Vérité veteran

Richard Leacock looks back

Richard Leacock said it himself: in the '70s and '80s, when he headed the MIT Film Unit, there wasn't a lot of teaching going on. But the atmosphere was informal and pleasant, and "Ricky" (that's what everyone calls him) was, between involvements with luscious girlfriends, a generous soul who cooked legendary dinners for his students in his Somerville flat below Inman Square and lent them his 16mm Bolex to make their movies.

Those who landed at MIT were a mature, self-motivated bunch, not to mention deeply talented. What other school can claim such an honor role of now-established documentarians? Among them: Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Steve Ascher, Jeff Kreines, Joel DeMott, Michel Negroponte, Claude Chelli, Alexandra Anthony, Mark Rance.

"I never had more than 12 students at a time, 120 in all," Leacock notes. "I still know most of them."

The one-time pride of the Hub was famous when he lived here for, among a thousand accomplishments, being Robert Flaherty's cameraman for Louisiana Story (1948) and helping pioneer cinéma-vérité-style documentary with such nonfiction classics as Primary (1960), Crisis (1963), and Monterey Pop (1969). Last month I saw Leacock, now 79 and still Gregory Peck-handsome, at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic. Here's how he's describes his life since leaving MIT (where he was a Professor Emeritus) in 1988:

"After a year mucking about Paris, I fell in love with this lovely lady there, Valérie Lalonde, and we've been together ever since. She does everything I don't do -- she smokes, she drinks -- and I absolutely adore her. I started filming her, and then she started filming. Now we love shooting together. We live out in the country in Normandy, with our dog and cats and our technical equipment. It's wonderful.

"I've sold my movie camera. I'll never use film again. Digital technology is everything I ever dreamed of, and it gets better every day. We can make movies out of our own pockets. DVD is a way to show quality films. You can show them in your house and invite friends."

Leacock and Lalonde (who was also at Karlovy Vary) collaborated on an 84-minute Video 8 work for French television that he calls "the only documentary I know that is about nothing in particular, only things we like." Lalonde elaborates: "It's called Les oeufs à la coque de Richard Leacock, a cheap French pun that means `Richard Leacock's Soft-Boiled Eggs.' It's a love song to France and me, and to the French girls he had met. Little scenes of people enjoying themselves -- shopping, fishing, gossiping, mushroom hunting -- are intercut with people eating soft-boiled eggs. See Gulliver's Travels for the war between people who eat their eggs from the pointed end and those who eat them from the rounded end. Most important, indeed!"

(Yes, there's an age difference. Lalonde tells me, "I was born in 1947, he in 1921. I'm a few months younger than Ricky's oldest daughter, who says I'm the best stepmother she ever had.")

At Karlovy Vary, Leacock unveiled a rough cut of the digitally produced A Musical Adventure in Siberia, a 57-minute collaboration with his daughter, Victoria Leacock, and (typical Ricky!) a blonde, beautiful former MIT grad student, Natalya Tsarkova. Leacock explains: "Sarah Caldwell, the ex-head of the Opera Company of Boston, telephoned me with a proposal. In a Moscow library, she'd discovered a handwritten score by Prokofiev, from October 1936, of a symphonic drama with actors of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. The two men who had worked with Prokofiev were taken to a hospital and supposedly died of food poisoning. They were liquidated, and the piece was banned under Stalin. But now she would stage it in Siberia, in an industrial town that, until recently, was closed to foreigners. Could I do something about it? Video the actors and musicians? There would be no money, but we would be provided with an apartment."

Leacock and crew went to Siberia and shot vérité-style, capturing what proved a black comedy as an exasperated Caldwell tried to impose her aesthetic on a provincial group of actors and singers who were led by a temperamental dramatic director, someone too stubborn to read Prokofiev's own notes.

"We wanted originally to show the whole opera. The music is lovely, but I found the rest excruciatingly boring. There's an awful lot of talk, minuets, and dances. As for the performance, someone described it as `Shakespeare performed by truck drivers.' It wasn't the definitive version."

PBS isn't interested in broadcasting A Musical Adventure in Siberia, and it's unclear whether we'll get to see it in Boston because Caldwell is less than crazy about the candid way she was shot. Undaunted, Leacock is enmeshed in his latest, MIT-sponsored project: a series of CD-ROMs documenting his life and work: "My recipes, my wives, my children, my loves, my letters from combat in World War II, films which I made, films which influenced me, like a Russian silent film about the building of the Trans-Siberian railway. I was 11 years old when I saw it, and I said, `I can do that! All I need is a camera!' "

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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