The influential filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker has died at age 94. Among Pennebaker’s innovative achievements:
- His 1968 Monterey Pop is in the conversation as the best ever concert film, and it undeniably influenced the other great concert movies that have followed (Woodstock, The Last Waltz, Stop Making Sense). This is one of the few DVDs that I still own, for the performances by Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Canned Heat, Simon and Garfunkle, Jefferson Airplane, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Country Joe and the Fish and The Who. Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix had a guitar-destroying competition, which Hendrix, aided by lighter fluid, undeniably won. The Otis Redding set is epic.
- Pennebaker’s 1993 The War Room, about the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, sets the standard for the insider political campaign documentary.
- Pennebaker directed Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back (1967), the story of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, when he was transitioning from an acoustic to an electric artist. In the film’s opening, Pennebaker invented the music video, as Dylan holds up cards with the lyrics for Subterranean Homesick Blues.
The pump don’t work
‘Cause the vandals took the handles
