Richard Leacock

Richard Leacock (born 18 July 1921, London) is a documentary film director and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema. Leacock (known to his friends as "Ricky") grew up on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands (the Leacock family, though English, have long been involved in the production of Madeira wine and bananas in the Spanish and Portuguese islands), until shipped off to School in England. He attended Bedales School, then Dartington Hall Sc... more

Richard Leacock (born 18 July 1921, London) is a documentary film director and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema. Leacock (known to his friends as "Ricky") grew up on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands (the Leacock family, though English, have long been involved in the production of Madeira wine and bananas in the Spanish and Portuguese islands), until shipped off to School in England. He attended Bedales School, then Dartington Hall School from 1929 to 1938, where he helped form a student film unit, and made his first film, Canary Island Bananas, an eight-minute silent film. He married anthropologist Eleanor Burke, Kenneth Burke's daughter in 1941. The marriage lasted until 1962. To learn more about the technical basis of filmmaking, he studied physics at Harvard University. During the war he was a combat photographer for the U.S. army. In 1946 Robert Flaherty hired him as cameraman for Louisiana Story. In the early 1960s Leacock, Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker and others... less