Documentaries
Many relatively conventional jobs followed, until 1954. He was then asked to make a reportage on a traveling tent theater in Missouri: the first film that he wrote, directed, photographed and edited himself, since Canary Bananas.
This film, Toby and the Tall Corn, went on the American cultural TV program, Omnibus, in prime time and brought him into contact with Robert Drew, an editor at LIFE magazine in search for a less verbal approach to television reportage. Another new contact, Roger Tilton wanted to film an evening of people dancing to Dixieland music spontaneously. Leacock filmed Jazz Dance for him, using hand held camera techniques.
Leacock's search for high quality, mobile, synchronous equipment to facilitate observation was ongoing. Leacock along with fellow film maker Robert Drew came up with the method of separating the wire from the microphones and the cameras. Leacock explains the problem with Louisiana story and pre-synchronized sound filmmakers: "Like all documentary filmmakers, he had an identity problem in that period. They couldn’t deal with sync sound. It tied them down. Made them rigid… Except for the drilling sequence, which was shot with sound, it was essentially a silent film. And it wasn’t till 1960, when we were filming Primary, that we were able to jump into the new world" Frustrated with the obtrusiveness of the process of synching footage and sound, Leacock knew there had to be a way to separate the two. In 1958, the idea became obvious. “We had to have a mobile quartz camera, and we had to have a mobile quartz tape recorder, and we couldn’t have cables connecting them." Leacock took the same design as in an accutron watch and put it in the camera. This allowed proper synchronization. They then took their design to RCA who showed interest; and after receiving money from Life magazine, Drew and Leacock were able to make the first model. The first film: Primary. As Leacock points out, “nothing has really changed since then, I mean it is a little bit better… basically the same thing." Brian Winston describes Leacock as the father of modern documentary because of this development. "He was the catalyst for the development of the modern documentary, liberating the camera from the tripod and abandoning the tyranny of perfectly stable, perfectly lit shot – as well as the straitjacket of ‘voice of god’ commentary." Winston goes on to note that this new mode of filmmaking essentially dominated over any other style for “a quarter of a century." When most people think of the word “documentary,” they think of the observational mode that Leacock, Drew, and Pennebaker all played such a huge role in creating.
A number of films followed made by Drew, DA Pennebaker, Maysles and their associates, but the US networks were not impressed. In France at the Cinémathèque Française, when Drew and Leacock screened Primary and On the Pole, Henri Langlois introduced the films as "perhaps the most important documentaries since the brothers Lumiere". After the screening, a monk in robes came up to them and said, "You have invented a new form. Now you must invent a new grammar!"
When Drew went to work for ABC-TV, Leacock Pennebaker was formed and produced Happy Mother's Day, Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, A Stravinsky Portrait and many others ending with the remnants of Jean-Luc Godard's One A.M. - One P.M. (1972).
In 1968 he was invited to join Ed Pincus creating a new, small film school at MIT. Since 16mm filming was becoming so expensive, his group developed super-8 film sync equipment with modified mass-produced cameras that were much cheaper. Many filmmakers emerged from this program, including Ross McElwee (Sherman's March), among others.
In 1989 he retired and moved to Paris, where he met Valerie Lalonde and, together, they made Les Oeufs a la Coque de Richard Leacock (84 minutes), the first major film shot with a tiny Video-8 Handycam to be broadcast on prime-time television in France. Leacock and Lalonde continued making films of their own choice without the pressures of TV producers.
Leacock died on 23 March 2011 at age the age of 89 in Paris. Before his death, he was raising funds for his multi-format memoir, “Richard Leacock: The Feeling of Being There,” a bound paper book and digital video book set to be published by Semeïon Editions.
To Leacock, the process of filmmaking is a “process of discovery." He does not film in order to preach his own ideas and his own presuppositions; he wants to discover the world around him. To him, any type of staging makes no sense, and in the end comes across as fake. “Usually, if you wait long enough they end up doing things naturally." Leacock believes that if you wait, people will become comfortable with the camera and start acting like themselves. Cameras, he thinks, should be small and unobtrusive, though never hidden. You should shoot in sequence if you can, and without interfering or asking for actions to be repeated.. Just like in Crisis and Primary, the action only comes from observation. By simply placing a camera in a room, our eyes can be opened. His main goal was to give viewers the sense of being there.
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