WASHINGTON — Academy Award-winning filmmaker Murray Lerner, best known for his music documentaries, especially capturing the moment Bob Dylan “went electric,” died Saturday. He was 90.
Lerner’s best-known work was likely the 1967 film “Festival!,” which portrayed the sprawling, vital Newport Folk Festivals of 1963-1965. He depicted the short, stormy 1965 Newport performance in which the erstwhile troubadour Bob Dylan, who just two years previously had played at Newport with an acoustic guitar in a work shirt and sang about coal miners, took the stage in a leather jacket, brandishing a Stratocaster and fronting a full-on rock band. He sneered “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and set the musical world on fire.
Lerner caught that moment, but he also depicted the obscure old-style folk singers, bluesmen and traditional musicians who were part of the Newport mix. He also captured the power that Newport had as a gathering place for disaffected young people looking to create change in the world, years before the more celebrated Woodstock festival.
He was nominated for an Academy Award for “Festival!” He won an Oscar in 1980 for the documentary “From Mao to Mozart,” which followed Isaac Stern’s visit to China after Mao’s death.
Lerner also directed the filming of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, from which he made the 1996 documentary “Message to Love.” In addition, the complete performances of many groups from the festival — Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, The Who, Jethro Tull, The Moody Blues, Leonard Cohen, Free and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
His production office, Murray Lerner Film Productions, said in a statement that he had just finished work on a documentary on Joni Mitchell’s appearance there, and was about to make an expanded version of “Message to Love.”
Lerner also made nonmusical documentaries such as “To Be a Man,” an examination of the educational system at Yale, and “The Return,” which his office claimed was the first film to depict the process of physical rehabilitation.
Later, he made the short film “Sea Dream,” which was shown as an attraction in amusement parks worldwide, and the 1982 Disney film “Magic Journeys,” which his office called “pioneering in its use of computer animation and blue-screen effects.”
Lerner graduated Harvard in 1948, majoring in poetry and creating a film production society, as there was no film school. Perhaps because of that do-it-yourself beginning, he taught himself all aspects of film.
“He was a complete filmmaker,” his son, Noah Lerner, told Variety. “A cinematographer first and foremost, but someone who also wrote, edited, produced, and directed.”
In 2007, he released “Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror,” a collection of all the footage of Dylan’s three 1960s performances at Newport.
In a 2014 interview, Lerner said he went to Newport thinking he was on a gig to shoot some footage for the festival foundation’s archive. But when he saw the music, and the attitude of the young people in the audience, he realized he was looking at the beginnings of a counterculture, and he began to document it.
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute; there’s something going on here that’s beyond entertainment,’” he said. “It was growing in popularity … and it was being used to create a philosophy and a cultural movement. I thought I could make a very broad film about the meaning of that movement.”
In “The Other Side of the Mirror,” he said of hearing Dylan’s electric 1965 performance, “it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.” He added, “I really thought it was the wave of the future … and it was.”
Variety reports that a restored version of “Festival!” will be released through the Criterion Collection next week.
