Albert Maysles dies; pioneer of documentary film technique

By Jake Coyle

AP Film Writer

NEW YORK

Albert Maysles, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who helped pioneer feature-length nonfiction movies that used lightweight, hand-held cameras to spontaneously record the lives of both the famous and the unexamined, has died. He was 88.

Stacey Farrar, marketing director of Maysles Films, his production company, said the filmmaker died at his home in New York on Thursday.

Maysles was best known for a handful of cult classics he made with his brother, David, in the 1960s and 1970s, though he continued to make movies until late in his life and to mentor younger filmmakers.

The Maysles Brothers — as many referred to them — chose subjects as ordinary as the struggles of Bible salesmen and as glamorous as Marlon Brando, Orson Welles and The Beatles, whom the pair followed in 1964 during their first trip to the U.S. One of their films, “Gimme Shelter,” about the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert Dec. 6, 1969, captured on film the killing of a fan and the darkening of the hippie dream for an Age of Aquarius. The Altamont concert, which also featured Jefferson Airplane and Santana, was the Stones’ disastrous effort to stage a festival like the Woodstock gathering a few months earlier.

He was active right up to his death. His documentary of the fashion icon Iris Apfel, “Iris,” is to be released in April. On Thursday, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that “In Transit,” a documentary he co-directed about the longest train route in the U.S., will premiere at this year’s festival.

Born in Boston to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Maysles served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, studied at Syracuse and Boston University and taught psychology for three years before turning to film. His first foray into motion pictures was a 16mm documentary he made in 1955 while visiting mental hospitals in the Soviet Union.

Maysles started out as an assistant to Robert Drew, a pioneer of cinema verite, and his peers included such acclaimed documentary makers as D.A Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman. He and Pennebaker were among those who worked with Drew on the groundbreaking 1960 documentary “Primary,” about rival Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

The Maysles and others worked without scripts, sets or lighting. The resulting works had no narration, no filmed interviews and gave audiences a fly-on-the-wall feeling.

“Our films aren’t the conventional kind, locked down and scripted before shooting begins,” David Maysles once said of their films. “We shoot life as it’s lived.”

A technical revolution had made such films possible — the arrival of lightweight, portable sound and film equipment — and gave them the opportunity to observe their subjects with as little effect on events as possible.

In 1966, using the new equipment, they filmed Truman Capote shortly after he finished “In Cold Blood.” Capote explained that his book was his idea of the “nonfiction novel” — “a synthesis of journalism with fictional technique.”

“We wanted to experiment in film the way Capote had experimented in literature,” Maysles said in “Hand-held and from the Heart,” the filmmaker’s autobiographical documentary. That led them to make the feature-length “Salesman” in 1968, following Bible salesmen from house to house as they try to convince people to buy what one of them calls “still the best-seller in the world.”

Some critics attacked the cinema verite techniques as falsely objective, given that the film ultimately viewed by audiences was usually a result of what the filmmakers chose to focus on and the cutting and selecting of the editing process.