The revolutionary film-maker DA Pennebaker, with his passion for music and political drama, invented tropes, ideas and procedures which became almost invisibly embedded in pop culture.



When Saturday Night Live did a sketch with Hillary Clinton at the door of a state “elector”, mutely begging her to vote for anyone but Donald Trump with a series of flashcards, of course everyone saw the reference to Love Actually. But the great meme-ancestor of that moment was Bob Dylan standing in an alley behind the Savoy Hotel in London in Pennebaker’s classic 1967 film Dont Look Back and with deadpan aplomb unveiling a succession of flashcards to Subterranean Homesick Blues with key lyrics punningly misspelt (and he did the whole thing in one continuous take - not easy).

It was a great comic turn; but what was the joke? Was it that the audience were like bad actors who needed cue cards to understand and play their part? Was it that flashcards, a staple of America’s grade school education, were going to explain to uncool hard-of-hearing oldsters what Dylan’s lyrics were and what they meant - or what the 60s counter-culture meant? Or just cheekily mocking their need for an explanation?

Dont Look Back is great movie showing Bob Dylan’s 1965 British concert tour with all its thrilling immediacy, intimacy and fluidity - and its sense of a wittily contrived set-piece; it was a 60s classic which nonetheless looked forward, setting the scene (paradoxically) for the Brit rock invasion of the United States, for pop videos, concert movies (with a behind-the-scenes language that helped underpin mockumentary comedy) our ideas of celebrity and its pressures, even reality TV. And it was Pennebaker who in a later Bob Dylan film, No Direction Home, captured the key moment at his concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall when a folk purist in the audience yelled “Judas!” because Dylan was using electric not acoustic guitars, to which an affronted Dylan appeared to snap to his band “Play fuckin’ loud” and launched into an overpowering version of Like a Rolling Stone.



Pennebaker imported the candour and panache of Life magazine photojournalism into the cinema, using a portable 16mm sound camera he had designed, and he himself said he wanted something other than a straightforward look at Dylan as a musician “because everyone’s a musician in the shower”. Pennebaker was famously plugged into the 60s zeitgeist and arguably helped popularise the whole idea of a zeitgeist by combining an interest in rock music – in his encounters with legends including Dylan, Lennon, Joplin, Hendrix and Bowie – with the backstage drama of insurgent political celebrities like John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton.



In Primary (1960) he followed the Democratic primary campaigns of Hubert Humphrey and Kennedy and set a new gold-standard for authenticity and getting up close and personal in that classic Pennebaker location: the hotel room. The title itself seemed to play on the film’s radicalism and its need to get back to basics.

Later, in the The War Room (1993), co-directed with his wife Chris Hegedus – the movie that got them an Oscar nomination – Pennebaker showed the battle to elect Bill Clinton to the White House, its stars being the campaign managers James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. The drama, in all its spin and sweat, nonetheless absorbed the Clintonian idealism of the time - and helped inspire Aaron Sorkin’s TV drama The West Wing, which began in 1999.

Just as he embraced the 60s spirit with Dont Look Back, The War Room epitomised the 90s restless liberalism. Again and again, Pennebaker captured lightning in a bottle of his own invention.