Xixax Film Forum

So I'm getting ready to watch The Horse's Mouth on DVD, and I'm made aware that upon the film's first run, they showed a short beforehand: D.A. Pennebaker's Daybreak Express, which is included on the DVD. This was apparently Pennebaker's first film. It's about 5 minutes, set to Duke Ellington's music, and was shot from the 3rd Street El in NYC before they tore it down.

It's fucking gorgeous.

Any fan of Terence Malick, David Gordon Green, Lynne Ramsay, etc, should find a way to see it like, yesterday.

Has anyone else had this experience?

The only other Pennebaker film I've seen is Depeche Mode 101, but now I feel inspired to seek out more of his stuff. Any recommendations?

yep, beautiful use of color and silhouettes.  i didn't know it was on the dvd when i rented it so it was a nice surprise for me.

Never really gone, Pennebaker changed the way cinema engages with artifice.

A Few Riffs on Penny (https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6559-a-few-riffs-for-penny)

QuotePennebaker’s most daring and powerful moments come when he is not content to merely observe phenomena but transgresses the strictures of documentary, finding within the shot jarring, poetic counterpoints to the subject he’s filming. Direct Cinema proposed a visual language perfectly suited to reflecting the accelerated, mass-mediated landscape of the latter part of the twentieth century. Within that genre, Pennebaker’s films, as director Martin Scorsese said of them, take us places we have never gone before “factually, cinematically, and poetically.” There’s immediate parity between the radicality of Pennebaker’s camera work and what he’s capturing.