R.I.P., D.A. Pennebaker

The influential documentarian D.A. Pennebaker died at age 94. NPR has a fine overview of his career. Pennebaker is known for his seminal works including "Don't Look Back," which traveled to London with Bob Dylan in 1965, and "The War Room," which chronicled the Clinton presidential campaign of 1992.

"Don't Look Back" opens with what is perhaps the first consciously produced music video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues."  The L.A. Times reports this recollection:

“We were down at the Cedar Tavern [in New York] and he [Dylan] said, ‘I was thinking of making up these cards and holding them up and running them like for a song,’ where the words would be the words for the song,” Pennebaker told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin. “It would be a takeoff of what the Beatles had to do when they had to play the playback, which was demeaning. They accepted it because they were told you had to do this to sell records…. Dylan wanted to put a little needle into that, by doing it as a gag.”

 Here's the video: