Last Wednesday Alan stumped me on a question about some of the technologies that allowed for much on-the-go filmmaking in the 1960s. I’ve since come across a good source that explains the technical aspects of sync-sound recording with these new light-weight cameras that allowed for that period’s boom in amateur/experimental filmmaking, documentary filmmaking and revolutionary filmmaking. The book, for those who are interested, is DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish by Ian David Aronson (O’Reilly Media, 2006). It’s just a technical manual, but the particular section I came across gives a good thumbnail description of the technologies in this period. The excerpt covering this material can be found courtesy of Google Books here.
On the topic of these new portable technologies and the accompanying boom in documentary filmmaking, one of the films I mentioned in section was Don’t Look Back (released 1967, filmed in 1965), D.A. Pennebaker’s cinema verite/direct cinema documentary about then-rising star Bob Dylan. It’s a really great film worth checking out and a good example of this kind of documentary filmmaking that really broke from the styles that had come before and would become practically the dominant mode for some time to come.
The whole film appears to be available on youtube and is easily accessible through netflix, Askwith or the Donald Hall Collection. This clip, however, gives you a good sense of the free-flowing “cinema of life” documentary style (and also a good glimpse of the film and sound crew on the move with Dylan, toting some of these new recording technologies with them):
And this clip below is probably the most famous segment of the film, often credited as the first music video. That claim is fairly suspect, but it’s still captivating in its simplicity and has probably been parodied several dozen times by this point. As a bonus for Beat nerds, that’s Allen Ginsberg hanging around behind Dylan for the duration of the song.
Random aside: I once had the privilege to sit beside D.A. Pennebaker through a film screening. He is a lovely man.
