The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Looking into Grey Gardens

by Jonathan B. Vogels, 2007

This excerpt from the Masters of Cinema Series 40-page booklet is the first quarter of an article updated by the author in 2007, from a chapter that originally appeared in The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles (ISBN: 0809326434), published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2005. The full piece can be found in the accompanying booklet for this DVD.

The brothers David and Albert Maysles have long held a prominent place in the history of documentary cinema. After spending time with the renowned team of documentary filmmakers known as Drew Associates, the brothers set out on their own in the early 1960s, championing a new style of filmmaking that they believed was more immediate, more authentic. They dubbed their approach “direct cinema” and sought to do nothing short of revolutionising the documentary genre. In so doing, they believed wholeheartedly that they had placed themselves “right in the middle of what cinema can really do.”1 In fact, David maintained that “this kind of filmmaking can be the most emotionally involving”2 and could transform the way people viewed films. A few years later, the brothers, along with co-director Charlotte Zwerin, created Salesman (1969); with that effort, their style of filmmaking had achieved a new level of artistry and depth. They believed the film would “prove to everybody… that you could take someone from everyday life and make a film about him.”3 That philosophy carried forth into the making of their 1975 masterwork, Grey Gardens.

The Grey Gardens project started inauspiciously enough. In 1972, Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, contacted the brothers through their mutual friend Peter Beard. Radziwill wanted to commission a cinematic family album of her childhood, and she had compiled a list of people and places she thought could be filmed. Among the suggested sites was her aunt’s ramshackle mansion, Grey Gardens, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York. Originally purchased by Phelan Beale, a brother-in-law of the Bouviers, the home was at that time occupied solely by Beale’s widow and daughter, both named Edith Bouvier Beale. The elder woman, then in her late seventies, and the younger, fifty-six, had lived for many years in virtual isolation amidst squalid conditions. The house had long since fallen into disrepair and had nearly been condemned by the town in the late 1960s. (The Bouvier family, Jackie included, had rallied support to clean up the place in order to meet health standards.) David and Al spent several days filming there as they accumulated footage of Radziwill’s immediate and extended family. After seeing some of the initial, unedited film, however, Radziwill lost interest in the entire project, primarily because she recognised that a Maysles kind of film would not meet her expectations or desires. According to the filmmakers, she was also more than a little appalled by the notion that the viewing public would be witness to the conditions in which two of her relatives lived. But by then the Maysles brothers themselves had become fascinated with the two women they had encountered at Grey Gardens. Following a hunch – much as they had turned a commissioned concert film on the Rolling Stones into Gimme Shelter (1970) – the brothers stuck with the project, shooting hundreds of hours of film. David and Al then turned the raw footage over to a skilled group of editors – Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke – who subsequently shaped and structured the film. The result is a ninety-minute masterpiece truly unlike anything else that had come before it. Perhaps because it was so unexpected, the initial critical reception of the film was mixed. The film’s admirers appreciated the way that the “story works like any tragedy in which the plight of everyone is raised in magnitude by the nobility of the protagonists… Grey Gardens is a film that exalts people, and you will like it if you like yourself.”4 Another believed that the film “achieves what cinema verite aims for but seldom conveys: a sense that the material is telling itself.”5 On the other hand, the film’s detractors often pointed to what they regarded as a lack of narrative or dramatic thrust, citing the “chronic elements of indiscretion and callowness”6 that marred other Maysles Films productions as well. The more vociferous critiques of the film, however, pointed to the central figures themselves and to the way the filmmakers had used them. In their view the brothers were no better than voyeurs, and their cruel invasion of the Beales’ lives was unethical at best. One critic posited that “the moviegoer will… feel like an exploiter. To watch Grey Gardens is to take part in a kind of carnival of attention with two willing but vulnerable people who had established themselves, for better or worse, in the habit of not being looked at. And what happens when the carnival moves on?”7 Another reviewer concluded that the film is “an aimless act of ruptured privacy and an exploitation.”8 Walter Goodman of the New York Times blasted the entire project: “The sagging flesh, the ludicrous poses, the prized and private recollections strewn about among the tins of cat food – everything is grist for that merciless camera. The sadness for mother and daughter turns to disgust at the brothers.”9

At the time, the Maysles brothers themselves, along with the Beale women, ardently defended the film. They maintained that Edith and Edie were not only willing participants in the project, but were thrilled with the finished product. The brothers were “factual,” Edie told Newsweek in 1976, and they “get the pith of every situation. There is no difference in the way we lead our lives and what you see.”10 Al has often recounted the story that when Edith was dying and someone asked her if she had any “final words,” she replied, “No, it’s all in the film.” The criticisms and accusations did hinder the film at the time, hampering the filmmakers’ ability to achieve a wide release and stymieing them from some of their future endeavours. Fortunately, the view of Grey Gardens as an ethical violation has not carried the day; instead, the film is now widely regarded as one of the crowning achievements in documentary film history.

It is precisely the film’s edgy strangeness, the very notion that we viewers are witness to something highly unusual and wonderful, that is one of the key aspects of the film’s popularity. Ultimately, the filmmakers’ sensitivity towards their subjects means that the Beale women are afforded respect and some degree of admiration, not condescension as some critics charged. We may be witness to some eccentric behaviour, but we get the sense that we have been invited in, rather than having to peek behind the curtains. I contend that another reason for the film’s success actually lies in its complexity: both emotionally and intellectually, it is a challenging film to watch, but in a way that rewards rather than frustrates the patient viewer. Grey Gardens tells its story through a highly fragmented, frequently repetitive narrative that recalls a cubist painting or a stream-of-consciousness novel. It defies formulaic structures in an attempt to show that there is beauty and artistry in the commonplace lives of two isolated women who might be anyone living anywhere at any historical time. The particular and the universal are thereby united: the Beales’ complex struggles and their small human victories are uniquely their own, yet, paradoxically, their lives are profound because they are in many ways so ordinary. The film is satisfied to explore the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship rather than offer definitive truths. Grey Gardens raises existential questions but avoids providing pat answers to them; the asking is what matters. The burden of making sense of the fragments falls to the audience, in whom, as they had in their earlier films, the Maysles brothers invested a great deal of trust. And yet, as the film takes pains to show, the fragments may or may not piece together coherently. Like most lives, the Beales’ are not reducible to a few simple truisms, and could never be explained precisely in a ninety-minute film. Theirs is a complex and frequently ambiguous story; it is, therefore, true to life.

END OF EXCERPT

The full article can be read in the accompanying booklet for the Masters of Cinema Series edition of _Grey Gardens_.