2016 Sarasota Film Festival | Pennebaker and Hegedus unlock new documentary
Michael Dunaway, the director of programming for the Sarasota Film Festival, considers D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus the greatest living team of documentary filmmakers.
Pennebaker is especially well known for such groundbreaking films as "Monterey Pop" and "Dont Look Back." He's one of the trailblazers of an intimate style of documentary filmmaking that eschews narrators and editorialization, and lets viewers form their own interpretations.
"The problem was getting anybody to look at it at the time," Pennebaker said of "Dont Look Back." The film -- which does not have an apostrophe in the title -- chronicles a very young Bob Dylan's tour of England. It opens with a sequence that has became a precursor to the music video, with Dylan holding cue cards with lyrics for "Subterranean Homesick Blues," and includes some now-famous scenes of Dylan berating and teasing reporters who had no clue about contemporary music.
"Dylan's biggest disappointment was what he called throwing diamonds at pigs," Pennebaker said.
Theater owners didn't want to book documentaries shot on 16-millimeter film by New York fimmakers, and the major newspapers didn't write about that kind of films. So "Dont Look Back" was largely relegated to independent movie houses in New York, attended by serious film buffs and written about in specialised magazines.
"We had a small audience," Pennebaker said. "But it was hard to base a career on it, which is what we were trying to do."
But that film and others gained critical momentum and ended up reshaping filmmaking, by showing that individuals, could make great films, without studios and huge amounts of money behind them.
"The idea of film as an art form like painting or music, something a person could do, that idea has become part of the culture," he said. "That's the most amazing aspect of it."
With his wife and filmmaking partner, Hegedus, Pennebaker has continued to make important films, including "The War Room,"
which Dunaway calls the perhaps best political documentary ever made.
The couple are getting ready to head down to Florida from their New York City home for the Sarasota Film Festival, for a screening of their latest film.
"Unlocking the Cage" tells the story of a Florida man named Steven Wise who has devoted much of his career to advocating for legal right for animals.
"He is an animal rights lawyer who spent 30 years fighting for the rights of animals," Hegedus said, "and he has decided that existing laws are not enough."
Wise's efforts are aimed at what Pennebaker calls "thinking" animals -- chimpanzees, great apes, dolphins, elephants, whales and others. He wants to give them a lot of the legal rights of a human being.
If that sounds farfetched, Pennebaker said, consider that corporations and even ships have the rights of a human beings, and that there have been times when a lot of human beings, including African-Americans and women, lacked a lot of the rights that most of us agree they should have.
And Wise isn't advocating for animals and humans to be regarded equally by the law.
"He's not saying chimpanzees should vote," Pennebaker said.
Pennebaker, Hegedus and Wise will all be at the Sarasota Film Festival. It will be the first visit to the festival, but Hegedus said they've heard great things about it.
"It's really growing in reputation as an interesting festival," she said. "A lot of people have told us they've had great experiences there."
Details: 6 p.m. April 4 and 10 a.m. April 10, Regal Cinemas Hollywood 20 Theater, 1993 Main St., Sarasota. Tickets: $20. Information: 941-366-6200, sarasotafilmfestival.com.
Marty Clear, features writer/columnist, can be reached at 941-708-7919. Follow twitter.com/martinclear.
This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 6:15 PM with the headline "2016 Sarasota Film Festival | Pennebaker and Hegedus unlock new documentary."