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MillimeterMOMA presents "Maysles Films: Five Decades"
Nov 23, 2005 10:48 AM
December 1-31, 2005
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
The Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org) presents a month-long retrospective of films by brothers Albert and David Maysles, pioneers in the field of modern documentary-making. Maysles Films: Five Decades, which consists of documentaries on topics ranging from opera to family dysfunction, surveys the career trajectory of these influential filmmakers, marking their substantial contribution to the field of nonfiction film. The opening-night films, Psychiatry in Russia (1955) and Grey Gardens (1976), will be introduced by Albert Maysles, director Susan Froemke, and David’s daughter, Celia Maysles. Organized by Anne Morra, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media, this series will run from December 1 to 31, 2005, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters.
In 1955, Albert Maysles (American, b. 1926) made his first film, Psychiatry in Russia, an unprecedented view into Soviet mental healthcare. This short film and Showman (1963), the first Albert and David Maysles (American, 1932-1987) collaboration, were catalysts for five decades of powerful and innovative documentary filmmaking. Over the following years, the brothers worked in partnership on more than a dozen films-with Albert on camera and David recording sound-and pioneered Direct Cinema, the American version of French cinema vérité, filmmaking without intervention.
Capturing the unpredictability of life on film, Albert and David Maysles provided audiences with the exhilaration of the Rolling Stones’ performance in Gimme Shelter (1970), a film that chronicles the mayhem at the band’s 1969 concert in Altamont, California; the loss of the American Dream in Salesman (1968), which follows four Bible salesmen as they ply their door-to-door trade; and, in Grey Gardens, the day-to-day existence of a mother and daughter who have fallen from a society world of parties and grandeur into eccentricity and squalor. Following David Maysles’s death in 1987, Maysles Films entered a second phase in which Albert Maysles continued to make compelling films true to the brothers’ original intent, but with a variety of collaborators.
Maysles Films: Five Decades explores the power of truth that the brothers’ camera and microphone have captured for 50 years. Albert Maysles continues to make collaborative works, mindful of the brothers’ original intent in documentary filmmaking. His two latest films, Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center (1987), made with Susan Froemke and Bob Eisenhardt, and the Oscar-nominated Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2000), made with Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson, will both be included.
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