Tag: Albert Maysles

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This Week At The Cinema: Salesman, Slaughter, And Anarchy

Tonight at Malco Ridgeway, a documentary classic.

Salesman

David and Albert Maysles are two of the most prolific and influential documentarians to ever pick up a camera. Just take a look at this filmography, that begins in 1955 and ends in 2015. Their first big hit was Salesman, a 1968 film where the brothers followed four Bible salesmen, including Bostonian Paul Brennan who emerges as the “star” of the show. This historic film, which legitimized the theatrical documentary feature form, will screen tonight at Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill. Tickets are available on the Indie Memphis website.

Meanwhile, in nearby Germantown, the locally produced documentary Shannon Street: Echoes Under A Blood Red Moon screens at the Forest Hill Cinema. The film provides new perspectives on the spectacular 1983 siege in North Memphis that left eight dead, including one police officer, with a mix of contemporary interviews and archival footage. The screening begins at 7:00 PM.

Shannon Street: Echoes Under A Blood Red Moon Trailer from Marie Pizano on Vimeo.

This Week At The Cinema: Salesman, Slaughter, And Anarchy

And if that’s not enough to keep you busy tonight, The Room is back at Paradiso at 7 PM. All these choices are TEARING ME APART!

This Week At The Cinema: Salesman, Slaughter, And Anarchy (3)

On Wednesday, Indie Memphis brings the Slamdance Anarchy shorts program to its long running Microcinema series. Slamdance is the Sundance Film Festival’s weirder cousin, and no where is that more apparent than in this group of films, which self-describes as a “disruptive platform for subversive filmmakers and dangerous short films.” The program, always a highlight of the film year, will screen at Crosstown Arts at 7:00 PM on Wednesday. It’s pay what you can, so it’s a bargain at twice the price!

Slamdance Spotlight: THE ANARCHY PROGRAM: A Fraternity of Freaks from Slamdance on Vimeo.

This Week At The Cinema: Salesman, Slaughter, And Anarchy (2)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Grey Gardens

Early on in the documentary classic Grey Gardens, Edith “Little Edie” Beale remarks to the man filming her, “It’s very difficult to keep the line between past and present. Do you know what I mean?” Her question, which goes unanswered by cinematographer David Maysles*, is an invitation into Grey Gardens’ dissociative estate. Little Edie and her mother, “Big Edie”, are fallen aristocrats who live reclusively in an East Hampton mansion, rehearsing old disappointments and feeding raccoons. Theirs might be an unremarkable story if the Edies weren’t first cousins of Jackie O, but their dysphoria was backdropped by 1975’s broader upsets with America’s ruling class: Vietnam, the energy crisis, Nixon. There was something in the water.

‘Big Edie’ Beale in the Maysles Brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens.

Watching Grey Gardens feels like having a seat at Wonderland’s madcap tea party. It is satisfying to see aristocratic logic skewed towards the insane, because of how insane very rich people seem to us in the first place. The Beales are the Kennedy’s court jesters, inverting white gloved tradition in a way both funny and sad. When Little Edie dances alone in the parlor of her broken mansion, wearing a bathing suit and jeweled headscarf, we are supposed to understand: the rich are not immune.

‘Little Edie’ Beale

In 2015, of course, we have new jesters. Real Housewives of wherever has given us the chance to gawk at the nouveau riche any time we want. Reality TV can trace a direct line back to cinema verite, but no news there. Grey Gardens more galling permutation can be found in figures like Donald Trump; politicians who run their own surreal tea party (no pun intended) and become more powerful for it. Far from cleaning up their own proverbial Grey Gardens, powerful people do better to curate the absurd. Which is why Little Edie’s most apt line in the film remains as ironic today as it was in 1975: “The whole mark of aristocracy is responsibility. Is that it?”

Throwback August: Grey Gardens

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Iris

Iris (2015; dir. Albert Maysles)—At long last, definitive proof of the link between shopping and immortality: Iris proves that the one who dies with the most toys doesn’t win because the one with the most toys apparently never dies. This fun, flirty, casual documentary about businesswoman/interior designer/high-class clothing empress and all-around sweetie Iris Apfel is both a glossy portrait of a great New York City character and an object lesson in the long-term health benefits of retail therapy. Apfel, a self-described “octogenarian starlet” who’s actually 93 (but who’s going to blame a pretty girl like her for fibbing about her age?), treats Maysles’ camera like an intimate acquaintance she’s known for years; she’s chatty, witty and curious but never gossipy, sarcastic or nosy. It’s easy to see why Carl, her centenarian husband of 66+ years, looks at her with ageless, amused enchantment.

It’s also easy to see why Carl lets her dress him up in whatever she thinks he looks good in. Her vaunted sense of style, like her gigantic, infinity-symbol-shaped black glasses, is loud, joyous and liberating; at times she pads herself so heavily in brightly colored fabrics, feathers, necklaces, bracelets and costume jewelry that she looks like a cross between a benevolent gay witch and a little kid sticking her head out of an overstuffed toybox. Her age-defying joie de vivre is no passing fad or put-on for the smitten cameras that surround her, and her gnarled, tree-root hands aren’t a sign of decline—they’re simply two additional accessories that go well with nearly everything.

Iris is a communal experience; watch it with a bunch of friends or in a theater with a large audience so you can enjoy the waves of delighted chortles and flabbergasted barks that break whenever Apfel appears in a new outfit. Maysles’ final film offers grandiloquence with a smile and a wink. It’s the cat’s pajamas.
Grade: A-