‘I wanted to get to the soul’: Dick Fontaine on his approach to documentary filmmaking
20 Feb 2021
A director of over 40 films, Dick Fontaine’s subjects have included The Beatles, Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman. (Supplied)
Leading British documentary film director Dick Fontaine celebrates his 82nd birthday in Durban next month, where he has lived for about a year.
Fontaine introduced “the techniques of direct cinema to British television”, according to the Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley Collection at the Harvard Film Archive. Starting as cinéma verité “truth cinema” in France in the late 1950s, direct cinema revitalised documentary filmmaking in the United Kingdom.