Audient Authentic: Primary

This is the seventh in my 2020 monthly series watching classic documentaries, going chronologically.

And now, on to the 1960s.

Primary seemed like a good 4th of July viewing. To the extent that I even wanted to celebrate Independence Day this year -- it doesn't feel like a very good time to be an American -- at least it could help me look back to a time when American politics felt a bit more innocent. Then again, society on the whole was probably worse, considering that the racism that is afflicting us today was only bolder and more socially acceptable back then.

Anyway, let's not go down that road.

It makes for a good 2020 viewing as well, as it's an election year, and the 60th anniversary of this 1960 movie.

Primary is a bit of a primer, so to speak, for one of the first dozen or so documentaries I ever saw, 1993's The War Room. That went behind the scenes of the Clinton campaign, and D.A. Pennebaker was one of its co-directors. Pennebaker will get a full spotlight in the movie I watch in August. For Primary, he gets credit as a sound recordist, photographer and sequence editor. (Albert Maysles was also a camerman on the film.)

It's interesting to see how Primary is marketed now, as a document of John F. Kennedy's rise to national prominence. At the time it was made, it was equally an examination of both Kennedy and his Wisconsin primary opponent, Hubert Humphrey, the perennial bridesmaid who would also lose to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign. In fact, in a way, this is more Humphrey's movie, as he was willing to let director Robert Drew and his crew into very intimate spaces with him -- even inside a car transporting him between campaign stops in Wisconsin. He's the one willing to let Drew and company really peek behind closed doors, perhaps because he didn't have that much to hide with his glad-handing and folksy aphorisms.

Kennedy is by far the more remote figure here. In trying to provide parallel coverage of the two candidates as the narrative progresses, Drew has to settle for similar access to Kennedy that any other media had -- the candidate pushing through adoring crowds at events open to the press, for example. There's even some footage of Kennedy giving a speech where they just film the TV screen, a prototypical symbol of their lack of any real access.

Until the end, I should say. Drew and company do get behind closed doors with Kennedy when he is waiting out the results on primary night, as the various voting districts of Wisconsin are reporting their vote tallies. You do see some stray, unrehearsed comments here, though nothing that reflects badly on him.

Still, I couldn't help marvel over the similarities between him and Clinton in this respect. Although Clinton's campaign is to be credited for giving Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus such unfettered access in The War Room, the candidate himself did not appear on camera very much. It's almost as though Clinton modeled his own participation on his hero Jack Kennedy's involvement in Primary.

Primary is a useful way to get to know Hubert Humphrey, though. Before this I'd had no experience with him, and in fact, I had to google him to be reminded what his political fortunes were both before and after this. He seems like quite a likeable fellow, which I think may have been the take on him: a bit soft and folksy and unable to ultimately capture anyone's political imagination. (He was awarded the 1968 Democratic nomination for president despite not winning a single primary.)

That last parenthetical comment provides a good bridge to my other major takeaway from the film. Near the beginning, when speaking to a group of voters, Kennedy talks about how Wisconsin is one of the few states in which citizens' preferences are polled in this format. I had always assumed primaries dated back to the start of the union, or close to it anyway. As it turns out, that aforementioned chaotic 1968 election was the impetus for primaries to become more mandatory across all the states, in terms of the process of accruing delegates. By Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, primaries were still only held in 40 of the 50 states.

The footage of the candidates interacting with voters and radio show hosts was not, in itself, really groundbreaking for me to watch in 2020. Though it certainly would have been 60 years ago, and for that I credit the filmmakers.

If my ultimate takeaway from Primary was to be a little underwhelmed by it, that could be because the result of the film itself is a bit underwhelming. Although Kennedy wins more delegates than Humphrey, it barely seems as though the April 5th Wisconsin primary is even a turning point in the campaign. In fact, someone states -- possibly the narrator -- that all this work and campaigning will basically end up being for naught, as it will leave the candidates in more or less the same respective positions as before they came to Wisconsin.

I did like some of the filmmaking choices that told a different story, though, specifically the camera pulling away from Humphrey's campaign bus as it falls behind into the distance, and his campaign theme song playing out the end of the movie.

In August, I expect to be moving on to Pennebaker's Bob Dylan documentary, Don't Look Back.