ALBERT MAYSLES ON DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING
"I want to carry moviemaking to the point where any storyteller can tell his story directly on film with the same personal impact as a Hemingway working with words or an Edward Hopper working with oil paint." - Letter to the Editor of Film Comment, 1964
"The word control is very interesting; it crosses all kinds of lines in that discussion. A true documentary is shot with no control. You might even call it the uncontrolled cinema. Because once you begin to control the audience its not even the real thing. And so thats part of the problem with the reality shows. They want to control things, so we get the control but lose the reality."
"As a documentarist, my job is to record experience direct without explanations, narration or hosts, or fancy photography or speeded-up editing or what have you."
"A Hollywood film, it has to cost $100 million, or $50 million in order to have-- high production value. Well high production value-- professional lighting and-- and the use of a tripod and 35 millimeter-- All these things are artificial devices that in-- in fact steer you away from common experience, from giving you the feeling which I think is so important and which we are so much deprived of, the feeling that you're on common ground with-- with another person. Whether that other person is from a different class or a different-- occupational kind of role or from another country or whatever."
(AFP News brief - April 8, 2007)
'Dean of documentaries' frowns at blurring of fact and fiction
: by Rob Woollard
At 80 years old and with half-a-century's worth of groundbreaking films behind him, it is small wonder that Albert Maysles is known as the dean of documentaries.
Michael Moore was barely a year old in 1955 when Maysles was packing up a camera and venturing behind the Iron Curtain to capture a glimpse of life inside the Soviet Union's psychiatric hospitals.
The result of that trip, "Pyschiatry in Russia", signaled the beginning of a career that saw Maysles and his late brother David emerge as two of the most important figures in 20th Century American film.
The Maysles were in the vanguard of the 'cinema verite' or direct documentary movement, among the first film-makers to capture their subjects without reference to scripts, sets, interviews or narration.
Maysles' most famous film is the 1970 Rolling Stones documentary "Gimme Shelter", which captured the tragic events surrounding the band's 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway, when four fans died amid chaotic organization.
Maysles, speaking ahead of an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences event that that will showcase his work in Hollywood on Thursday, said he was not surprised by the recent resurgence in documentaries.
But he is disturbed by a number of films which he thinks present a slanted view to suit the editorial line of the director.
"I think it's a pity that people aren't making documentaries with higher expectations to tell the truth, to work in a more observational fashion rather than controlling things," Maysles told AFP in an interview.
"Alfred Hitchcock put it beautifully. He said 'In a feature film the director is god. In a non-fiction feature film, god is the director.'
Maysles, who has been critical of "Fahrenheit 9/11" director Moore in the past, says he is concerned at the increasing number of films which blur the line between fact and fiction.
"What I find so odd is that people seem to take pride in that blur," Maysles said. "That's fine if the film is no longer identified as a documentary. But if it is then it's just wrong.
"It disturbs me when I hear other directors say things like 'documentaries are a fictional reality.' The one thing a documentary can do so beautifully is give us knowledge of the real world.
"And if it's not the truth then it's not real knowledge."
A psychologist by training, Maysles was drawn to film in the 1950s at the height of Cold War paranoia, when nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union appeared a very real and terrifying prospect.
Out of a desire to provide Americans with an idea of what life was like for ordinary Russians, Maysles traveled to the Soviet Union to chronicle life inside the country's mental hospitals.
"In 1955 when the Soviet Union was in full swing, I felt very sad that we could easily have gone to war at that point," Maysles recalled.
"But I felt that it might be harder to start a war if we could show Americans that Russians were like them. And when you look at that film you just see ordinary people. So it's no longer easy to bomb that country."
Similarly, Maysles maintains that a lack of mainstream information about life inside Iraq prior to the US-led invasion in 2003 contributed to the countdown to the war.
"It was so easy to bomb the hell out of Iraq because we had no immediate experience of an Iraqi person," he says.
"And it's going to be a lot easier for Mr Bush to launch a military operation against Iran if we have no experience of who they are."
In 2005 Maysles founded the Maysles Institute, a non-profit organization that aims to provide film training and apprenticeships to the under-privileged.
Maysles, who is based in New York, remains actively involved in film-making however and is currently working on a documentary about people traveling on trains.
"We're pretty much all between stations," he said. "The intention is to find ordinary human stories about what people are going to be doing when they arrive at their destination."
Mooncusser Films produces documentaries, educational programs, music video, and corporate / promotional media multimedia with passion.
We've been lucky enough to work with the late illustrator Edward Gorey , musician Suzanne Vega , actress Julie Harris , filmmaker Albert Maysles , and journalist Walter Cronkite over the course of our ten years in the business. Current projects include a music video for Chris Trapper of the Push Stars and a 10-part series of natural soundscapes cd's- Cape Cod Soundscapes available now at Target, Itunes, and Amazon.com.
Contact director Christopher Seufert for help in creating your next project proposal.
