DVD of the Week: Primary

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Robert Drew, the producer of “Primary” (which I discuss in this clip), at IFC Center after a screening of two other documentaries he made in the early sixties, “The Chair” and “The Children Were Watching,” in the context of a tribute to the late filmmaker and cinematographer Richard Leacock, Drew’s prime artistic collaborator. I asked him how he connected with Leacock; the story he told the fortunate audience is, in substance, the one he wrote here, in 2001, and which concludes,

Finally, in 1960, with the camera hefted by Richard Leacock and the tape recorder carried by me, we set out to tell the story of a young man who wanted to be President. His name was John F. Kennedy, and our drama focussed on his tough primary fight in Wisconsin. Though burdensome by today’s standards, the equipment made it possible for the first time for us to move the sync sounds camera-recorder freely with characters throughout a story.

The film was called “Primary” and is regarded as the beginning of American cinéma vérité.

The film is the result of a technical advance that made possible an aesthetic revolution that is as much psychological as stylistic: the notion of documentary filmmaking as existential, as a plunging into a situation—and one that takes on a new dimension by the fact of its being recorded. Drew and Leacock, as well as the other filmmakers involved in the process (including D. A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles), weren’t detached observers; they were, inherently, a part of the unified field of action, and were intellectually, emotionally, and morally engaged in the events they were filming. If Kennedy’s election was the first political earthquake of the sixties, the filming of his campaign by Drew and Leacock was its cinematic counterpart, a homegrown documentary correlate to the French New Wave, which, for its part, gained impetus from France’s own version of cinéma vérit&#233, launched by Jean Rouch. (The transatlantic connections are another fascinating story, as seen in this transcript of a 1978 discussion with Leacock and Rouch.)

P.S. It’s worth noting, on this December 28th in the year of “Hugo,” that it’s the hundred-and-sixteenth anniversary of the first public screening of movies, by Louis and Auguste Lumière, in Paris (an event that’s dramatized in Martin Scorsese’s film). Movies were already being made elsewhere, as, here, by Thomas Edison; but, as this compendium of texts on the Lumière brothers makes clear, among their great innovations was the portability of their combination camera and projector, accounting for the documentary diversity of the short films with which they launched their invention. The birth of the cinema coincides with the birth of the primordial cinéma vérit&#233.