D. A. Pennebaker was a pioneer of the direct cinema documentary movement in the early 1960s, which sought to use the new technology of handheld, mobile cameras and synchronous sound to film in a strictly observational, spontaneous style. The movement first came to prominence in 1960 with Primary (Robert Drew, 1960), an account of the Democratic Party’s Presidential Primary contest between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy.
The movement’s ontology of realism reflected André Bazin’s case for a cinema of realism, deriving from the camera’s mechanical, truth-capturing qualities, resulting in “an image of the world [being] created automatically without the creative intervention of man” (10)
Tim O’Farrell ‘No Direction Home:’ (18/02/2006)