Whilst the 1960s provided the Maysles with a rich cultural landscape for their innovative documentaries, moving to colour film enabled the brothers to create some of their most vivid work.
From their intimate character study of Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to a film which helped kickstart a lifelong collaboration with artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, as well as their infamous Rolling Stones doc, which shattered the dreams of the Love Generation, the following films all became classic works of documentary cinema.
Gimme Shelter / Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin / 1970 / 91 min
This landmark Rolling Stones doc captures the band in the final weeks of their notorious 1969 US tour, culminating in their infamous concert at the Altamont Speedway.
Just months after Woodstock, a crowd of nearly 300,000 amass for the free gig, but a febrile atmosphere ends in tragedy with the fatal stabbing of a fan by one of the Hells Angels tasked with security.
A magnetic insight into the era, Gimme Shelter has been credited with capturing the death of the sixties, as the dreams of the Love Generation crashed into disillusionment.
Gimme Shelter is screening Sunday 4 May at Bertha DocHouse. Book tickets here,
Christo’s Valley Curtain / Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde /1974 / 28 min
Nominated for an Academy Award, Christo’s Valley Curtain celebrates the Bulgarian-born artist’s dramatic hanging of a huge orange curtain between two Colorado mountains. Since the late 1950s, Christo’s large-scale temporary works of art have helped change our perception of art and society.
This is one of the first Maysles films about visual artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Throughout their career, they went on to make another six films about the eclectic duo.
Grey Gardens / Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer / 1976 / 94 min
Grey Gardens is the unbelievable but true story of Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Mother and daughter live in a world of their own behind the towering privets that surround their decaying 28-room East Hampton mansion known as “Grey Gardens,” a place so far gone that the local authorities once threatened to evict them for violating building and sanitation codes. The incident made national headlines — American royalty, living in squalor!
For the Beales were nothing short of the upper crust. Mrs. Beale, a.k.a. “Big Edie,” was a born aristocrat, sister of “Black Jack” Bouvier, Jackie O’s father. “Little Edie” was an aspiring actress of striking beauty who put her New York life on hold to care for her mother – and never left her side again. Together they descended into a strange life of dependence and eccentricity that no one had ever shared until the Maysles arrived with their camera and tape recorder.
Abortion: Desperate Choices / Albert Maysles, Deborah Dickson, Susan Froemke / 1992 / 67 min
An intensely personal exploration of an explosive issue – abortion in America. Wrenching first-person narratives from seven decades of women, each one facing an unplanned pregnancy – and the dreadful decision that no one wants to make.
Both pro-life and pro-choice, both out front on the picket line and inside the clinic, these women’s stories turn politics into heart-searing drama: a pregnant 17-year-old and her pro-life mother whose conflict unfolds in front of the camera; a 22-year-old who became a pro-life protestor when she learned that her mother nearly aborted her; an unhappy mother-of-two who’s expecting a third when her marriage suddenly hits the rocks; a 71-year-old grandmother who still grieves for her mother, an early victim of illegal abortion.
In this fusion of past and present, the history of abortion is the history of women – told at a time in America when yesterday’s back-alley abortions may be the only choice left for tomorrow.
This work of socio-political documentary was one of the first films that Albert Maysles produced after the untimely death of his brother David in 1987.
Concert of the Wills: Making the Getty Center /
Albert Maysles, Bob Eisenhardt, Susan Froemke / 1997 / 100 min
Filmed over the course of twelve years, Concert of Wills chronicles the conception, construction and completion of the most eagerly anticipated architectural undertaking of this century. The film offers a rare look at a creative process in action, where different aesthetic philosophies meet head on and are passionately defended.