THE EMPATHETIC
LEFT EYE OF ALBERT
by Joel Silvers MAYSLES
“I like to keep
my left eye
open and see what else is going on,” explains
cinematographer / director Albert Maysles about
his camerawork while his right eye remains glued
to a 16mm viewfinder. A major figure in the
history of documentary filmmaking, he thus
modestly describes his uncanny ability to capture
those unpredictable, yet critical moments that
make his films so unforgettable. Describing his
liberating experience of working with newer
lightweight digital video cameras, he states, ”All
you need is one eye on the camera, and now I
can even work more that way because the
cameras are more flexible for me. My two eyes
are free to look at the image on the LCD screen of
the camera and everything else, including making
eye contact.”
In a pivotal scene from the Maysles brothers’
documentary Gimme Shelter, we witness Albert
Measles’ powerful close-ups of the Rolling Stones
as they study 16mm footage on an editing
machine of a murder that took place at their
disastrous 1969 Altamont concert. His camera
captures drummer Charlie Watts’ inner anguish,
then suddenly pans and lands with a probing
close-up of Mick Jagger’s detached state. With
such revealing close-ups and agile camera
moves, the viewer glimpses the fundamental
characteristics of Albert Maysles’ cinematography. Capturing the flow of unplanned events,
witnessing life as other people experience it and
thereby extending the boundaries of the viewer’s
empathy - these are the essential and enduring
goals of Albert Maysles’ long career. In collaboration with his late brother David and a skillful
team of editors, he helped launch a revolutionary
movement in documentary filmmaking. During the
1960s they called it “direct cinema.” It was
essentially defined by the immediacy of the
human interaction portrayed through the lens.
Primary & The Emergence of Direct
Cinema: 1950s – early 1960s
While today’s audiences have grown accustomed
to the highly mobile handheld camera techniques
used by television news, documentary filmmakers
and Hollywood films, they are for the most part
unaware of the revolutionary impact of these
techniques and the contributions of the pioneers
of these techniques – including Albert and David
Maysles. In Documentary: A History of Nonfiction Film*, film historian Erik Barnouw
describes how two of the earliest pioneers,
Time-Life journalist Robert Drew and cinematographer Richard (“Ricky”) Leacock, contributed to the
development of the approach that became known
as “direct cinema.” Drew convinced Time-Life,
Inc. to finance technical experiments that would
produce cinematic equivalents to the candid
photographs featured by Life Magazine. Among
American documentary filmmakers, mobile 16mm
cameras and handheld techniques rapidly
replaced cumbersome 35mm cameras and
tripods during the 1950s. Yet, Drew and Leacock
still encountered serious technical problems
capturing sync sound of spontaneous, unpredictable and intimate verbal exchanges in a
non-intrusive manner. Documentary filmmakers
were limited to using voiceovers or capturing
speech of subjects extremely close to microphones. To make matters worse, the mobility of
filmmakers was restricted by a tangle of cables
between the sound recording equipment and the
camera. What Drew and Leacock developed was
a highly mobile “crystal sync sound system”
(sometimes referred to as a “double system”)
which permitted the cameraman and a sound
recorder to move around independently of each
other. This system, with the addition of wireless
microphones, helped launch a type of filmmaking
that encouraged filmmakers to capture unscripted
events as they unfolded. It liberated documentary
filmmaking from the curse of so-called “voice of
god” narration, as well as self-conscious formal
interviews and manipulative editing techniques.
This new type of filmmaking became known as
“cinema verite” in Europe. Albert Maysles,
however, preferred the term “direct cinema.” And
this was the term adopted by other members of
the Drew and Leacock group (Barnouw, pages
234-41).
One of the groundbreaking examples of this new
method of capturing spontaneous, unscripted sync
sound was found in the 1960 film Primary
produced by Drew and Leacock. The two
filmmakers had convinced both Democratic
candidates for the presidential nomination to
allow access to film around the clock in both
public events and intimate behind-the-scenes
settings during the 1960 Wisconsin primary. One
of the candidates was Hubert Humphrey, the
Minnesota senator long revered as a champion of
working people and liberal causes, and the other
was John F. Kennedy, the young Massachusetts
senator from a wealthy Irish-Catholic background.
There were no interviews or events planned for
the cameras. With is new immediacy, Primary
revealed the American political process – of the
candidates at rallies and meetings, in motorcades, at press conferences and in hotel rooms
on the night of the election returns - with an
entirely unprecedented candor.
Among the members of the small crew that Drew
and Leacock recruited to make Primary was a
young, former psychology professor from Boston
named Albert Maysles. Maysles had several short
films to his credit before his invitation to serve as
a camera assistant by Drew and Leacock. One
such film was a short 16mm investigation of
psychiatry techniques in the Soviet Union in the
1950s called Psychiatry in Russia. Airing on
network television, it helped launch Maysles on a
new career as a filmmaker and cinematographer.
A short travelogue of observations, made during
a motor scooter journey around Europe during
the 1950s with Albert’s brother David, was
another. On the strength of these productions,
Albert was invited to work as a camera assistant
for Drew and Leacock, but his previous camera
experience and enthusiasm for the work quickly
led to his promotion as one of the three principal
cinematographers. Frequently assigned to capture
close-ups of the young Jackie Kennedy and
reaction shots of people at rallies, he managed to
include revealing images of Wisconsin farmers at
a Humphrey rally. These images hold their place
within a documentary tradition represented by
legendary still photographers Walker Evans and
Cartier-Bresson. Perhaps Albert’s most “famous”
shot in Primary is the over-the-shoulder tracking
shot of Kennedy as he moves through a crowd of
adoring supporters at a rally. This innovative shot
subsequently became a hallmark (if not eventually
a cliché) of this type of filmmaking.
Exploring Technique & Early Celebrity
Films: 1962 – 1966
During the mid-1960s, in the years immediately
following the making of Primary, the members of
the team Robert Drew had assembled went their
separate ways and explored different strategies
for realizing the goals of what they called “direct
cinema.” To varying degrees, they all sought to
achieve maximum authenticity through noninterventionist techniques, a strict avoidance of both
interviews and voiceovers and strong preference
for strict chronology as opposed to crosscutting in
the editing. From 1962 through 1966, the
direction that Albert and his brother David chose
was a series of short films that probed aspects of
celebrity worship in American culture. In Showman
(1962), What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.
(1964), Meet Marlon Brando (1965) and With Love
From Truman: A Visit with Truman Capote (1966), the
Maysles produced profiles of celebrities in the arts and
entertainment from behind the scenes. These unflinchingly expose carefully fabricated public personas. In
Meet Marlon Brando, for example, we witness Brando
at the height of his fame at a press conference
mocking the superficial questions of reporters. We see
him constantly twisting their questions around and
shifting their trivial concerns towards the things of most
concern to him - such as the plight of American
Indians. Brando comes across as either heroic or
obnoxious (depending on your perspective) in the way
he is unwilling or unable to play the pigeonhole game
with reporters. While these early films may be seen as
early critiques of celebrity worship, from a filmmaker’s
perspective they are most interesting as early experiments in direct cinema technique.
The early celebrity films are double-edged in the way
they both comment on American celebrity worship and
yet inadvertently contribute to that phenomenon.
(Jonathon B. Vogels points this out in his insightful
study The Direct Cinema of David and Albert
Maysles,) It is, however, also important to keep in
mind the essential humanism underlying these films
about celebrities. Albert and David were the products
of an immigrant Jewish background. Their father was
a postal clerk who died one year before retirement,
and their mother was a schoolteacher who was
ardently committed to civil rights. They grew up in a
largely Irish lower middle class neighborhood in the
Boston area where they regularly encountered the
bigotry of their childhood peers. Albert has never
forgotten these origins, and although he has made
films about some of the most famous people in
American entertainment and culture, he sees no
difference between the celebrities he has portrayed –
often in commissioned works - and the invisible people
in society. He sees the common humanity of his
subjects, and what he strives to capture in his filmed
portraits of celebrities is their off-guard actions and
reactions when their public personas are temporarily
set aside.
novel” during the 1960s. Similar to Capote’s In Cold
Blood, the Maysles team took unscripted and uncontrolled reality and then revealed the dramatic structure
inherent within it. But where Capote knew the end of
his story in advance as he wielded his dramaturgical
chisel to the raw material, the Maysles brothers had
no idea of what kind of material they would ultimately
come up with as they shadowed door-to-door Bible
salesmen around – with Albert carrying a camera that,
he says, “looked like a bazooka for chrissake” and
David running the separate sync sound tape recorder.
Gestures Towards “Modernism”: 1969 –
1970
Although Salesman provoked debate over the use and
misuse of direct cinema techniques upon its release, it
did receive considerable critical acclaim and art house
distribution that empowered the Maysles team, both
professionally and artistically, to embark upon their
most ambitious film to date and the film for which they
became most well-known. This film, Gimme Shelter,
began when the Maysles were hired to document a
1969 New York Rolling Stones concert. But the
Maysles brothers, along with their editor/co-director
from Salesman Charlotte Zwerin, had the intuition to
see a potential for a much more compelling film. They
therefore decided to follow the Rolling Stones at their
own expense on much of the Stones’ 1969 American
Gimme Shelter provokes similar questions about what
constitutes “truth” and whether we can ever be certain
about anything – even when we believe we have
irrefutable visible evidence. One of the arguments
against direct cinema (and particularly against the
techniques employed in Salesman upon its release)
was that the presence of the crew, small as it might be,
inevitably shaped the very events depicted - in spite of
the ardent claims of objectivity by the early proponents
of direct cinema. Other criticisms have been that the
highly selective nature of the cinematography and the
selective process of the editing created inherently
biased, dishonest or manipulative views of reality. In
the making of Gimme Shelter, however, the Maysles /
Zwerin team directly addressed these philosophical
concerns from a Modernist perspective. In subsequent
interviews with the filmmakers, it becomes even more
apparent that one of the major objectives of the film
was to show the impossibility of explaining human
behavior through easy ideological answers and
cinematic representation.
Among the most important sequences in Gimme
Shelter are those in which Mick Jagger and the other
Rolling Stones are studying 16mm footage of the
Altamont murder – as it was occurring - on a flatbed
editing machine. These sequences acknowledge the
fact that we, the viewers of Gimme Shelter, and Mick
Jagger, who is watching the film within the film on the
flatbed, are both observing a cinematic construct - and
therefore a limited version of reality. This explicit
acknowledgement, or self-reflexivity, in Gimme Shelter
regarding the methodology should have been sufficient
to disarm much of the early criticism of the Maysles’
work. It might also permit placement of their later
collaborative films (particularly Gimme Shelter and
Grey Gardens) within the self-conscious Modernist
tradition of “art examining art.”
Synthesizing A New Form of Non-fiction
Storytelling: 1966 – 1968
That Albert has never lost sight of the invisible people
of American society is especially apparent in his 1968
classic Salesman in which lower middle class Bible
salesmen struggle to pursue the American dream. (This
focus remains apparent in his 2000 documentary
Lalee’s Kin in which we find a great-grandmother
struggling to hold her family's world together in the
face of dire poverty in the Deep South.) With Salesman, however, Albert – along with his brother David
and editor/co-director Charlotte Zwerin - forged a
new synthesis between documentary filmmaking and
dramatic storytelling and thereby established a unique
voice within the direct cinema movement. Salesman is
widely regarded as a masterwork in the history of
documentary film, and the Maysles team could
legitimately lay claim to having pushed the boundaries
of nonfiction filmmaking with this film alone. Albert has
described how this film was inspired, in part, by
Truman Capote’s experiments with “the nonfiction
accomplishments of Salesman and realizes the
Maysles brothers’ goal of creating a new and more
“literary approach” to the nonfiction film. As Maysles
scholar Jonathon Vogels argues, Gimme Shelter
employs cinematic and literary devices like out-ofchronological-order editing, cross-cutting and
self-reflexivity that go well beyond the original
precepts of direct cinema and have much in common
with Truman Capote’s experimental approach to the
novel.
Christo – A Kindred Spirit: 1974 – 2007
tour – a tour that culminated in the disastrous outdoor
Altamont concert in December of that year. Among
other things, Gimme Shelter provides close documentation of the drug-induced excesses of the audience in
attendance at the Altamont concert, which culminates
in the murder of a member of the audience by one of
the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Some critics regard
the film primarily as a historical record of that specific
tragic event in a particularly turbulent period of
American history. But in doing so, they have exaggerated the significance of the Altamont concert as a
defining event ending the youthful idealism of the
1960s. More significant to filmmakers and film
scholars is the way the film builds upon the aesthetic
Albert and David already had a longstanding
friendship with the environmental artist Christo
and his artistic partner Jeanne-Claude when the
artists approached them in 1974 to make a film
about the installation of a gigantic curtain in a
Colorado valley. In many respects, Christo’s
emphases on process, chance and risk-taking in
his public art turned out to be a perfect fit with
the open-ended methods of direct cinema as
espoused by the Maysles. This 1974 film led to
an ongoing series of beautiful films about Christo
by the Maysles over the years (including a
soon-to-be-released film on the 2006 “The Gates”
installation in New York’s Central Park). Yet, in
spite of Christo’s highly unconventional conceptual approach to his art, the Maysles’ Christo
films took a relatively more traditional documentary
form. It was a flexible approach that was particularly
appropriate to the subject matter but which was neither
as experimental or as Modernist in its form as either
Salesman, Gimme Shelter or the 1976 Grey Gardens.
Nor did the early Christo films - Valley Curtain in Rifle,
Colorado in 1974 and then Running Fence in 1978 –
rigidly adhere to the precepts of direct cinema
originally articulated by Robert Drew and company.
Christo’s approach to his art and the Maysles
approach to their filmmaking have much in common,
and by depicting Christo’s process of creating a vast
site specific environmental work of art, the Maysles
were, in a sense, portraying how they themselves go
about making a film. Both the Maysles’ work and
Christo’s work are intentionally open-ended, and, as
such, they embrace risk-taking and chance as their
main concern. Once the Maysles had determined who
their subjects would be for their films, they let those
subject dictate what was going to be filmed without
any deliberate attempt to manipulate or influence
events for the sake of any specific outcome or in
accordance with any kind of a script. They were
entirely willing to follow events wherever they may
lead in a quest to uncover new truths and ultimately
provoke a deeper understanding of reality as it is.
Likewise Christo, once he has set a concept into
motion, he accepts the consequences wherever they
may lead. He is only interested in revealing the
inherent nature of the physical materials (like fabric)
and the human dynamics he has set in motion.
Provoking new ways of seeing, as opposed to
realizing a preconceived finished product, is his only
concern. Both the Maysles and Christo place the
emphasis entirely on their processes. Like the “conceptual art” that emerged at the end of the 1960s performance pieces, installation, mail art and
earthworks, their works are implicit statements about
commodification in contemporary capitalist culture,
and especially the commodification of the art object.
A Nonfiction Modernist Masterpiece: 1972 –
1976
The peculiar opening scenes of the Maysles 1976 film,
Grey Gardens, signals that the viewer is about to
watch a film that is not going to fulfill expectations for
either a traditional expository documentary or, for that
matter, a direct cinema documentary as defined by
Robert Drew and the Maysles during the 1960s. The
first ten minutes or so of the film echoes the themes,
motifs and moods found in the plays of Tennessee
Williams and Eugene O’Neil plays, as well as the
self-reflexive distancing devices in those of playwright
Bertold Brecht. The viewer receives subliminal clues
that what is about to unfold is neither a traditional
linear narrative nor the dramatic crisis structure that
typify earlier direct cinema films - and even the
Maysles own Christo films. There are also cues that the
film will take the form of an experimental character
study – a character study that more nearly resembles
Picasso’s fractured cubist portraits with multiple
perspectives from different vantage points.
The montage sequence near the beginning of Grey
Gardens (consisting of stills from newspaper articles) in
itself provides a clear message that the film deviates
from the precepts of direct cinema in a number of
significant ways. Direct cinema eschews any form of
montage in favor of strict chronological footage as
well as any reference to the filmmaking process. But in
Grey Gardens, a newspaper photo of David and
Albert introduces the filmmakers as major participants
in the unfolding cinematic story. Direct verbal
exchanges between the on-screen subjects and the
filmmakers throughout Grey Gardens provide further
acknowledgement of the filmmaking process. It is an
open admission of the fact that the film, as authentic as
it may be, is also a subjective cinematic construct of a
filmmaking collaboration.
Critics challenged the authenticity of Grey Gardens
upon its release because the subjects, Edith and Edie
Beale, were merely performing for the camera and
therefore not behaving as they would ordinarily
behave without the presence of Albert’s camera. This
criticism, moreover, provided some critics with
additional ammunition to discredit the goals and
techniques of the entire direct cinema movement. But a
strong counterargument can be made. For one thing,
both of the subjects of Grey Gardens, Edith and Edie
Beale, were individuals who genuinely enjoyed
performing on and off camera, and they had done so
on a daily basis throughout their lives. Furthermore, by
permitting reflections of themselves to appear in
mirrors, along with direct verbal exchanges, at several
points throughout the film, the filmmakers repeatedly
acknowledge their presence in the Beale’s lives. This
acknowledgment underscores the Maysles’ belief that
their respectful relationships with their subjects override
any risk of distorting their behavior. The entire
approach of Grey Gardens – as with Salesman - rests
implicitly upon the belief that “a certain amount of
performing in everyday life represents a healthy form
of ‘self-expression’” (Vogels, page 135). The fundamental question that Grey Gardens raises - and
answers - is whether any behavior consciously
performed in front of a camera becomes a less
“authentic” manifestation of true inner character than
behavior not consciously performed in front of a
camera.
Consolidation & Mastery: 1976 – 2007
The period of the Maysles brothers most intense
experimentation with documentary form may have
culminated with Grey Gardens, but the brothers
continued their collaborative endeavors in a series of
compelling documentaries about celebrities and the
arts until David’s sudden death from a stroke in 1987.
The films produced under Albert’s guidance since that
time, moreover, sustain the unique voice that was
apparent from the earliest collaborative films. For one
thing, Albert’s entire approach to filmmaking can be
viewed as a method, or process, of exploring broader
social truths through intense focus on individual
subjects within specific situations. Another prevailing
quality within the overall body of work is his openendedness or willingness to follow subjects over time wherever that unscripted journey may lead. This
open-endedness may partially be the result of Albert’s
resistance to using the documentary medium as a
means of advocacy for specific causes or
pre-determined points of view, but it may also be
attributed to Albert’s earlier scientific training as a
psychologist. Yet another quality that stands out in the
work of Albert Maysles, although particularly in the
work of the late 1960s and 1970s, is its unique
approach to Modernism (or what one scholar has
called “Pragmatic Modernism”**). The illogical play
of language in Salesmen, the self-reflexivity in Gimme
Shelter and the fractured “cubist” narrative in Grey
Gardens have been cited as varied examples of this
Modernist quality. Yet what ultimately distinguishes the
Maysles approach to Modernism is a formal or stylistic
flexibility which, in turn, serves a higher goal of
providing a more truthful portrait of reality.
.
The body of Albert Maysles’ work represents a vision
which is deeply personal and yet which synthesizes
major trends in contemporary culture. It embodies a
near mystical faith in the power of the documentary
camera to yield inner portraits that transcend the
power of words. Eschewing preaching to the
converted and the use of narrators and interviews
traditionally associated with the term “documentary,”
Albert, along with gifted collaborators, helped launch
a major movement in documentary filmmaking which
he labeled “direct cinema,” But over the course of his
long career, he has developed an approach towards
“direct cinema” that is uniquely his own. When
Albert’s agile camera pans from one subject to the
next and he zeroes in on a telling expression or a
fragment of body language, his empathetic “left eye”
sweeps us into both a direct visual encounter with the
souls of his subjects and a broader understanding of
the world in which we live.
REFERENCES
* Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the
Non-fiction Film, Second Revised Edition. New York,
N.Y.: Oxford University Press.1993.
** Vogels, Jonathan B. The Direct Cinema of David
and Albert Maysles. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press.2005.