Richard Leacock, Innovative Documentary Maker, Dies at 89 (original) (raw)

March 24, 2011

Richard Leacock, a filmmaker who helped create the documentary style known as direct camera or cinéma vérité, and who played a pivotal role in making some of the most innovative documentaries of the 1960s, died on Wednesday at his home in Paris. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Victoria Leacock Hoffman.

Although overshadowed by colleagues like Albert and David Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker, Mr. Leacock was a seminal figure in developing the artistic theories and the small, lightweight camera and sound equipment that led to a new style of reportorial filmmaking, one that had a profound influence not just on nonfiction filmmakers but also on directors, like John Cassavetes, who were seeking a more immediate, spontaneous style.

From the time he made his first documentary film, at the age of 14, Mr. Leacock looked for ways and means that would allow the camera to function as an unblinking observer and allow stories to, as it were, tell themselves — to convey, as he was fond of saying, “the feeling of being there.”

A striking example was the 1960 film “Primary,” a fly-on-the-wall record of the Democratic primary in Wisconsin that pitted John F. Kennedy against Hubert H. Humphrey. The film, produced by the Time-Life photographic editor Robert Drew and shot by Mr. Leacock with Albert Maysles, Mr. Pennebaker and Terence Macartney-Filgate, offered deadpan, highly revealing scenes of two candidates in the throes of American-style campaigning, in all its tedium and exhaustive repetition.

This was something new in journalistic filmmaking. For the first time, audiences were given a sustained cinematic look behind the curtain of politics and an unvarnished portrait of two candidates going all-out for the brass ring.

Mr. Leacock went on to make many films with Mr. Drew and, after teaming up with Mr. Pennebaker, collaborated on several slice-of-American-life documentaries and “Monterey Pop,” an enormously successful concert film that captured artists like Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding in their heyday, in 1967.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he co-founded the film school and taught for many years, he influenced aspiring filmmakers like Mira Nair, Ross McElwee and Richard Peña, the program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

“He had an eye for character and story,” Mr. Drew said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “While doing unimaginably difficult things with the camera, he could think of character and story and the human factor; that was his great gift.”

Richard Leacock, known as Ricky, was born on July 18, 1921, in London and spent his early childhood in the Canary Islands, where his father owned a banana plantation. While still at boarding school in England he filmed “Canary Bananas,” about life on the plantation, and made a documentary about the Galapagos Islands while on a school expedition with the ornithologist Richard Lack.

He enrolled at Harvard to study physics and master the technology of filmmaking. At the same time he worked as a cameraman and assistant editor on several documentaries, notably “To Hear Your Banjo Play” (1941). That film, about a folk festival in Virginia, was one of the earliest documentaries to capture live sound.

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The documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock.Credit...G. Andrew Boyd for Richard Leacock/Canary Banana Films

In 1942 he left college to enlist in the United States Army, serving as a combat photographer in the Signal Corps in Burma and China. On returning to the United States, he learned that the pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty, the director of “Nanook of the North,” had just received financing from Standard Oil to make a film about Louisiana.

Mr. Flaherty, who had seen “Canary Bananas” — his daughters had attended Mr. Leacock’s school — hired Mr. Leacock as a cameraman and associate producer on “Louisiana Story,” which in documentary style told the fictional story of a 12-year-old Cajun boy whose world is transformed when his father allows an oil rig to drill in an inlet behind the family home.

“Louisiana Story” helped push Mr. Leacock toward a new concept of filmmaking.

“I saw that when we were using small cameras, we had tremendous flexibility, we could do anything we wanted and get a wonderful sense of cinema,” he told the journal Film Culture in 1961. “The moment we had to shoot dialogue — lip-synch — everything had to be locked down, the whole nature of the film changed.” In 1954 Mr. Leacock made his first solo documentary for the cultural television program “Omnibus.” That film, “Toby and the Tall Corn,” followed a tent show through the Midwest. By shifting his heavy 35-millimeter cameras around to film the show on different nights from new angles, he was able to achieve some of the variety and immediacy that a later generation of lightweight 16-millimeter cameras would allow.

In Mr. Drew at Time-Life he found a soul mate, a photographic editor who wanted to achieve in film what Life’s great photojournalists captured on the page. To that end, Mr. Leacock developed hand-held cameras and recorders that could capture images and sound simultaneously.

This new technology was put to immediate use on “Primary” and its groundbreaking successors, with Mr. Leacock as a cameraman and editor, including “On the Pole,” a portrait of the race-car driver Eddie Sachs and the 1960 Indianapolis 500, and “The Children Were Watching,” about school integration in New Orleans.

With Mr. Drew, he made two of the most gripping documentaries to come out of the cinéma vérité movement: “Chair,” the story of a lawyer’s fight to save his client from the electric chair, and “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment,” a taut behind-the-scenes diary of the face-off between the Kennedy administration and Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama over the integration of the University of Alabama.

In 1963 Mr. Leacock formed a production partnership with Mr. Pennebaker. It yielded “Happy Mother’s Day,” a film, made with Joyce Chopra, about the hoopla surrounding a woman who gives birth to quintuplets. The partners’ other films included “A Stravinsky Portrait,” about the composer Igor Stravinsky, and “Chiefs,” about a convention of police chiefs.

The partnership dissolved not long after the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard pulled out of “One A.M.” (“One American Movie”), which was intended to be his first American feature, with Mr. Leacock and Mr. Pennebaker filming under his direction. A mélange of footage from the film and documentary footage of the production, called “One P.M.” (“One Parallel Movie”), was released in 1972.

In the meantime Mr. Leacock accepted an invitation, with the documentary filmmaker Ed Pincus, to found a film school at M.I.T., where he taught for the next 20 years.

In 1988 he moved to Paris, where he collaborated with his companion, Valérie Lalonde, on several works shot on video, including “Les Oeufs à la Coque” and “A Musical Adventure in Siberia.”

Mr. Leacock’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Victoria, of Manhattan, and Ms. Lalonde, of Paris, he is survived by another two daughters, Elspeth, of Brooklyn, and Claudia, of Manhattan; two sons, Robert, of Watermill, N.Y., and David, of Jupiter, Fla.; a half-sister, Martha Leacock Crawford, of England; and nine grandchildren.

His memoir, “Richard Leacock: The Feeling of Being There,” is to be published in the summer by Semeïon Editions.

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