of work The International Documentary Association named Robert Drew the recipient of the IDA Career Achievement Award. Film making by Robert Drew on PBS has included --"Fire Season", "Warnings From Gangland", "Marshall High Fights Back", "Your Flight is Cancelled", "For Auction: An American Hero" (duPont/Columbia Award), "Life and Death of a Dynasty" ( BBC co-production), "LA Champions" (CPB). The Drews’ most recent programs are "The Militia Man" and "From Two Men and a War."

D A PENNEBAKER BIOGRAPHY
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D A (Donn Alan) Pennebaker is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of cinema verite filmmaking. The style revolutionized the documentary genre by discarding narration, reenactments and other staged techniques in favor of direct and uninterrupted observation, creating a fly-on-the-wall sense of immediacy.
Since 1977 Pennebaker has partnered with Chris Hegedus on a host of acclaimed films. Most recently they co-directed with Nick Doob ELAINE STRITCH AT LIBERTY whch earned three Primetime Emmy nominations including Outstanding Direction of a Music, Comedy, or Variety Program. In 2003 they completed ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE about some of the legendary rhythm and blues performers, including Rufus and Carla Thomas, Mary Wilson, Jery Butler, Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett and the Chi Lites. The team received the D.W. Griffith Award for Best Documentary of the Year and an Academy Award nomination for their 1994 film THE WAR ROOM, which followed Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.

D A Pennebaker made his filmmaking debut with the 1953 short DAYBREAK EXPRESS. In 1959 Pennebaker joined Drew Associates, a group of filmmakers dedicated to furthering the use of film in journalism. Drew Associates developed the first fully portable 16mm synchronized camera and sound system. This technical development helped Pennebaker and his colleagues establish what became known as “cinema verite,” a new style of filmmaking that rejected voiceover narration in favor of recording real people and events as they happened, with as little direction from the filmmaker as possible. Together, they produced such landmark films as PRIMARY, CRISIS, and JANE.

In the 60s, Pennebaker’s portrait of Bob Dylan, DONT LOOK BACK, and MONTEREY POP, starring Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, were two of the earliest films using real-life drama to have a successful theatrical distribution. 1972 saw the release of KEEP ON ROCKIN’, with Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, and it was Pennebaker who filmed David Bowie’s final concert appearance as his most famous persona in ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS. Pennebaker detoured to Broadway for the television documentary COMPANY - THE ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM about the recording of the Stephen Sondheim musical starring Elaine Stritch.

In 1977, the filmmaker met and began collaborating with his partner Chris Hegedus. Their early films included the five-hour, three-part documentary THE ENERGY WAR, co-directed with Pat Powell, which followed the congressional fight over President Carter’s 1977 proposal to deregulate natural gas, and TOWN BLOODY HALL, filmed in 1971 and edited by Hegedus, which chronicled the fractious “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” at New York City’s Town Hall. Among the additional films that Pennebaker co-directed with Hegedus are ELLIOT CARTER AT BUFFALO, about the American composer; DELOREAN, a profile of the automobile entrepreneur John DeLorean; ROCKABY, a document of the staging and performance of Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name, and DANCE BLACK AMERICA, a record of a four-day festival celebrating African-American dance. Their 1998 film MOON OVER BROADWAY, about Carol Burnett’s return to Broadway, was cited by the New York Times as the Best Documentary of the Year.

The partners have devoted much of their creative energies to short and feature-length films about music. Their film of Randy Newman’s song Baltimore predated MTV and was one of the templates for the music video format; their subsequent music video credits include clips for John Hiatt, Soul Asylum, Suzanne Vega, Victoria Williams and Marti Jones. Their other music-related films include the 30-minute profile of singer Victoria Williams, HAPPY COME HOME, THE MUSIC TELLS YOU, with Branford Marsalis and his trio; and OPEN HAND, a chronicle of singer Suzanne Vega’s tour. In 1989, Hegedus and Pennebaker released the theatrical feature DEPECHE MODE 101, about the popular British synth-pop band. Recent credits include KEINE ZEIT, about German rock star Marius Muller-Westernhagen, and the contemporary performance film SEARCHING FOR JIMI HENDRIX.

DEREK LAMB BIOGRAPHY
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Derek Lamb, one of the first teachers of film animation at Harvard and a prolific and admired animator in his own right, died November 5, 2005 in Seattle after a long struggle with cancer. He was 69.
Lamb began teaching at Harvard in the mid-1960’s in what was then known as the Light and Communication Workshops, a division of Visual Studies (which later became Visual and Environmental Studies). Robert Gardner, who was coordinator of Light and Communications, recommended hiring Lamb after seeing one of his animated films.

"I saw Derek's film The Great Toy Robbery and knew he had to come to Harvard to counterbalance any tendencies toward solemnity in our proceedings," Gardner said. “But levity was not the only quality embodied by Lamb's films. They also made you think. Derek was a mightily accomplished comedic storyteller. His highest hope and purpose was to use his gifts to entertain and not simply divert. One walked away, if one could, from a film like The Last Cartoon Man holding one's sides and pondering the weight of its meaning."
Lamb taught at Harvard as a lecturer on Visual Studies until 1970, then returned in 1986 and 1990 as a guest lecturer. Award-winning animator Caroline Leaf '68 remembers his special qualities as a teacher. "Derek was an enabler," Leaf said. "He had energy and made things happen. He wasn't a teacher in the ordinary sense of the word, imparting information or know-how or being a role model. He created an environment that buzzed. He made it exciting to be active and try out new things."

Lamb won two Academy Awards for best animated short films -- in 1978 for Special Delivery and in 1979 for Every Child. His other film credits include I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Psychic Parrot, The Hottest Show on Earth, Why Me? and Afterlife. He also directed and produced Karate Kids, a short, animated film designed to provide AIDS-prevention information for street children. Most recently, Lamb served as executive producer on the Emmy-winning PBS series, "Peep and the Big Wide World."
Lamb is survived by two sons, Richard and Thomas, his wife Tracie, and a granddaughter, Vivian – as well as the innumerable people whose lives he enriched.

GLORIANNA DAVENPORT BIOGRAPHY
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Glorianna Davenport grew up taking pictures and began making film and video work in 1969. In 1977 she joined the staff of the MIT Film Section, which soon became the Film/Video Section. From 1976 to 1988, Davenport made a number of films including Just Blue (with Rachel Strickland), Remembering Niels Bohr: 1885-1962 (with Richard Leacock), City in Transition: New Orleans 1983-1986, as well as a number of shorter, more personal films such as Grist for the Mill: A Family Project, Winging-It and Letters I Can’t Send Home. A founding member of the MIT Media Lab, Davenport's research contributed to the evolution of random access video edit systems and hypermedia video projects for which she has received international recognition. Davenport's recent work explores the emergence of the "media fabric,” a paradigm that encourages the design of media in ways that support the engagement in meaningful, improvisational real-time dialogs. Much of her work for the past decade has been designed for on-line co-construction and publication. In 1990, she received MIT's prestigious Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship Prize for excellence in the arts.

Photo credit: Peter Menzel

VALERIE LALONDE BIOGRAPHY
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Born in Paris in 1947, Valerie Lalonde studied Classical literature at the Sorbonne. She worked in perfumes until the mid-1980’s and studied
drawing at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Lalonde switched to filmmaking when she met Richard Leacock in 1989.

MICHEL NEGROPONTE BIOGRAPHY
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Michel Negroponte is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker with such directing credits as Space Coast, Silver Valley, Jupiter’s Wife, No Accident, W.I.S.O.R. and The Sightseer. His new feature-length documentary, Methadonia, premiered at the New York Film Festival in September, 2005, and was aired on HBO in the United States a few weeks later. In 1995, Jupiter’s Wife was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Grand Prize for Best Feature Documentary at the Vancouver Film Festival and the Santa Barbara Film Festival. The film also was awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Documentary. Originally shot on small format video, it premiered on HBO/Cinemax before getting a nation-wide theatrical release. In addition to his own work, he has worked in a producing capacity on many other films, among them Bookwars by Jason Rosette, Fastpitch by Jeremy Spear, the Academy Award-nominated Children Underground by Edet Belzberg, and a current work-in-progress by Jason Hutt about a young boxer named Dmitry Salita. Negroponte teaches in the graduate film program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

ROSS MCELWEE BIOGRAPHY
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Ross McElwee has made seven feature-length documentaries as well as a number of shorter films. Sherman’s March has won numerous awards, including Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and was chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically significant American motion picture.” Time Indefinite and Six O’Clock News won a number of festival awards before being distributed theatrically throughout the United States. McElwee’s newest film, Bright Leaves, premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight before being distributed theatrically in Europe and the United States. It was nominated for Best Documentary of 2004 by both the Director’s Guild of America and the Writer’s Guild of America. McElwee received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Film Institute, the LEF Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Four of his films were featured in a selection of western documentaries shown for the first time in Tehran, Iran.