In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Works of art and Factual Material | 135 become a giant gash, as though the entire house is being devoured. At the end of the film, the images of Mrs. Beale, half-asleep on a mattress caked with dirt, singing “Night and Day” and surrounded by sleeping cats while her daughter dances alone downstairs in the foyer, uncannily anticipate Mrs. Beale’s own death (which took place not long after the film opened). Mrs. Beale seems to be returning to the earth, amidst the decay of her once aristocratic lifestyle. Cinephilia, at its most extreme, has been attracted not simply to the image but to the image’s disembowelment , to the moment when the screen and the frame disappear, and the film, now transformed, begins to inhabit the viewer. That giant hole at the end of Grey Gardens is terrifying and thrilling—terrifying in that it portends the destruction of one world, but thrilling in that it also could open up to new worlds and new ways of seeing. Democratic Art Forms: A Visit with Truman Capote, A Journey to Jerusalem, Muhammad and Larry, Ozawa, Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic, Horowitz Plays Mozart, Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia, and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Films People desire to understand that which they cannot understand. . . . People desire to understand that which they cannot understand. —Muhammad and Larry Did you meet Cassius Clay? —Salesman In 1973, the Maysles brothers were asked by the Bulgarian artist Christo Javacheff and his collaborator and wife Jeanne-Claude to film them at work installing their latest project, Valley Curtain in Rifle, Colorado—a mammoth orange canvas stretched across a valley in a small Colorado town. Christo’s Valley Curtain, running only twenty-eight minutes, is one of the most widely praised of the Maysles brothers’ films. It is a visually beautiful work, masterfully edited by the codirector, Ellen Hovde. While made between Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, Christo’s Valley Curtain more properly belongs to—and in some ways initiates—the 136 | Albert Maysles later phase of Maysles: films attempting to capture the process by which artists and performers work. Christo’s Valley Curtain has been followed by several other Christo and Jeanne-Claude films, including most recently The Gates (which was unavailable for viewing as of this writing). In addition to the Christo and Jeanne-Claude films, other Maysles films about artists include Ozawa (focusing on the conductor Seiji Ozawa, codirected by Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson), Vladimir Horowitz : The Last Romantic (1985) and Horowitz Plays Mozart (both dealing with the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, the former codirected by Froemke, Dickson, and Patricia Jaffe; the latter codirected by Charlotte Zwerin and Froemke), Muhammad and Larry (1980; the boxers Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes preparing for a fight—although it may be a stretch to consider boxing an art form, it is a type of public performance) and Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia (1991; documenting Dimitri Rostropovich’s return to the Soviet Union after an exile of sixteen years). Also relevant to this group, although preceding and in some ways standing apart from it, are A Visit with Truman Capote (largely a filmed interview with Capote after the publication of In Cold Blood) and A Journey to Jerusalem (Leonard Bernstein’s visit to Israel after the Six Day War to conduct Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony). Assessment of the value of these films (as well as the numerous others produced by Maysles Films profiling musicians, choreographers, dancers , and composers) within the context of Maysles’s entire body of work is a complex matter. In spite of many effective moments, none of them are equal to the best of his work, from Showman through Grey Gardens. The limitations of these later films have largely to do with their status as commissioned works, which, unlike in earlier commissioned films as Meet Marlon Brando, What’s Happening or Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers were unable to completely transcend. This is particularly evident in the films initiated, produced, or coproduced by Peter Gelb of the classical division of Columbia/Sony Records. These films came about after Gelb became acquainted with Albert and David Maysles at a party in the early 1980s, when Gelb was vacationing on Fisher’s Island, near Manhattan. Gelb offered them the opportunity to make a series of films for Columbia’s (and, later, Sony’s) classical music division. Many of these films, whatever their virtues, are designed to essentially flatter their subjects as well as...

Share