Richard Leacock

Richard Leacock (18 July 1921 – 23 March 2011) was a British-born documentary film director and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema and Cinéma vérité.

Leacock was born in London on 18 July 1921, the younger brother of film director and producer Philip Leacock. Leacock grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands until being sent to boarding schools in England at the age of eight.

He took up photography with a glass plate camera, built a darkroom and developed his pictures, but was not satisfied. At age 11 he was shown a silent film Turk-Sib about the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He was stunned, and said to himself: "All I need is a cine-camera and I can make a film that shows you what it is like to be there."

At the age of 14 he wrote, directed, filmed and edited Canary Bananas (10 min. 16mm, silent), a film about growing bananas, but it did not, in his opinion, give you "the feeling of being there".

He was educated at Dartington Hall School from 1934 to 1938, alongside Robert Flaherty's daughters, and where David Lack (Life of the Robin) taught biology.

Having filmed in the Canary Islands and then in the Galapagos Islands (1938–39) for ornithologist David Lack's expedition, he moved to the US and majored in physics at Harvard to master the technology of filmmaking. Meanwhile, he worked as cameraman and assistant editor on other peoples films, notably To Hear Your Banjo Play (1941), filming a folk music festival atop a mountain in south Virginia where there was no electricity, with a 35mm studio camera and 35mm optical film sound recorder using batteries in a large truck, a rare achievement at that time. Three years as a combat photographer in Burma and China were followed by 14 months as cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1946–48).

In the meantime, Leacock had married Eleanor "Happy" Burke in 1941. Daughter of the world-famous literary critic, philosopher, and writer Kenneth Burke, she had studied at Radcliffe College, but graduated from Barnard in New York City. The Leacocks had four children together: Elspeth, Robert, David and Claudia. After ethnographic fieldwork with the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) of Labrador, Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) earned her doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University (1952). Ten years later, after her marriage broke up, she went on to become a pioneering feminist anthropologist.

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