Documentary Filmmaker Albert Maysles Has Died at Age 88

Posted on Friday, March 6th, 2015 by Germain Lussier

Albert Maysles dead


Albert Maysles, the documentary filmmaker who made films such as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, has passed away at the age of 88. Maysles was a master; a true auteur in the documentary form. As a brilliant observer and cinematographer, Maysles not only differentiated his films from the work of other documentarians, he set the standard for what all documentaries could be. He pioneered a movement.

Maysles regularly worked with his brother, David, who died in 1987, and with partners such as Charlotte Zwerin and Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer (on Grey Gardens). Together the Maysles brothers were revered for their work, gaining the praise of such legends as Jean Luc-Goddard, and making films about The Beatles, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote and more. Salesman, in 1968, truly put them on the map; they continued to document singular personalities and events. The quirkiness of the women in Grey Gardens, the fear of the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont. These were landmark people and events captured by a unique filmmaker.

On his official website, Maysels has this statement:

As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality. It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences – all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, the knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It’s my way of making the world a better place.

There’s no doubt that with his films, Maysles succeeded in that. He made this world a better place by showing us the world we live in. While he may be gone, his films will never go away.

For more on Maysles, visit his personal website. http://mayslesfilms.com/ It’s a fascinating look into his groundbreaking filmmaking techniques and career.



http://www.slashfilm.com/albert-maysles-died/

Albert Maysles, Documentary Pioneer, Dead at 88

The director was responsible for key portraits of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones

BY JASON NEWMAN March 6, 2015




David Maysles and Albert Maysles with musician Mick Jagger on the set of the documentary 'Gimme Shelter', 1970. Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty



Albert Maysles, the director who, alongside his brother David, revolutionized documentary filmmaking, died at the age of 88 Thursday night. The Criterion Collection, the video company that distributed many of Maysles' films, confirmed the news in a Facebook post on Friday. The filmmaker had been battling pancreatic cancer recently and had fallen ill last month.

"Our dear friend Albert Maysles passed away last night at the age of 88. We saw things through his lens that we will never forget. He was a filmmaker up until the end. We loved him and will miss him terribly."

The brothers began their career in the early 1960s helming films about movie executive Joe Levine (Showman) and Orson Welles (Orson Welles in Spain) before documenting the Beatles' debut trip to the United States in The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit.

But it was with 1968's Salesman, the story of door-to-door Bible salesmen canvassing Boston and Florida, that gave the duo their first classic. Building off the cinematic style of Jean Rouch and Dziga Vertov, Salesman pioneered cinéma vérité, the observational strain of documentary filmmaking that eschews narrative voiceover in favor of fly-on-the-wall, non-judgmental spectating.

The brothers would return to music for their next feature Gimme Shelter, the engrossing story of the Rolling Stones' ill-fated 1969 concert at Altamont. Filming from the stage as the band played, the duo captured the murder of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old fan who was killed by the Hells Angels; their portrait of violence and chaos at Altamont Speedway became an epitaph for the optimistic, late-Sixties movement. Maysles was also a cinematographer behind iconic music documentaries such as 1968's Monterey Pop and 1977's The Grateful Dead Movie.

In 1975, while making a film on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' younger sister Lee Radziwill, the brothers met Edith Bouvier Beale, Onassis' free-spirited cousin, and her mother, affectionately known as "Big Edie." The Maysles scrapped their planned film on Radziwill and began to film Grey Gardens, the story of Big and Little Edie living in squalor in their near-condemned Long Island mansion.






The Beales' penchant for disagreement and eccentricity made them cult heroes, with the film remaining a beloved camp classic. When influential film magazine Sight and Sound released their inaugural list of the Greatest Documentaries of All Time, Grey Gardens was listed at Number Nine. "Imagine if John Waters shot a script by Tennessee Williams and it was broadcast in a TV slot usually reserved for The Hoarder Next Door or How Clean Is Your House?" the list's authors wrote. (Salesman and Gimme Shelter also appeared on the list.) Albert Maysles had just finished consulting on the film's upcoming 40th anniversary re-release.

After his filmmaking partner and younger brother David passed away in 1987 following a stroke, Albert continued to helm dozens of documentaries on everything from French artist Christo (1990's Christo in Paris — his second film on the artist following 1974's Christo's Valley Curtain) to Rufus Wainwright (2009's Rufus Wainwright - Milwaukee at Last). In 2001, Wainwright penned the song "Grey Gardens" as an homage to Maysles' film.

His last film, 2011's The Love We Make, chronicled Paul McCartney's 2001 appearance at the Concert for New York following the attacks on the World Trade Center. The film premiered on September 10th, 2011, almost exactly 10 years after the attacks.



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Documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, famous for Rolling Stones' 'Gimme Shelter,' dies at 88



In this Oct. 15, 2012 file photo, filmmaker Albert Maysles attends the premiere of the HBO documentary "Ethel" in New York. Maysles, known for his works of "cinema verite" in the 1960s and '70s, including the Rolling Stones documentary "Gimme Shelter" and "Salesman," about a traveling Bible salesman, died Thursday, March 5, 2015 in New York. He was 88. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)



By The Associated Press
on March 06, 2015



NEW YORK (AP) -- Albert Maysles, the revolutionary documentary filmmaker who helped pioneer nonfiction movies by turning a keenly observant eye on both the famous and the ordinary in films like "Gimme Shelter" and "Grey Gardens," has died. He was 88.

In a statement, Maysles' family said the director passed away after a brief battle with cancer at his New York home Thursday night. (See a collection of reactions on Twitter.)

Maysles was best known for a handful of documentary classics he made with his brother, David, in the 1960s and 1970s. The Maysles Brothers -- as many referred to them -- chose subjects as ordinary as the struggles of Bible salesmen and as glamorous as Marlon Brando, Orson Welles and the Beatles, whom the pair followed in 1964 during their first trip to the United States.

One of their films, "Gimme Shelter," about The Rolling Stones' Altamont Speedway concert on Dec. 6, 1969, captured on film the killing of a fan and the darkening of the hippie dream. The Altamont concert was the Stones' disastrous effort to stage a festival like the Woodstock gathering a few months earlier.

Maysles was active right up to this death. His documentary of the fashion icon Iris Apfel, "Iris," is to be released in April. Earlier this week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that "In Transit," a documentary he co-directed about the longest train route in the U.S., will premiere at this year's festival.

"We lost a true titan today, one who pioneered an art form and fostered a whole generation of artists," said Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, which is releasing "Iris." ''His impact is immeasurable and we won't soon see his likes again."

Born in Boston to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Maysles served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, studied at Syracuse and Boston University and taught psychology for three years before turning to film. His first foray into motion pictures was a 16-mm documentary he made in 1955 while visiting mental hospitals in the Soviet Union.

Maysles started out as an assistant to Robert Drew, a pioneer of cinema verite, and his peers included such acclaimed documentary makers as D.A Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman.

He and Pennebaker were among those who worked with Drew on the groundbreaking 1960 documentary "Primary," about rival Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Maysles also served as a camera operator for Pennebaker's 1968 concert film "Monterey Pop."

"My friendship with Al was forged during four months of filming together, just the two of us, in Russia in 1959," said Pennebaker, referring to their film "Opening in Moscow," about that year's world fair. "When he got a camera against his eye, he was one of the world's great watchers, and I knew we would always be filmmaking companions."






The Maysles and others worked without scripts, sets or lighting. The resulting works had no narration, no filmed interviews and gave audiences a fly-on-the-wall feeling.

"Our films aren't the conventional kind, locked down and scripted before shooting begins," David Maysles once said of their films. "We shoot life as it's lived."

A technical revolution had made such films possible -- the arrival of lightweight, portable sound and film equipment -- and gave them the opportunity to observe their subjects with as little effect on events as possible. "The natural disposition of the camera," Maysles said, "is to seek out reality."

In 1966, using the new equipment, they filmed Truman Capote shortly after he finished "In Cold Blood." Capote explained that his book was his idea of the "nonfiction novel" -- "a synthesis of journalism with fictional technique."

"We lost a true titan today, one who pioneered an art form and fostered a whole generation of artists."

"We wanted to experiment in film the way Capote had experimented in literature," Maysles said in "Hand-Held and From the Heart," the filmmaker's autobiographical documentary. That led them to make the feature-length "Salesman" in 1968, following Bible salesmen from house to house as they try to convince people to buy what one of them calls "still the best-seller in the world."

The technique of unfettered observation -- "direct cinema," the brothers called it -- allowed the Maysles Brothers to record such historical moments as the slaying of a fan at the Altamont concert, and the grim reaction of Mick Jagger, the Stones' singer, as he watched a replay of the footage.

In "Grey Gardens," released in 1975 and later adapted into a Broadway musical, the Maysles Brothers captured on film the lives of a mother and her daughter, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, living in a falling-apart East Hampton mansion.

Some critics attacked the cinema verite techniques as falsely objective, given that the film ultimately viewed by audiences was usually a result of what the filmmakers chose to focus on and the cutting and selecting of the editing process.

"Any work of art is a combination of objective and subjective," Maysles once told The New York Times in response to those criticisms. "But I try to minimize my effect. I don't interview people, for instance. If you ask a question, that determines the answer. Making a film isn't finding the answer to a question; it's trying to capture life as it is."

After his brother died in 1987, Albert Maysles continued to work with various collaborators and mentored younger filmmakers. In 2006, he founded the non-profit Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem.







"While we mourn the loss of Albert, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as inspiration to people around the world to be willing to push themselves creatively and take the time to observe and reflect on life as it unfolds," said Erika Dilday, executive director of the center.

Maysles also continued a longtime working relationship with artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose process for creating monumental environmental art the Maysles Brothers documented in several films beginning in the 1970s.

They were Oscar nominated for their 1973 short "Christo's Valley Curtain." In 2007, Maysles and Antonio Ferrera made "The Gates" about Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park project.

Last July, President Barack Obama awarded Maysles the National Medal of Arts, honoring his six decades of filmmaking. Said Obama: "By capturing raw emotions and representations, his work reflects the unfiltered truths of our shared humanity."

___

AP film writer Jakes Coyle wrote this article. Former Associated Press reporter Cristian Salazar contributed to this report.


http://www.nola.com/movies/index.ssf/2015/03/documentary_filmmaker_albert_m.html...

Gazza wrote on Mar 6^th, 2015 at 4:39pm:


Charlie had fun on that airship ride, didn't he? 

http://youtu.be/hHFL9VNaM9E

Yes, my friend Riffy sat beside Mr. Maysles on the day immortalized in the classic film "The Blimp" (click link)

What Died at Altamont

BY RICHARD BRODY




PHOTOGRAPH BY MARY EVANS/EVERETT



It had been a while since I’d seen “Gimme Shelter,” one of the early classics of the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, and I watched it again on the occasion of the passing of Albert Maysles last Thursday. To my surprise, I found that a big part of the story of “Gimme Shelter” is in the end credits, which say that the movie was filmed by “the Maysles Brothers and (in alphabetical order)” the names of twenty-two more camera operators. By way of contrast, the brothers’ previous feature, “Salesman,” credited “photography” solely to Albert Maysles, and “Grey Gardens,” from 1976, was “filmed by” Albert Maysles and David Maysles. The difference is drastic: it’s the distinction between newsgathering and relationships, and relationships are what the Maysleses built their films on.

The Maysleses virtually lived with the Bible peddlers on the road, they virtually inhabited Grey Gardens with Big Edie and Little Edie, but—as Michael Sragow reports in this superb study, from 2000, on the making of “Gimme Shelter”—the Maysleses didn’t and couldn’t move in with the Rolling Stones. Stan Goldstein, a Maysles associate, told Sragow, “In the film there are virtually no personal moments with the Stones—the Maysles were not involved with the Stones’ lives. They did not have unlimited access. It was an outside view.”

It’s a commonplace to consider the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s films to be centered on the lives of institutions and those of the Maysleses to be centered on the lives of people, but “Gimme Shelter” does both. Though it’s replete with some exhilarating concert footage—notably, of the Stones performing on the concert tour that led up to the Altamont disaster—its central subject is how the Altamont concert came into being. “Gimme Shelter” is a film about a concert that is only incidentally a concert film. Yet the Maysleses’ vision of the unfolding events is distinctive—and, for that matter, historic—by virtue of their distinctive directorial procedure.

Early on, Charlie Watts, the Stones drummer, is seen in the editing room, watching footage with David Maysles, who tells him that it will take eight weeks to edit the film. Watts asks whether Maysles thinks he can do it in that time, and Maysles answers, waving his arm to indicate the editing room, “This gives us the freedom, you guys watching it.”

Filming in the editing room (which, Sragow reports, was the idea of Charlotte Zwerin, one of the film’s editors and directors, who had joined the project after the rest of the shoot) gave them the freedom to break from the strict chronology of the concert season that went from New York to Altamont while staying within the participatory logic of their direct-cinema program. It’s easy to imagine another filmmaker using a voice-over and a montage to introduce, at the start, the fatal outcome of the Altamont concert and portentously declare the intention to follow the band on their American tour to see how they reached that calamitous result. The Maysleses, repudiating such ex-cathedra interventions, instead create a new, and newly personal, sphere of action for the Stones and themselves that the filmmakers can use to frame the concert footage.

The editing-room sequences render the concert footage archival, making it look like what it is—in effect, found footage of a historical event. The result is to turn the impersonal archive personal and to give the Maysles brothers, as well as the Rolling Stones, a personal implication in even the documentary images that they themselves didn’t film.

Among those images are those of a press conference where Mick Jagger announced his plans for a free concert and his intentions in holding it, which are of a worthy and progressive cast: “It’s creating a microcosmic society which sets examples for the rest of America as to how one can behave at large gatherings.” (Later, though, he frames it in more demotic terms: “The concert is an excuse for everyone to talk to each other, get together, sleep with each other, hold each other, and get very stoned.”)

A strange convergence of interests appears in negotiations filmed by the Maysleses between the attorney Melvin Belli, acting on the Stones’ behalf; Dick Carter, the owner of the Altamont Speedway; and other local authorities. The intense pressure to make the concert happen is suggested in a radio broadcast from the day before the concert, during which the announcer Frank Terry snarks that “apparently it’s one of the most difficult things in the world to give a free concert.” The Stones want to perform; their fans want to see them perform a free concert; the local government wants to deliver that show and not to stand in its way; Belli wants to facilitate it; and the Stones don’t exactly renounce their authority in the process but do, in revealing moments, lay bare to the Maysleses’ cameras their readiness to engage with a mighty system of which they themselves aren’t quite the masters.

Within this convergence of rational interests, one element is overlooked: madness. Jagger approaches the concert with constructive purpose and festive enthusiasm, but he performs like a man possessed, singing with fury of a crossfire hurricane and warning his listeners that to play with him is to play with fire. No, what happened at Altamont is not the music’s fault. Celebrity was already a scene of madness in Frank Sinatra’s first flush of fame and when the Beatles were chased through the train station in “A Hard Day’s Night.” But the Beatles’ celebrity was, almost from the start, their subject as well as their object, and they approached it and managed it with a Warholian consciousness, as in their movies; they managed their music in the same way and became, like Glenn Gould, concert dropouts. By contrast, the Stones were primal and natural performers, whose music seemed to thrive, even to exist, in contact with the audience. That contact becomes the movie’s subject—a subject that surpasses the Rolling Stones and enters into history at large.

The Maysleses and Zwerin intercut the discussions between Belli, Carter, and the authorities with concert footage from the Stones’ other venues along the way. The effect—the music running as the nighttime preparations for the Altamont concert occur, with fires and headlights, a swirling tumult—suggests the forces about to be unleashed on the world at large. A cut from a moment in concert to a helicopter shot of an apocalyptic line of cars winding through the hills toward Altamont and of the crowd already gathered there suggests that something wild has escaped from the closed confines of the Garden and other halls. The Maysleses’ enduring theme of the absent boundary between theatre and life, between show and reality, is stood on its head: art as great as that of the Stones is destined to have a mighty real-world effect. There’s a reason why the crucial adjective for art is “powerful”; it’s ultimately forced to engage with power as such.

What died at Altamont was the notion of spontaneity, of the sense that things could happen on their own and that benevolent spirits would prevail. What ended was the idea of the unproduced. What was born there was infrastructure—the physical infrastructure of facilities, the abstract one of authority. From that point on, concerts were the tip of the iceberg, the superstructure, the mere public face and shining aftermath of elaborate planning. The lawyers and the insurers, the politicians and the police, security consultants and fire-safety experts—the masters and mistresses of management—would be running the show.

The movie ends with concertgoers the morning after, walking away, their backs to the viewer, leaving a blank natural realm of earth and sky; they’re leaving the state of nature and heading back to the city, from which they’ll never be able to leave innocently again. What emerges accursed is the very idea of nature, of the idea that, left to their own inclinations and stripped of the trappings of the wider social order, the young people of the new generation will somehow spontaneously create a higher, gentler, more loving grassroots order. What died at Altamont is the Rousseauian dream itself. What was envisioned in “Lord of the Flies” and subsequently dramatized in such films as “Straw Dogs” and “Deliverance” was presented in reality in “Gimme Shelter.” The haunting freeze-frame on Jagger staring into the camera, at the end of the film, after his forensic examination of the footage of the killing of Meredith Hunter at the concert, reveals not the filmmakers’ accusation or his own sense of guilt but lost illusions.



Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com.


http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/what-died-at-altamont

Last night at 12:30 just about to go to bed. Take one last spin around the dish channels and I see GIMME SHELTER playing on TCM - Turner Classic Movies. Uncut and uncensored. WTF. I'm hooked despite knowing the dialogue by heart. Turns out the station was running a tribute to Albert Maysles! Bedtime was pushed back to 2 a.m., but it was well worth it.

ps They really need to just put together concert movies of MSG and Altamont. Would blow everything else released away.