No filmmaker has changed his branch of cinema more drastically, enduringly, or quietly than did Robert Drew, who died yesterday, at the age of ninety. I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing him, at IFC Center, in 2011, during a series of memorial screenings for the documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock, because Drew (or, I should say, Bob) brought Leacock in on the project that quickly proved epochal: the documentary “Primary,” shot in 1960, which recorded John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey’s campaigning in Wisconsin for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination.
Seeing the film now, it looks far less revolutionary than in fact it was—because more or less everything that Drew and his associates did has become standard procedure in documentaries since then. The shorthand for what he came up with is "cinéma vérité" (a term coined by the French sociologist and filmmaker Edgar Morin around the time that “Primary” came out, but one that Drew borrows in this 2001 essay about his work).
What’s crucial about Drew’s career is that the way that he worked, and the films that he made, arose from an idea that he pursued to its logical extreme. Beginning with an extended contemplation of the very nature of documentary filmmaking, he undertook a complex reconception of the equipment that was used to make documentaries, and followed it up with the actual meticulous production of new equipment to make possible the films he envisioned. In effect, Drew was a one-man cinematic supply chain—critic, theoretician, fund-raiser, manufacturer, producer, director. He took upon himself the entire range of activities required in the creation of a movie. (He himself negotiated, first with Kennedy and then with Humphrey, for the access needed to film “Primary.”) By the time that Drew and his collaborators began following the candidates, in mid-1960, he had essentially already wrought, under the radar, the transformations to documentary filmmaking that orient the form to this day. The movie wasn’t superfluous—far from it. It was the tip of the iceberg, the crowning proof of a set of worked-out theorems.
And what collaborators! The team that worked on “Primary” included Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles, all of whom, of course, became major filmmakers of the era in their own right. Here’s a clip from a documentary by the late Peter Wintonick, “Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment,” in which Leacock describes the camera work that connected him to Drew in the first place:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TsAnUmIzYY
Later in the same clip, Drew talks about the dissatisfaction with his own work that led him to a critical discovery, which he is shown explaining in an interview recorded in 1962:
That turn of phrase—“personal experience”—is crucial. The personal experience that’s implicated in Drew’s films is that of the filmmakers themselves. Though the filmmakers aren’t seen onscreen, their connection to the subjects being filmed—their physical presence in the field of action—is palpable. Wintonick, illustrating his interview with Maysles, includes an amazing shot that Maysles realized for “Primary,” one that remains jolting in its sense of physical proximity to its subject, J.F.K. The personal experience of the filmmaker becomes that of the viewer; the filmmaker stands not between the viewer and the subject but for the viewer, whose own virtual space becomes that of the action. In the clip above, Maysles talks about what went into the shot:
Drew worked on a grand historical scale, deploying the big resources of big companies to film matters of vast political import. Among the things that his equipment and his methods made possible were a pair of films about the civil-rights movement, “The Children Were Watching” and “Crisis” (the latter of which examines Kennedy’s decision to deploy federal troops to integrate the University of Alabama), as well as “The Chair,” about the legal struggle on behalf of a prisoner on death row. All three are among the greatest American political films ever made. They display a prescient sense of the currents of history unfolding in the intimate sphere, the dependence of great historical moments on the wise judgment and decisive action of their ever-so-human participants.
While no overt ideology conditioned Drew’s cinematic theories, these theories nevertheless embody a crucial ideal—in effect, a political morality in which personal implication and risk go hand in hand with character. Drew himself was an exemplar of his own morality: his artistic conception, journalistic vision, and personal authority will long endure.
