Jim Desmond, a close collaborator of D A Pennebaker's who was a cameraman on many of his films, passed away yesterday per social media posts. Unfortunately, his contributions have been poorly documented on IMDB (where they barely list anything at all) but he was one of the camera operators who filmed Hendrix, Janis Joplin and other rock greats in
Monterey Pop, he was one of the camera operators filming Chuck Berry, Little Richard and John Lennon in
Sweet Toronto (and it's likely at least some of his footage wound up in Wim Wenders's
Alice in the Cities and William Klein's
The Little Richard Story), filming David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars in
Ziggy Stardust, Stephen Sondheim and others in
Company (a long cherished film among musical theater aficionados that was finally brought back into circulation by Criterion), Depeche Mode in
Depeche Mode 101, and he even filmed Martin Luther King shortly before he was assassinated.
And also
Steven Wise, an animal rights advocate who was the subject of D A Pennebaker's last film. He founded the Nonhuman Rights Project in 1995 as the “only civil rights organization in the United States dedicated solely to securing rights for nonhuman animals.”
