D.A. Pennebaker

D. A. Pennebaker
Pennebaker in New York City in February 2007
Born	Donn Alan Pennebaker (1925-07-15) July 15, 1925 (age 91) Evanston, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Documentarian, author
Years active	1960s–present
Spouse(s)	Chris Hegedus
Website	www.phfilms.com

Donn Alan "D. A." Pennebaker (/ˈpɛnibeɪkə/, born July 15, 1925) is an American documentary filmmaker and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema. Performing arts and politics are his primary subjects. In 2013, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award or "lifetime Oscar".

Pennebaker has been described as "arguably the pre-eminent chronicler of sixties counterculture".

Pennebaker (known as "Penny" to his friends) was born in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Lucille Levick (née Deemer) and John Paul Pennebaker, who was a commercial photographer. Pennebaker served in the Navy and later worked as an engineer, founding Electronics Engineering (the makers of the first computerized airline reservation system) before beginning his film career.

After falling under the influence of experimental filmmaker Francis Thompson, Pennebaker directed his first film, Daybreak Express, in 1953. Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording of the same name, the five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City is the earliest known example of Pennebaker's penchant for blending together documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques. According to Pennebaker, Ellington responded favourably to the film.

In 1959, Pennebaker joined the equipment-sharing Filmakers' [sic] Co-op and co-founded Drew Associates with Richard Leacock and former LIFE magazine editor and correspondent Robert Drew. A crucial moment in the development of Direct Cinema, the collective produced documentary films for clients like ABC News (for their television series, Close-up) and Time-Life Broadcast (for their syndicated television series, Living Camera). Their first major film, Primary (1960), documented John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's respective campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary election. Drew, Leacock and Pennebaker, as well as photographers Albert Maysles, Terrence McCartney Filgate and Bill Knoll, all filmed the campaigning from dawn to midnight over the course of five days. Widely considered to be the first candid and comprehensive look at the day-by-day events of a Presidential race, it was the first film in which the sync sound camera could move freely with characters throughout a breaking story, a major technical achievement that laid the groundwork for modern-day documentary filmmaking. It would later be selected as an historic American film for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1990.