Background
Richard Leacock was born on 18 July 1921 in London. Richard is the younger brother of Philip Leacock, a director of humdrum feature movies that have seldom exceeded the limits of entertainment cinema.
Richard Leacock was born on 18 July 1921 in London. Richard is the younger brother of Philip Leacock, a director of humdrum feature movies that have seldom exceeded the limits of entertainment cinema.
Richard is first and foremost a cinematographer of documentary projects. Having come to America in his teens, he became photographer to Willard Van Dvke, for several wartime films made by the army, and in 1948, on Robert Flahertv's Louisiana Story, the last gesture of pioneering documentary, intent on going to the corners of the earth to bring back pictorial celebrations of the simple life that existed there. Leacock was capable of the beauty of the swamp scenery and the “symphonic" treatment of the oil rig. But Flaherty was enchanted by the idea of the noble savage so that his films are curiously out of touch with political and economic realities. Louisiana Story is nominally about oil drilling, but it has little sense of time and place, let alone political direction or human involvement. Even so, it was set up on much the same basis as the classic 1930s films by Pare Lorentz—The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains. In other words, it was made on institutional or corporation money, to propound some notion about how the world ought to be run, or rerun.
Documentaries of that sort may still be made: Nuit et Brouillard, for instance, was filmed by Alain Resnais for the Museum of the Second World War. But since 1948 a new, journalistic appetite for documentary or reportage had come into being: TV. Louisiana Story, and films like it, might have taken six to nine months to make, being composed with care and artistry before being released to rather select audiences, numbered in the thousands. But TV is geared quite differently. In any one evening it is likely to show seventy-seven minutes (the length of Louisiana Story) of newsreel or documentary footage—shot and processed with the emphasis on speed—to an audience measured in the millions. And the next night, and the next . . . Most of such footage comes to us because a cameraman was sent in time to Vietnam, the Middle East, or wherever. We hardly know' who “directed" or “was responsible for the miles of film from Vietnam, but nevertheless we were moved to tears, anger, and dismay by it. Someone pressed the button, and we did the rest. It may be odious to “compose" a close-up of a child whose face has been stripped by napalm.
Cinema vérité is based on the thought that film ought, as swiftly and directly as possible, to connect that child with our sensibilities. It is able to rest its case on the objectivity of its method and on the usefulness of filming important people at close quarters, without unsettling them, and then conveying those images to audiences. Leacock and Robert Drew began by making films for Time- Life, for TV showing, with novel cameras and tape recorders that allowed two men, as unobtrusively as possible, to cover such newsworthy events as the 1960 primary in Wisconsin between senators Kennedy and Humphrey (Primary), a motor race (Eddie Sachs at Indianapolis), the ordeal of a man sentenced to death (The Chair); and the rehearsal of a play and the effects on its actress ( Jane). Drew' and Leacock experimented with the famous and the unknown. But they found the recurring need for a subject that had wide appeal and where there w as an extra dramatic interest in seeming to catch people under stress reacting spontaneously. Cinema vérité has tended to founder on the everyday and mundane. Secretly, it has the journalist’s uneasy lust for disaster or breakdown, for the moment when the subject “cracks."
Leacock and his colleagues argued that they did not believe that their remorseless coverage disturbed the people they were filming. Reasonably, they argued that a senator working for his life soon forgot one discreet camera that was always in his presence—after all, men forget their wives in that way. It might be different with a show-off like Joseph Levine (Showman), and there w'ere argu¬ments that Jane Fonda’s creative energy could have been sapped by the cameras that filmed her rehearsals. In part, that is journalism demanding the right to be everywhere and then being amazed by charges of intrusiveness. In fact, politicians hire TV coaches and makeup artists, and know as much as Dietrich about how they photograph best. Later cinema vérité films have been more concerned about what effect filming has on reality. Godard asked runic questions and made films about the helpless answers to them. Gimme Shelter, made by the Maysles brothers in 1971, on the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, edged up to the dilemma of how far the cameraman might have a duty to intervene. On the “American Family" series, made for TV7, there came a moment when an affair between the unhappy wife and the sympathetic director seemed imminent.
The “artistic" importance of cinema vérité is that it has asked these questions. We now look at real events as if they were also performances. The “American Family" situation only reproduced a common bond in fiction film production. That is no disgrace. For who believes that people have not always performed or played themselves, that they have not always had to present themselves in everyday life? Cinema vérité has made us reappraise sincerity and see the qualities shared by fiction and documentan’. When Sam Ervin at Watergate reacted to criticism by conceding that he was only a country lawyer, he was James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder blunting the sharpness of George C. Scott. And when Orson Welles lumbered on set to be interviewed by Dick Cavett, he was only one more surrogate Kane ready to say, “They asked the questions quicker in my day.”
Nothing in Ins own work reveals Richard as a more distinct or talented director. And yet he is vastly more important. Indeed, in the long-term survey of mans use of film, it may be that Leacock’s part in the cinema vérité movement will be seen as highlv influential. If only because he is marginally the senior, and because the approach of cinema vérité amounts to a blurring of the talents or personalities of the filmmakers, it is legitimate to include within an entry on Leacock his chief collaborators in the fusion of cinema and journalism: Robert Drew, Greg Shuker, the Maysles brothers, and D. A. Pennebaker. (In addition, as head of film at M.I.T., he produced far too many voung men and women who carried a camera in nearly every life situation.)