Richard Leacock

Early life and career

Leacock was born in London on 18 July 1921, the younger brother of film director and producer Philip Leacock. Leacock grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands until being sent to boarding schools in England at the age of eight.

He took up photography with a glass plate camera, built a darkroom and developed his pictures, but was not satisfied. At age 11 he was shown a silent film Turk-Sib about the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He was stunned, and said to himself: "All I need is a cine-camera and I can make a film that shows you what it is like to be there."

At the age of 14, he wrote, directed, filmed and edited Canary Bananas (10 min. 16 mm, silent), a film about growing bananas, but it did not, in his opinion, give you "the feeling of being there".

He was educated at Dartington Hall School from 1934 to 1938, alongside Robert Flaherty's daughters; David Lack (Life of the Robin) taught biology at the school. After filming Lack's expedition to the Canary and Galapagos Islands (1938–39), Leacock moved to the US and majored in physics at Harvard to master the technology of filmmaking. Meanwhile, he worked as cameraman and assistant editor on other people's films, notably To Hear Your Banjo Play (1941)—Leacock filmed a folk music festival atop a mountain in south Virginia where there was no electricity, using a 35 mm studio camera and 35 mm optical film sound recorder with batteries in a large truck, a rare achievement at that time. He then spent three years as a combat photographer in Burma and China, followed by 14 months as cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1946–48).

In the meantime, Leacock had married Eleanor "Happy" Burke in 1941. Daughter of the world-famous literary critic, philosopher, and writer Kenneth Burke, she had studied at Radcliffe College, but graduated from Barnard in New York City. The Leacocks had four children together: Elspeth, Robert, David and Claudia. After ethnographic fieldwork with the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) of Labrador, Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) earned her doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University (1952). Ten years later, after her marriage broke up, she went on to become a pioneering feminist anthropologist.

In 1963, he married Marilyn Pedersen West, a painter, writer, and fashion model, who worked for social causes. They had a daughter, Victoria. In 1970 they separated, and remained separated until her death in 1980.

Documentaries

Many relatively conventional jobs followed, until 1954, when Leacock was asked to make a reportage on a traveling tent theater in Missouri: the first film he had written directed, photographed, and edited himself since Canary Bananas.

This film, Toby and the Tall Corn, went on the American cultural TV program, Omnibus, in prime time and brought him into contact with Robert Drew, an editor at Life magazine in search of a less verbal approach to television reportage. Another new contact, Roger Tilton, wanted to film an evening of people dancing to Dixieland music spontaneously. Leacock filmed Jazz Dance for him, using hand held camera techniques.

Leacock's search for high quality, mobile, synchronous equipment to facilitate observation was ongoing. Along with fellow film maker Robert Drew, he developed the method of separating the wire from the microphones and the cameras. Leacock explains the problem with Louisiana Story and pre-synchronized sound filmmakers:Like all documentary filmmakers, he [Flaherty] had an identity problem in that period. They couldn't deal with sync sound. It tied them down. Made them rigid… Except for the drilling sequence, which was shot with sound, it was essentially a silent film. And it wasn't till 1960, when we were filming Primary, that we were able to jump into the new world.Frustrated with the obtrusiveness of the process of synching footage and sound, Leacock knew there had to be a way to separate the two. In 1958, the idea became obvious. "We had to have a mobile quartz camera, and we had to have a mobile quartz tape recorder, and we couldn't have cables connecting them." Leacock took the same design as in an Accutron watch and put it in the camera. This allowed proper synchronisation. They then took their design to RCA who showed interest; and after receiving money from LIFE magazine, Drew and Leacock were able to make the first model and shoot their film Primary. As Leacock pointed out, “nothing has really changed since then, I mean it is a little bit better… basically the same thing." Brian Winston describes Leacock as the father of modern documentary because of this development.

"He was the catalyst for the development of the modern documentary, liberating the camera from the tripod and abandoning the tyranny of perfectly stable, perfectly lit shot—as well as the straitjacket of ‘voice of god’ commentary."

Winston goes on to note that this new mode of film-making essentially dominated over any other style for “a quarter of a century." When most people think of the word “documentary,” they think of the observational mode that Leacock, Drew, and Pennebaker all played such a huge role in creating.

Preservation

The Academy Film Archive preserved On the Pole, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, and The Chair by Richard Leacock.

Selected filmography

1935 Canary Bananas (8 min.)

1941 To Hear Your Banjo Play (20 min., dir. Charles Korvin (Geza Karpathy))

1948 Louisiana Story (cameraman)

1948 Mount Vernon and The New Frontier (cameraman)

1949 Earthquake in Ecuador (director cameraman)

1950 Head of the House (writer-director-editor)

1952 The Lonely Night (dir. Irving Jacoby, filmed by Leacock)

1954 Jazz Dance (20min., cameraman)

1954 Toby and the Tall Corn (30 min., writer-director-camera-editor for Omnibus)

1956 A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp

1957 How the F-100 Got Its Tail (20 min., for Omnibus)

1957-9 Frames of Reference, Coulomb's Law, A Magnet Laboratory, Crystals

1958 Bernstein in Israel (30 min., Omnibus)

1959 Bernstein in Moscow (55 min.)

1959 Bull Fight at Malaga (20 min.)

1960 Primary (30 min.)

1960 Yank! No! (55 min., Close-Up, ABC)

1960 Kenya: Land of the White Ghost (Close-Up, ABC)

Films about Leacock

Ein Film für Bossak und Leacock (1984) – German documentarist Klaus Wildenhahn's homage to Richard Leacock and Jerzy Bossak

Ricky on Leacock by Jane Weiner, a JDB Films and Striana co-production (work-in-progress)

How to Smell A Rose: A visit with Ricky Leacock in Normandy (2014) by Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht (US-France, 65 min.)

The Camera That Changed The World – a 59 minutes film by Mandy Chang