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Movies & TV

In memoriam: Albert Maysles, 1926 – 2015

Earlier this afternoon, the Criterion Collection announced that Albert Maysles had died. He was 88 years old.

The news of Maysles’s death coming from Criterion makes a lovely kind of sense the company is devoted to restoring and releasing cinema at its finest, and that is precisely the sort of cinema that Maysles made.

Often working in tandem with his younger brother David, who died in 1987 at the age of 55, Maysles blurred the boundaries between documentary and psychodrama at a key point in American cinema, offering an intimate, confessional format that existed in stark opposition to the “direct cinema” work being practiced by Frederick Wiseman and Allan King.

In such essential works as Salesman, Gimme Shelter and the indelible cult classic Grey Gardens, you had the sense that the Maysles’s camera was not passively observing its subjects but actively watching them, pushing past false bravado and affected swagger to reveal the confused, vulnerable human being beneath. It was a skill honed by his work as a documentary cinematographer, filming seemingly every nascent cultural icon of the 60s: the Beatles, the young John F. Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Jimi Hendrix and more.

The first glimpse of Paul Brennan’s flop sweat in Salesman the slackening of Mick Jagger’s face in the editing bay as he realizes he’s watching a murder in Gimme Shelter the dawning realization of the depths of Big Edie and Little Edies’s self-deception in Grey Gardens: a gifted documentarian could work for a lifetime and be grateful for delivering even one of those.

Albert Maysles got them all. That’s a hell of a legacy.

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