With his brother, made Gimme Shelter

NEW YORK — Albert Maysles, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who helped pioneer feature-length nonfiction movies that used lightweight, hand-held cameras to spontaneously record the lives of both the famous and the unexamined, has died. He was 88.

Stacey Farrar, the marketing director of Maysles Films, his production company, said the film maker died at his home in New York on Thursday.

May sl e s was bestknown for a handful of cult classics he made with his brother, David, in the 1960s and 1970s, though he continued to make movies until late in his life and to mentor younger filmmakers.

The brothers 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 for an Age of Aquarius. The Altamont concert, which also featured Jefferson Airplane and Santana, was the Stones’ disastrous effort to stage a festival like the Woodstock gathering a few months earlier.

He was active right up to this death. His documentary of the fashion icon Iris Apfel,

Iris, is to be released in April. On Thursday, 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. His brother died in 1987.