Albert Maysles: a film-maker who had an artist's sense of what was important

Before reality TV became a cornerstone of popular culture, and perhaps even before direct cinema and cinéma vérité were widely understood, Albert and David Maysles had created their masterpieces of documentary movie-making. Albert (who yesterday died at the age of 88; David died of a stroke in 1987 at 55) pioneered the art of the cameraman being the unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall in documentary. Which is to say: his camera was unobtrusive only as far as the documentary subject was concerned. The audience watching the finished product would be highly conscious of the film-maker with his camera, observing, selecting, intervening.
The Maysles’ movie Salesman (1969) was a study of salesmen going door-to-door in the US, selling Bibles, and this hard-hitting study forms a kind of link – though perhaps not exactly a missing link – between Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross. The brutally plain capitalist imperative in selling is in contradistinction to the rejection of money and materialism inherent in Christianity. Selling and the service economy is the purest example of the American ideal of making something of yourself, lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, without any primary source material other than yourself and your self-belief. The Maysles’ movie Salesman was to be a locus classicus in this field, freighted with implied irony and tragedy.

‘The eye of the cameraman should be the eye of the poet’: an interview with Albert Maysles

Their equally famed movie Gimme Shelter (1970) was another study of compromised idealism and contemporary anxiety. It is a record of the Rolling Stones 1969 US tour and the notorious concert at the Altamont Speedway Park in northern California in which chaotic “security” was allegedly provided by Hells Angels motorbike gangs, whose aggressive machismo and self-importance were exacerbated by drugs and headspinning proximity to the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world. Violence spiralled out of control: an 18-year-old was stabbed – a horrific event captured on film. The era of peace and love is widely thought to have finished rather neatly at the 1960s’ end with the disbanding of the Beatles and the death of Jimi Hendrix. But it was the Maysles’ 1970 film which captured on celluloid the very moment when this epoch of idealism finally, definitively, curdled.

But the Maysles’ finest hour came in 1975, with their remarkable film Grey Gardens. I will never forget seeing it for the first time in 1999 at the Edinburgh film festival – and seeing Albert Maysles on stage, a shy, self-effacing man who behaved as if he was merely a technician who just pointed the camera. He was more than that: Maysles had an artist’s sense of what was humanly important. He also, I suspect, had what Graham Greene called the “splinter of ice” in his heart which would allow him to go ahead and film what was happening: an old woman living through her final days, hours and minutes.
Yet always there is compassion. The heroines of Grey Gardens (it is not wrong to call them that) are not ridiculed. The film is a study of two grandly patrician Wasp ladies, a mother and daughter both called Edith Beale, distinguished by their nicknames Big Edie and Little Edie – related to Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis who before filming commenced had evidently paid some money for futile repairs to their still spectacularly dilapidated home, Grey Gardens, in Long Island, New York. The house, like its occupants, is a tragicomic ruin and part of the film’s fascination is how entirely naive the Beale women are about how they will be perceived; how childlike in their innocence about the modern age.

    Mick Jagger in Gimme Shelter Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Feature/Everett Collection / Rex Feature

They could have come from the 19th century. They were stranger than fiction. Tennessee Williams could have scripted Big Edie and Little Edie – but it would have been too operatic. Gore Vidal might have done so – but he would have been too caustic. Albert Maysles, with his brother David, was perfect: reticent, cool, gentle, and yet shrewd. In Grey Gardens, Maysles created a great American work of art.