Albert Maysles

Works of Art and Factual Material

Works of Art and Factual Material I try to stay neutral somehow. —Meet Marlon Brando Within the history of documentary cinema, the name Albert Maysles has assumed near-mythical status. Maysles, usually in collaboration with his brother David, was a central figure in some of the most important documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, culminating with three featurelength films that continue to generate intense debate about the ethics and aesthetics of documentary form: Salesman (1969), Gimme Shelter (1970), and Grey Gardens (1975). The series of Maysles films dealing with Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s large-scale art projects, including the Academy Award–nominated Christo’s Valley Curtain (1973), have been described as among the greatest documentaries ever made about the process of creating art. And in his unfinished The Other Side of the Wind (1972), Orson Welles used the Maysles brothers as the inspiration for a parody of documentary filmmakers. Since David’s death in 1987, Albert Maysles (mainly in collaboration with others) has continued to shoot an enormous amount of footage in both film and video, including two additional Christo and Jeanne-Claude films. Nevertheless, there has been 2 | Albert Maysles little sustained attempt to examine this body of work in any detail. The first book-length examination of their films, Jonathan B. Vogels’s The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles, was published in 2005. In looking at the ways in which their films engage in a complex and sometimes contradictory search for authenticity, Vogels places the Maysles brothers within various modernist traditions. I have no particular quarrel with this reading, but my own concerns will be of a somewhat different nature. Before proceeding further, an explanation of the title of this book is in order. Albert Maysles is a volume in a series of books on contemporary filmmakers. Maysles’s reputation rests almost entirely on the films he did with his brother, even though he worked on films before David began collaborating with him, and he has continued to work long after David’s death. Maysles Films, Inc., initially begun with his brother, is a company in which Albert plays a central role, although the day-to-day management has been handled by others. Maysles Films produces many nonfiction works, from television commercials to promotional films to various documentary commissions for theatrical, television, and video release. Albert Maysles is involved in many of these projects, sometimes credited as codirector, sometimes only credited as cinematographer. Even during the years in which he worked with his brother, Albert Maysles typically assigned codirector credit to his editor, a testament to the editor ’s enormous input in determining the final shape and meaning of the films, as well as to the importance the brothers placed on collaboration. In no way do I wish to diminish this collaborative input, especially given Albert Maysles’s frequently stated admission that he does not edit his own footage. The title of this book, then, might appear to be misleading, as though it is attempting to assign full authorship to one person on films that were, at every level of production and postproduction, collaborative. On the Maysles brothers’ films, David was officially responsible for sound (as well as for much of the interviewing of subjects, and he had a great deal of input into the editing), while Albert was the cameraman. Even here, though, Albert Maysles’s claim to total authorship of the images on some of his most famous films is complicated. On a number of these (including Gimme Shelter and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude films), he was a primary but not sole cameraman, and assigning precise authorship to every image would be laborious if not impossible. A late Works of art and Factual Material | 3 Maysles film such as Umbrellas (1995), for example, not only required an enormous camera crew to capture the simultaneous installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s fabric and aluminum umbrellas in California and Japan; its emphasis on the simultaneity of the installation on two continents precludes any romantic possibilities of a single “man with a movie camera” magically being everywhere at once. In spite of this, as I will argue throughout the book, Maysles’s cinema is repeatedly drawn toward particular kinds of images, and these images, in turn, strongly determine much of the meaning and impact of the films, regardless of whether Albert Maysles himself was in fact behind the camera. While the nature...