Film and celluloid is going the way of vinyl. The shift from tactile mediums to ones and zeroes has happened so quickly that for a while it had looked like these records and film strips that we had used to record our artistic history for the entire 20th century would suddenly become obsolete and erased …
Albert Maysles, the documentarian behind such groundbreaking films as Grey Gardens and The Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, died Thursday evening. This morning, The Criterion Collection announced his passing via their Facebook page. He was 88. Maysles innovated the “fly on the wall” style of filmmaking, and his films from Salesman to Grey Gardens to …
Wearing a dark scarf over her head to shield herself against the bright, Long Island sunlight, Little Edie Beale famously introduced her iconoclastic sense of fashion by calling her outfit “the best costume for today”. In the Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens, this single clip seems to encapsulate the greatness of that film: performance, style, agelessness. And nearly 40 years later, Albert Maysles returns to a similar, if not the same, kind of subject: Iris Apfel. In Iris, those ideas are explored with a little less than half the vitality that Grey Gardens, but on the plus side it’s a pleasure to watch.