Richard Leacock

Richard Leacock, who died on March 23 aged 89, was a British-born pioneer of the documentary film movement known as cinéma-vérité. 

Richard Leacock (left) with Robert Flaherty Photo: KOBAL COLLECTION

 

The phrase was coined in the early 1960s to describe a form of “fly-on-the-wall” film making, shorn of interviews, lights and preachy voice-over, that seemed to promise a true record of events. Leacock was one of a team of film-makers (including DA Pennebaker and Albert Maysles) who, in the early 1960s, devised the portable, hand-held cameras and synchronous sound equipment that formed the basis for the movement. It was as much ideological as technological, championing non-judgmental observation as the purest form of documentation.

Leacock made his mark in America with Primary (1960, with DA Pennebaker). Using the new lightweight equipment, they gained unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to the young Massachusetts senator John F Kennedy’s presidential campaign against Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin. “On the first day Bob Drew, Al Maysles and I walked into the photo studio where Kennedy was having his portrait taken and just shot what happened — they ignored us,” Leacock recalled.

Primary established a new model for film-making which paved the way for new wave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut and a later generation of reality TV programme makers.

Of course, the notion of a neutral cameraman dispassionately recording unselfconscious happenings has come to be seen as an illusion by a more cynical age. And, to his credit, Leacock never made grandiose claims for his art: “All I ever wanted,” he explained to an interviewer, “was to give the impression of being there.” The phrase cinéma-vérité, he observed, “was coined as a jokey reference to Dziga Vertov’s Kino Pravda, which was itself a complete manipulation. It meant nothing then and it means nothing now.”

Richard Leacock was born in London on July 18 1921 and grew up on his father’s banana plantation in the Canary Islands. He was educated at Dartington Hall, where, aged 14, he made his first documentary film, Canary Bananas, to show his friends what it was like to live on a banana farm.

After leaving school in 1938 he spent a year as a cameraman on the ornithologist David Lack’s expedition to the Canary and Galapagos Islands. He then moved to America, where he took a degree in Physics at Harvard and served for three years as a combat cameraman in the US Army in Burma and China. After the war he worked as a cameraman on Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story.
The first film he wrote, directed and edited himself was Toby and the Tall Corn (1954), about a travelling theatre in Missouri. Shown on American television, it brought him into contact with Robert Drew, an editor at Life magazine who was looking for a more cinematic approach to television reportage. In 1959 they went into partnership with DA Pennebaker, Shirley Clarke and Albert Maysles to find a way of making films with more mobile equipment. Pennebaker developed the revolutionary portable 16mm cine camera, while Leacock hit on the idea of using a system of Bulova watches to keep film and speech in sync.
After Primary, Leacock and Pennebaker worked on many more documentaries, notably A Stravinsky Portrait and Monterey Pop, an account of the 1967 rock festival featuring The Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix and The Who. For many critics, however, one of Leacock’s finest films was his 1961 documentary Mooney vs Fowle/Football, a penetrating study of the American dedication to winning as evinced in the lives of two rival high-school football coaches in Miami.
In 1968 Leacock was invited to join Ed Pincus in creating a new film school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
After retiring from MIT, Leacock moved to Paris, where he married Valerie Lalonde, with whom he made a number of films.
Richard Leacock is survived by his wife and by five children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/8404794/Richard-Leacock.html