ALBERT MAYSLES Memorial Film Festival (May 8-14, 2015)

[Chris Knipp]

Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival Honors Legendary Documentary Pioneer with Week-Long Documentary Festival at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco, May 8 - 14, 2015

General Forum thread.



ALBERT MAYSLES

LINKS TO REVIEWS

ORSON WELLES IN SPAIN 1963 10 MINS.
MEET MARLON BRANDO 1965 28 MINS.
SALESMAN 1968 85 MINS.
GET YER YA-YA'S OUT 1970 28 MINS.
GIMME SHELTER 1970 91 MINS.
CHRISTO'S VALLEY CURTAIN 1974 28 MINS.
GREY GARDENS 1975 100 MINS.
RUNNING FENCE 1977 58 MINS.
ISLANDS 1986/87 58 MINS..
CHRISTO IN PARIS 1990 57 MINS. (Not in the SF festival)
UMBRELLAS 1994 81 mins.
THE GATES 2005/07 98 MINS.
IRIS 2014 73 MINS.

Albert and David Maysles are among the greatest American documentary filmmakers. They are particularly warm and humanistic proponents of the non-intrusive school of Direct Cinema originated in the late Fifties and early Sixties, relying on the making of documentary films with minimal staff and light equipment, and without interviews, stock footage, or voiceover narration. Boston natives of working-class Jewish origin, the two brothers made movies as a duo, unaided in the shooting. Albert manned a camera of his own making and David used a separate, synchronized sound recording system that made it possible to shoot uninterrupted for longer than commercial equipment allowed before digital. The brothers worked together (with several faithful and brilliant editors) from the late Fifites till David's death in 1987. Then Albert continued making documentaries by himself until last year. He died March 5, 2015. Teacher and documentarian David L. Brown has set up a great program in San Francisco to celebrate the the Maysles' achievement. I'll be reviewing some of these, and was particularly eager to catch up on the Christo ones. By working on Christo's "Running Fence" myself in 1976, as part of doing an article about the project for Runner's World, and, somewhat paradoxically, winding up on the cover of the magazine running beside a strip of "Running Fence," I became a convert, but I had not seen the Maysles' other Christo & Jeanne Claude films.

[The festival press release.] The historic Vogue Theater in San Francisco in association with David L. Brown Productions and Maysles Films present the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival at the Vogue Theater, 3290 Sacramento St. in San Francisco, May 8-14. Screening 16 documentaries (shot and directed by Albert Maysles, many with his brother, David – the Maysles Brothers), the Festival honors the legendary documentary filmmaking pioneer who passed away from cancer on March 5th at age 88, with a first-of-its-kind documentary retrospective. Tickets are available at the Vogue Theater box office and at http://www.cinemasf.com/vogue. Tickets are $12.50, $10 for students and seniors.

The Festival opens on Friday, May 8th with the Direct Cinema classic, Salesman, along with Meet Marlon Brando. The program on Saturday, May 9 th will feature Gimme Shelter, the 1969 Rolling Stones tour that ended tragically at the Stones’ free concert at Altamont, and Running Fence, on the planning and creation of grand-scale-artist Christo’s epic 26-mile white nylon fence in Sonoma County. The Festival features four other documentaries on Christo’s epic-scale art pieces, the Academy Award-nominated Christo’s Valley Curtain , The Gates (the 20-years-in-the-making project in Central Park), screening Sunday, May 10th, and Islands and Umbrellas, screening Tuesday, May 12 th.

D. A. Pennebaker, Maysles’ fellow Direct Cinema pioneer at Drew Associates, (Primary, Dont Look Back) will participate in a conversational remembrance of Maysles via Skype on opening night, May 8th at 6:15 p.m. Pennebaker will discuss collaborating with Maysles over 54 years including shooting a recent documentary that is currently in post-production. The Saturday May 9th screenings of Gimme Shelter and Running Fence will include Questions and Answers with distinguished guest filmmakers who worked with Mr. Maysles: Stephen Lighthill (cinematographer on both Gimme Shelter and Running Fence) and Joan Churchill (cinematographer on Gimme Shelter). The Sunday, May 10th screening of The Gates will include Q and A with Jon Else, acclaimed Bay Area cinematographer and Academy Award nominee (for The Day After Trinity). Long-time co-director with Maysles, Susan Froemke, will also participate via Skype on Wednesday, May 13th. With Maysles, she co-directed Grey Gardens and the Oscar-nominated Lalee’s Kin, along with ten other Maysles Films.

A special addition to the Festival is Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, the seldom-seen Maysles documentary on the 1969 Rolling Stones performance at Madison Square Garden. The rousing half-hour film will screen on Saturday, May 9th and Thursday, May 14th. The Festival will include multiple video messages or Skype Q and A from filmmakers who worked with Albert Maysles (and his brother), including Bill Jersey (cinematographer on Showman, who gave Maysles his first industrial job as cinematographer). Additional invited guest filmmakers include: Maysles’ son, Philip; cinematographer on Gimme Shelter, George Lucas; and Mayles protégé and two-time Oscar winner, Barbara Kopple.

David L. Brown. The Festival was conceived, produced and curated by Brisbane documentary filmmaker, David L. Brown, who met Maysles in 2007. Brown filmed a two-hour interview with him for a Les Blank film on Direct Cinema pioneer, Richard Leacock, another early close collaborator and long-time friend of Maysles at Drew Associates, the birthplace of Direct Cinema. Brown wrote an article on Albert Maysles, the Maysles Brothers and their films for CineSource Magazine that Maysles described as "the best ever written about me." (available on request) The co-curator of the Festival is Adam Bergeron, programmer-operator of the Vogue Theater and owner-programmer of the Balboa Theater in San Francisco. I'll provide some previews and comments here.

Brown is a three-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced, written and directed over 80 productions and 14 broadcast documentaries on a variety of issues and topics. His documentaries have received over 85 international awards and have been broadcast on PBS and in sixteen countries. Surfing for Life, his documentary on older surfers as models for healthy aging, was described by Bruce Jenkins of the San Francisco Chronicle, as "a treasure, perhaps the most intelligent treatment of surfing ever captured on film." His documentary on the long, troubled history of the new east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story, won two Northern California Emmys including Best Documentary. Brown has produced three film festivals on nuclear, environmental, peace and justice issues. He teaches Documentary Filmmaking at City College of San Francisco where, for 16 years, he has curated a documentary film series.

[Chris Knipp]

FILMOGRAPHY OF DAVID AND ALBERT MAYSLES



Filmleaf Festival Coverage thread.

The following is based on a Wikipedia listing of Maysles works, with David L. Brown's Memorial Festival offerings highlighted. Gray Gardens is on Netflix as are Rufus Wainwright - Milwaukee at Last and Muhammad and Larry. And so is the 3-DVD set "5 Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude - A Maysles Films Production," including Christo Valley Curtain/Running fence, Islands/Christo in Paris, and Umbrellas. Amazon lists only two copies of this set available, from $229. That's not all of the Maysles available on DVD (though we need more) -- see notations of other current Netflix offerings below.

Filmography of Albert and David Maysles
Orson Welles In Spain (1963)
What's Happening! The Beatles In The USA (1964) – featuring The Beatles (Netflix as "The Beatles - the First U.S. Visit")
IBM: A Self-Portrait (1964)
Meet Marlon Brando (1965)
Cut Piece (1965)
Six in Paris (1965) (with Godard, as cinematographer)
With Love from Truman (1966, with Charlotte Zwerin) – featuring Truman Capote
Salesman (1968) (with Charlotte Zwerin) (Netflix - Criterion edition)
Journey to Jerusalem (1968)
Gimme Shelter (1970, with Charlotte Zwerin) – featuring The Rolling Stones (Netflix)
Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! (1970)
Christo's Valley Curtain (1974, with Ellen Hovde) (Netflix)
Grey Gardens (1976, with Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke) (Netflix)
The Burks of Georgia (1976, with Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer)
Running Fence (1978, with Charlotte Zwerin)
Muhammad and Larry (1980) (Netflix)
Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic (1985, with Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson, Pat Jaffe)
Ozawa (1986, with Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson)
Islands (1986, with Charlotte Zwerin) (Netflix-set)
Christo in Paris (1990, with Deborah Dickson and Susan Froemke)

Selected filmography by Albert Maysles
Psychiatry in Russia (1955)
Horowitz Plays Mozart (1987, with Susan Froemke, Charlotte Zwerin) (Found on YouTube here, 50 mins.)
Jessye Norman Sings Carmen (1989, with Susan Froemke)
They Met in Japan (1989, with Susan Froemke)
Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia (1991, with Susan Froemke, Peter Gelb and Bob Eisenhardt)
Abortion: Desperate Choices (1992, with Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson)
Baroque Duet (1992, with Susan Froemke, Peter Gelb, Pat Jaffe)
Accent on the Offbeat (1994, with Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson)
Umbrellas (1995, with Henry Corra, Grahame Weinbren) (Netflix)
Letting Go: A Hospice Journey (1996, with Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson)
Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center (1997, with Susan Froemke, Bob Eisenhardt)
LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2000, with Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson)
The Gates (2005, with Antonio Ferrera)
The Beales of Gray Gardens (2006) (Netflix)
Sally Gross: The Pleasure of Stillness (2007)
Close Up: Portraits (2008)
Rufus Wainwright – Milwaukee At Last (2009) (Netflix)
Hollywood Renegade: The Life of Budd Schulberg (2009) (Cinematographer)
The Love We Make (2011, with Bradley Kaplan, Ian Markiewicz) (Netflix "save")
Iris (2014) (Netflix)

[Chris Knipp]

MAYSLES FESTIVAL, SAN FRANCISCO, PROGRAM



Friday May 8
6:00 Skype conversation with three-time Academy Award-winner, Haskell Wexler,
and legendary Direct Cinema pioneer, D.A. Pennebaker.
Salesman 7:00, 9:30 (91)
Meet Marlon Brando 8:45, 11:15 (29).
Saturday, May 9
Gimme Shelter 12:30, 3:30, 7:00 (90)
Running Fence 2:00, 5:45, 9:15 (58)
Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! 10:30 (27)
Sunday, May 10
The Gates 2:00, 5:00, 8:00 (87)
Stephen Lighthill introduces the 2:00. Jon Else conducts Q and A after the 2:00 (at 3:40) and introduces the 5:00 and conducts
Q and A after the 5:00 (at 6:30)
Christo’s Valley Curtain 4:00, 6:45, 9:30 (28)
Monday, May 11
The Love We Make 7:00, 9:15 (91)
[The post-9/11 Concert for New York City organized by Paul McCartney]
Orson Welles - Spain 8:40 (10)
Anastasia 8:50 (8)
Tuesday, May 12
Islands 6:30, 9:00 (57)
Umbrellas 7:30, 10:00 (81) .
Wednesday, May 13
6:15 Skype conversation with Susan Froemke, long-time co-director with Albert Maysles.
Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton 7:00, 9:15 (88)
The Met in Japan 8:30 (21)
Thursday, May 14
Grey Gardens 7:00 (94)
Horowitz Plays Mozart 8:40 (50)
Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! 9:30
Tickets $12.50, $10 seniors and students.

[Chris Knipp]

MAYSLES BROTHERS: ORSON WELLES IN SPAIN(1963)


STILL FROM THE MAYSLES' WELLES IN SPAIN

A glimpse of Orson pitching a project

ORSON WELLES IN SPAIN was made in 1963 and is a 10-minute film in which Welles pitches a film to well dressed people, that was to have been a fictional narrative about important, chic -- and obsessed -- bullfight aficionados. It was to be entirely improvised based on Welles' predetermined structure as laid out in his own written script. The film, like so many Welles projects, apparently did not finally see the light of day. It's very experimental nature may have been a drawback. Welles' eloquence and fluency are much in evidence. Spanish music is included at the beginning and end along with some images of a major Spanish Plaza de Torros. The film seamlessly edits together several different moments, as they will do at greater length in the longer Marlon Brando film they made a couple of years later. An online commentator suggests that a lot of the idea pitched by Welles here, including the character of Jake Hannaford, he transferred to his The Other Side of the Wind, a hitherto unreleased film whose cast includes John Huston, Robert Random, and Peter Bogdanovich, which is listed on IMDb as coming out 5 May 2015.

A print of this little early 16mm color Maysles film portrait of Orson Welles can be found on the Welles.net website here.

The Maysles brothers did some commercial work at the outset, starting in the late Fifties to make films together. A notable effort was a promotional film for IBM, for which they were apparently handsomely paid.

All the films in this thread were screened in connection with the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival organized by David L. Brown at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco, May 8 - 14, 2015

[Chris Knipp]

MAYSLES BROTHERS: MEET MARLON BRANDO (1965)



Marlon turns on the charm, jousts with interviewers

MEET MARLON BRANDO (1965) is an amusing, (sort of) revealing 28-minute film, apparently mostly shot in and around a New York hotel, sequencing and overlapping several short interviews with Brando, some of them intended to be plugs for the movie Morituri, directed by Bernard Wicki (who Brando says smoked bad-smelling cigars). Brando dodges questions, kids around with men, and flirts with the women. One of the latter is 22, another 21, one who was a former Miss USA. Brando is in good humor and amusing and light-hearted, except when he's asked about the "plight of the American Indian," when he turns serious and cites grim statistics.

Meet Marlon Brando is sort of informal, certainly tongue-in-cheek, and shows Brando managing to seem himself while performing behind a good-natured persona, while not really cooperating or revealing anything he doesn't want to reveal. Television journalists (apparently) are interviewing the star about a then new film, but Brando counters their futile questions, a blurb says "with wit and insight, a man unwilling to sell himself." "It's a wonderful show," one woman comments about the new project. "Did you see it?" he asks. "No, I haven't seen it yet." "Then how do you know?" Always smiling and never modest, Marlon Brando shines in one of his most revealing performances. One may compare this with the young Bob Dylan's relentless baiting of interviewers in Don't Look Back, the classic doc shot about a year later by the Maaysles brothers' close colleague D.A. Pennebaker. Never, it would seem, was here a time like the mid to late Sixties for finding naive interviewers and celebrities unwilling to be manipulated.

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1966, and has been telecast "with much acclaim" (the Maysles site says)in France. Brando shows off his knowledge of French here, which would be observed later in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. Reactions to this short film were gushy. The NY Times said "the actor was never morea appealing than in this candid camera cameo." The Post goes further: "possibly the best and most appealing personal portrait of a major film star ever made." And the pull quotes from Variety are "enchanting. . . clever. . . delightful. . . beguiling." Steve Riley references moments from this film to show Brando's dodgy sexual playfulness in his recent documentary biography, Listen to Me Marlon (New Directors/New Films 2015). It should be noted, though, that there's nothing particularly "candid" in these interviews. Brando shows both shyness and a desire to enchant, without revealing anything. But he is so good humored that he succeeds in making the American male interviewer seem to want to be in on the fun, and the French male journalist to be quite respectful.

He is all that, and Brando in his dazzling early career was unmatched for youth, sex appeal, and charm. A clip from this film, one of several where he turns back the questioning to the pretty interviewer to interview her and draw attention to her looks, is used in the new comprehensive feature-length documentary biography by Steve Riley, Listen to Me Marlon (New Directors/New Films 2015, where Riley is showing Brando's dodgy sexual playfulness. It should be noted, though, that there's nothing particularly "candid" in these interviews. Brando shows both shyness and a desire to enchant, without revealing anything. But he is so good humored that he succeeds in making the American male interviewer seem to want to be in on the fun, and the French male journalist to be quite respectful.

This, like the Welles film, shows its famous subject performing as himself in public, but even here we can see the Maysles' uncanny ability to get up close to their subjects unnoticed and keep them relaxed. Behind this performance there is a certain sexism toward the ladies, since he is unwilling to let them do their job for very long. There is a hostility to commerce, because he clearly wants to act and not promote his films. There may be an awareness that the new movie is very far from his best work. And there is the constant desire to charm the public without revealing anything much or being forced to act serious, except when he wants to.

In the most unusual moment, Brando interrupts the interviewer in French, who has asked him to speak about the situation of black people, to call attention to a pretty woman walking on the sidewalk with a small child in tow. "C'est fantastique, cette femme!" Marlon exclaims. She is brought over, and turns out to be black. He then declares that he is not qualified to comment on the situation of Negroes in America, but she is. He asks her if the government is doing what it needs to do for the Negro, and she quickly and emphatically declares that it is not. Brando's flirtatiousness vies with his nimbleness in conversation here, not to mention his gameness in making his way in French. What a guy! And he was a pretty damn good actor, too, I've heard.

In 16 mm. black and white, Meet Marlon Brando is identified as edited by long-time collaborator Charlotte Zwerin. Actually the Maysles were to use the 28-minute length again, to remarkably powerful and epic effect, in their first Christo film, Christo's Falley Curtain (1974). All the films in this thread were screened in connection with the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival organized by David L. Brown at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco, May 8 - 14, 2015

[Chris Knipp]

THE MAYSLES BROTHERS: SALESMAN (1968)


PAUL BRENNAN IN SALESMAN

The Maysles' debut feature is a devastating and fluid image of the American dream

SALESMAN (1968). Albert, the longer lived of the great documentarians, the Maysles (pronounced "MAY-zuls") brothers (David, the younger brother, died in his fifties in 1987) said in the Criterion Collection edition apropos of this, their classic first feature, Salesman: "I've always had a kind of almost religious excitement about the fact that you can really record reality with a great deal of exactitude, as long as you don't carry with you the baggage of prejudgment, of preconception. You have to throw all that stuff aside, and depict with an open mind what you as an artist with a camera find interesting. It isn't just a fly on the wall. It has to be a camera with love. It has to be a camera with empathy." He says this with an Irish-tinged Boston accent, very like the accents of the subjects of the film, their debut feature.

The grainy black and white film has an immaculate and classic look. It is free of narration or commentary or interviews, the sound and image seamless, all recorded with perfect access only by Albert using a camera he had built and David using a a separate synchronized Nagra for the sound, a method that allowed them to work more seamlessly and in longer stretches before the days of digital. . They called it "cinema direct," or Direct Cinema, and didn't like the word "vérité," finding it pretentious and alien to their own humble Boston origins.

The Willy Loman, Eugene O'Neill grimness of the life of these men on the road selling Catholic Bibles to poor people in Opa-locka, a town outside Miami, is palpable. But the essential thing to know is that the Maysles brothers feel close to this world and affectionate toward these men. They themselves were Jewish, but they came from the same lower middle class part of Boston as these Irish Catholic salesmen. The joke was, as told by Paul Brennan in his fake Irish brogue, that the Irish were supposed to have civil service jobs, and the Jews should have been the salesmen, but the filmmakers' father was a postal clerk, and these poorly educated Irish guys were out selling, a job they weren't, or at least Paul Brennan, despite his years of experience, wasn't suited for. Salesman is stunning and true because it is a labor of love. And, of course, it is beautifully edited and given a structure by Ellen Gifford and Charlotte Zwerin. In the end it is a story of American falsehood and the American dream, lives on the edge lived by lower class people (Albert Maysles' term). "It's a film," Albert says in the Criterion commentary, "that questions the very core of capitalism, of our belief in the individual." And it was too strong in its simple truth-telling: it took them twenty-five years to get it shown on television. It has taken some of us longer than that to be ready to look at it.

Salesman's surface simplicity and focus, its clean, uncluttered, grainy, 16mm., black and white images, give it, in retrospect, a kind of searing, diamond-bright perfection. It's not an easy film to watch, but nothing impure, didactic, or ironic appears in the picture it provides, the Maysles' first great picture of what Direct Cinema meant in their hands. The film depicts nothing extermal to these four Irish Catholic Bible salesmen in Chicago and Florida one winter in 1966. The first essential is the smooth, light method of working Albert and David had developed, their confidernt, friendly ability to walk into a house the salesmen visited or linger in their motel room, filming virtually unnoticed. It took skill and empathy. You either have it or you don't. The second essential is the men's own willingness to be filmed, without acting. Or at least without seeming to. After the film was made, Paul Brennan said to someone he was an "actor," perhaps wishful thinking, but it had a bad effect: it led to Pauline Kael's calling all this a lie and claiming the Maysles had hired roofing salesmen to pose as Bible salesmen. (In the event, Penelope Gilliatt wrote the favorable New Yorker review praising its humor and elegance.)

It was not planned or anticipated, but the salesman of the four whom the Maysles chose to concentrate on, Paul Brennan, turned out to be having a grim time indeed. In Florida Paul spends two weeks unable to come up with a single sale. And of the four he was the one who tended to take dry periods particularly hard. We see that his own attitude is bringing him down, when the other three perform better with less effort; but there is no need to point to this, it's just there.

The men live in the simple motels of the time, which look pathetic today. They smoke a lot, to a contemporary American eye suicidally much, or at least to a degree you'd think would turn off the customers. But such things went unnoticed then. They wear dark suits, short sleeved white shorts and thin black ties, go periodically to company meetings where they're threatened and cajoled and hear men tall lies about their successes that can only be depressing to those, like Paul, who know first hand the truth is otherwise.

As the Maysles saw, and Albert's commentary underlines, there is no real togetherness among the men. They had worked together for years. They had pet names for each other, making them like cartoon characters: the Rabbit, the Gipper, the Bull; and Paul was the Badger. But in these barren circumstances, there little room for real camaraderie. The epithets seem to distance them. They prey off their poor clients and they compete with each other.

The film looks extraordinary now. Some then were impressed by it, but others were put off. The truth it shows is too hard to bear. The church gave parishioners something to fill out, expressing an interest. The company was in touch with the Catholic Church, perhaps. So to get a foot in the door, the salesmen say "We're from the church." But they are not from the church. And they are selling almost exclusively to people who can't afford it -- because richer people don't fall for Bible salesmen. This also makes Paul Brennan more angry, because he is struggling with those who say they haven't the money, and it's true.

Albert Maysles recounts that they showed the film to groups of potential buyers. From one group all walked out before the film was over. One woman remained, and when he looked, she was crying. She was the woman who was to become his wife.

Salesman, 85 mins., was edited by regular collaborator Charlotte Zwerin, along with Ellen Giffoard and Barbara Jarvis. Sound recorded by David Maysles, cameraman Albert Maysles. Sound mixer Dick Vorosek. Screened for this review on the Criterion Collection film (for a more explicit spelling out of the themes see the Criterion essay by Toby Miller), for the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival May 8 - 14, 2015 at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco. See also Chris Dashiell in Cinescene.