The Real Thing: Filmmaker Richard Leacock
Source: By CHRIS JANCELEWICZ
Posted: 04/17/08 4:24PM
Filed Under: Hot Docs 2008
In this day and age, when most of us contemplate documentary filmmaking, our minds automatically jump to people like Michael Moore. If we try to reach further back, we might even come up with Jacques Cousteau or Robert Flaherty. But one man who consistently falls off the radar is someone considered to be one of the grandfathers of the modern documentary and direct cinema, Richard Leacock.
At this year's Hot Docs Film Festival, the Board of Directors is honouring him as the recipient of its outstanding achievement award, something long overdue to a man who has contributed so much to the genre. And to say that Leacock is an outstanding man is an understatement. On the phone from Paris, the now-87-year-old was upbeat, chipper, and cracking jokes about his own impact on filmmaking.
"I had an enormous influence," he says, his smile practically audible over the phone. "A lot of it came from working with [Robert] Flaherty. Everything they teach you at film school is wrong, I think."
If anybody knows the intricate formula of a documentary film, it's Leacock. Born in London, he grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands. At age 8, he was sent back to boarding school in England. His friends consistently asked questions about the Islands, and Leacock found himself hard-pressed to explain them.
"Then, one day, when I was 11, something very exceptional happened," he said, talking about a day at school. "They showed a 35-mm Russian documentary about the building of the Trans-Siberian railway. I was astounded. I said 'I can do that, I just need a movie camera.'"
A cinematographer was born. At the age of 14, Leacock made his first documentary with a 16-mm camera that he bought for 7 pounds. Called Canary Bananas, it documented the banana tree plantation where his father worked. After its production, he never stopped filming, or "videoing", as Leacock referred to it.
"I was fascinated by filming, and I did a lot of it. I went to the Galapagos Islands," he said. "I went to Harvard to learn physics to learn how to make it easier to make movies. So it went on, and always the idea was to give the feeling of being there."
And that's what you'll find with his films - you feel like you're in those worlds, whether it's in Siberia rehearsing a Prokofiev symphonic drama, or in South Dakota on the trail of newly-born quintuplets. A lot of other documentarians in his day (and in modern film as well) would manipulate their subjects or stage events that never really happened, in order to make their film more interesting or dynamic to the public at large. Not so for Leacock.
"That's what filmmaking is about - relating to people. Don't wait…don't have them talk to the camera. That's what I want[ed] to avoid," he says. "We never used tripods or boom microphones. All my rules were stuck to. We never interviewed anybody. We simply observed."
Nowhere is the observation aspect of his filmmaking more noticeable than in the two political movies Primary and Crisis. Primary follows John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin presidential primary of 1960. One shot in particular follows Kennedy through a throng of people to the stage, with the camera strategically hovering about two feet behind his head. It's almost as if we're inside it.
Crisis looks at the de-segregation of Alabama universities in 1963, and how then-President Kennedy and then-attorney general Robert F. Kennedy dealt with the situation. In a type of shot that will more than likely never be filmed again, Leacock is in the White House with JFK and RFK as they debate and ponder the situation.
"I literally sat in the corner, didn't say a word, and just kept on filming," says Leacock. "You could really see how things progressed."
And that's really the beauty of Leacock's work. It's not just a subject presented, dissected, and left to debate. It's more of an intricate exploration of a subject, without any falsity or grandiosity, and we are exposed to its bits and parts instead of a bland whole.
In one of Leacock's films, A Stravinsky Portrait, legendary composer Igor Stravinsky states that "[He] likes to compose music more than [he] likes music itself." Similarly, and perhaps subconsciously, Leacock mirrors that sentiment.
"I find rehearsals more interesting than the performance," he says. "All the fights and arguments."
While watching his films, I kept thinking of an open watch, with the inner mechanics exposed. You may not catch a glimpse of the actual face of the watch, but you can deduce how it functions and as a result, can almost picture the watch without it. That will always be Leacock to me - explorer of the unknown, patient and ready, waiting for that true glimpse, the one reality, to walk in front of his lens.
Richard Leacock will be honoured at the Hot Docs Awards Presentation on Friday, April 25 at the Bader Theatre.
Leacock Film Screenings:
THE CHAIR and CHIEFS
Bader, Friday Apr. 18, 11:30 am
MONTEREY POP
Bloor, Saturday Apr. 19, 11:59 pm
A MUSICAL ADVENTURE IN SIBERIA and CANARY BANANAS
Innis, Saturday Apr.19, 5:00 pm
PRIMARY and CRISIS
ROM, Friday Apr. 25, 9:15 pm
A STRAVINSKY PORTRAIT and JAZZ DANCE
ROM, Saturday Apr. 26, 4:45 pm
TOBY AND THE TALL CORN and HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY
Al Green, Sunday Apr. 20, 9:15 pm
MAIDSTONE (by Norman Mailer)
Jackman Hall, Thursday, Apr. 24, 7:00 pm
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