Albert Maysles: Pioneering documentary filmmaker
1926-2015
ALBERT Maysles, who has died aged 88, was a filmmaker known as the “Dean of Documentaries”. Along with his brother, David, he was widely credited for driving the form to new levels of cinema vérité.
The pair founded Maysles Films in the early ’60s; Albert was the cameraman and David dealt with the sound.
“The film is sort of the beginning of a love affair between the filmmakers and the subjects,” Albert Maysles observed. “Some filmmakers make targets of the subjects they film; that’s not our way.”
Perhaps the pair’s greatest triumph was Grey Gardens (1975), which chronicled the eccentric existence of Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little Edie”, the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy.
The Maysles brothers (the name rhymes with “hazels”) embraced “direct cinema”, a technique in which filmmakers shoot on the fly, allowing events to unfold, and immerse themselves in their subject. In the case of Grey Gardens, this was an unsavoury proposition.
The story of the Beales was Dickensian in its blend of lost fortunes and gothic horror. The once-glamorous pair had slipped from the champagne and chandelier life of US high society into squalor at Grey Gardens, their shambolic, 28-room, clapboard and shingle home in the Hamptons, on Long Island off New York City.
Grey Gardens could have been modelled on Miss Havisham’s decaying manor house: raccoons and cats ran wild among the rooms, branches and brambles grew through the walls, and piles of newspapers rotted alongside oil paintings, broken furniture and bread left out for the wildlife.
“The cat’s going to the bathroom right in back of my portrait,” Big Edie squeals to Albert at one point. “I’m glad he is. I’m glad somebody’s doing something he wanted to do.”
Every grotesque aspect of their lives was explored by the brothers.
Elderly Edith, a society beauty during the 1920s, and Little Edie — also past her prime — tramped around bickering and singing, clearly enjoying the attention of the Maysles. In particular, Little Edie — whose dress sense could politely be described as “bohemian” — grandstanded for the camera.
“The best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt,” she told Albert. “You can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape.”
The film became a cult classic. Little Edie reportedly attended the premiere in a stunning red dress, but wearing it backwards, with the zip in front.
Albert Maysles was born on November 26 1926 in Boston. He served in the US tank corps during WorldWar 2. On leaving the army he studied psychology at Syracuse University and then at Boston University, where he stayed on to teach the subject for three years.
“I think my training taught me above all to be unprejudiced,”
We would arrive 15 or 20 minutes early. When we got out of the car we sprayed ourselves so we wouldn’t get bitten by the fleas
Maysles recalled. “Psychology was social science, and so in a way my work has always combined a kind of scientific approach with art.”
A trip to Russia to document mental hospitals led to his first (silent) film, Psychiatry in Russia (1955). In 1960 he worked with Robert Drew on Primary, shadowing John F Kennedy on the campaign trail. It was here that he developed the technique of incorporating hand-held cameras with synchronous sound recording.
The Maysles brothers made celebrity profiles of the Beatles, Truman Capote and Orson Welles, but it was Salesman (1968), a portrait of four door-to-door Bible salesmen from Boston, that made their name.