Full Frame honors the work of legendary filmmaker Richard Leacock. In A Stravinsky Portrait, Richard Leacock captures the composer conducting rehearsals, conversing at home, and otherwise going about his daily life. The film is defined by a pervasive sense of intimacy, generated by subtle innovations, such as Leacock’s whispering in the viewer’s ear.

Colleagues D A Pennebaker, Robert Drew, Albert Maysles, and Ross McElwee will join Full Frame in recognizing Leacock’s outstanding career as a director and cinematographer. Leacock has described his process of filmmaking as a search rather than a pre-determined process. This search for “the essence” contained in the recorded images requires the filmmaker’s involvement in every stage of production—a lesson Leacock learned from working with Robert Flaherty. Leacock’s visionary filmmaking seeks to capture the essence of the places and the people he comes into contact with and share these with audiences by making visual sequences. Leacock insists that he does not aim merely to record images and create “films” for the widest audience possible. His films demonstrate a gift: the ability to allow the subjects before his camera to reveal themselves, their inner dilemmas and longings, their own truths and their own lies. It is this quality of Leacock’s filmmaking that makes his work truly unique and extraordinary. The resulting films involve rather than inform the audience.