Richard Leacock was a distinguished documentary film-maker and a pioneer of Direct Cinema, a form of documentary that strove to record reality as neutrally and as precisely as possible.
His discreet, non-judgmental films, described by one film scholar as a “cinema of self-effacement”, rank among the leading achievements of non-fiction film. Their subjects ranged from politics to music.
Richard Leacock was born in 1921 in London. His early childhood was spent in the Canary Islands, where his father owned a banana plantation. His fascination with cinema began early. “At the age of 8,” he recalled, “I had scarcely seen even two films, but I knew then that I wanted to make movies.”
Victor Turin’s Soviet documentary Turksib, about the building of the Turkestan-Siberian railway, inspired him to make a 16mm documentary, Canary Bananas (1935), the first of several amateur films made while still a schoolboy.
In 1938, after visiting the Galápagos Islands to film an ornithological expedition, he moved to the US to read physics at Harvard. After war service as a combat photographer in China and Burma, he worked as cinematographer and associate producer on Louisiana Story (1948), the last film by the veteran documentary director Robert Flaherty.
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Thereafter Leacock edited and photographed several documentaries, before writing, directing and editing Toby and the Tall Corn (1954), a made-for-television account of a travelling tent theatre in Missouri. His mature style was formed in that decade, when he established a professional partnership with the photojournalist Robert Drew. Drew and Leacock shared an assumption that documentary should strive for neutrality, recording reality and avoiding editorial comment. To fulfil this aim, they worked to develop a light, silent, hand-held camera and a self-powered tape recorder. To synchronise the two, Leacock devised a system using Bulova watches.
The first important fruit of this collaboration, Primary, followed the 1960 Wisconsin primary election in which John F. Kennedy defeated his main rival within the Democratic Party, Hubert Humphrey. Leacock, with several colleagues including Albert Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker, served as cinematographer, while Drew wrote and produced. The team again followed President Kennedy in Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), which focused on JFK’s efforts to enforce racial integration at the University of Alabama, despite opposition from the state governor, George Wallace.
In the meantime, Leacock had visited India to film Jawaharlal Nehru as he led his Congress party to a third election victory in 1962. In the same year he worked on one of the outstanding achievements of Direct Cinema, The Chair, which followed the efforts of a lawyer to save a convicted client from the electric chair. However, by the mid-1960s, Leacock’s partnership with Drew was under strain, and he established a production company with Pennebaker. His first film for the new company, Happy Mother’s Day (1963), was a satirical examination of the circumstances surrounding the birth of quintuplets in South Dakota, and it won prizes at Venice and Leipzig. Leacock went on to work on a 1966 documentary about the Ku Klux Klan, and on Chiefs (1969), about a convention of police chiefs at Waikiki Beach, Honolulu.
His most famous collaboration with Pennebaker was Monterey Pop (1968), a concert film that recorded the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, featuring Jimi Hendrix and Simon and Garfunkel. Ironically, Leacock preferred classical music, as evidenced by his films about Stravinsky and the pianist Van Cliburn, and his collaboration on filmed segments used in opera performances by the Boston Opera Company. Decades later, he would travel to Ekaterinberg in Russia to make A Musical Adventure in Siberia (1996), documenting the first performance of Prokofiev’s Eugene Onegin, a symphonic drama banned in 1937 under Stalin.
In 1968 Pennebaker and Leacock collaborated with the French New Wave film-maker Jean-Luc Godard on One AM (One American Movie). After Godard abandoned the project Pennebaker reshaped the footage into One PM (One Parallel Movie), released in 1972. By then, however, the Leacock-Pennebaker collaboration had ended, as Leacock devoted himself increasingly to teaching, founding and serving as head of the film department at MIT. In addition, he strove to develop cheaper and more practical film-making tools.
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He continued to produce notable documentaries, including interviews with the silent-era star Louise Brooks and the film director John Huston. After his retirement from MIT in 1989, he lived in Paris, where he met the filmmaker Valérie Lalonde. He collaborated with her on such films as Les oeufs à la coque (1991) and Les vacances de Monsieur Leacock (1992), and she was his partner in the last decades of his life.
Leacock’s elder brother, Philip, who died in 1990, was also a film-maker, albeit of fiction films. Richard’s first marriage, to the anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock, ended in divorce; she died in 1987. They had two sons and two daughters. He married secondly Marilyn West Leacock, who died in 1980; they had one daughter. He is survived by Lalonde and his five children. His son Robert and daughter Victoria also worked in documentary film.
Richard Leacock, documentary film-maker, was born on July 18, 1921. He died on March 23, 2011, aged 89