Artists out the wazoo
I just got back from the Silverdocs documentary film festival in Silver Spring, Md. The big event tonight was a tribute to Albert Maysles, who with his late brother David made some of the best examples of the genre, including "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter." The former is about a zany mother and daughter on Long Island who count Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis among their close relations. Maysles commented last night that Big Edie and Little Edie Beale "were just like everyone else, only more so." The latter is about the tragic Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969.
I'm concluding a six-month documentary filmmaking program at George Washington University that has had its ups and downs. This was definitely one of the ups. Mayles was introduced by Barbara Kopple, a two-time Academy Award winner for documentary film who was a student of Maysles and who first came to prominence with the scary and wonderful film, "Harlan County USA."
She was followed to the podium by Christo and Jeanne Claude, the French artists who create huge, dramatic, and temporary public art. I saw them wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris in 1985, and walked through the series of orange gates they erected in Central Park in 2004 (that was my Facebook picture until a couple of days ago). Maysles makes a film of most of their projects. Jeanne Claude, whose hair was dyed the color of the Central Park gates, joked that Maysles shoots chronologically but doesn't edit that way. There is a scene in the Pont Neuf film where she and Christo are seen walking into an office during their 10-year quest for a permit to wrap the bridge. She is heavier than she would like to be when she walks in and thin when she walks out because scenes were shot a year or more apart "and you know how women are heavy one year and not the next."
Maysles, who is 82 but still making films, talked about his reputation for capturing magic moments on film, but talked about the ones that got away. In the old days, it just wasn't practical to carry a 16 mm film camera with you everywhere. He accompanied Fidel Castro to a party at the Chinese Embassy in Havana sans camera in the early 1960s and saw Castro's face when he opened a telegram from the U.S. State Department informing him that diplomatic relations were being broken off. And he recalled as a 10-year-old boy getting a rare strapping from his father and then seeing him a few moments later leaning against his bedroom wall crying.
He said that the documentary filmmaker must find a way through the competing poles of human emotion, namely to keep something secret or dislose it to the world. The latter emotion is stronger, Maysles believes. Or as Little Edie Beale told him after seeing her life laid out on film, "Everyone should do this!"