Happy birthday Albert Maysles! Videos and Other Links

[The video embedded above presents a conversation with] one of America's foremost non-fiction filmmakers, Albert Maysles who along with his brother David (1932-1987) is recognized as a pioneer of direct cinema, the distinctly American version of French cinéma vérité. Their seminal early films Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter(1970), and Grey Gardens (1976) became cult classics and are still finding new rapturous audiences. On the occasion of the publication of A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/Documents, Maysles screens selections from filmed portraits of Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, and Truman Capote, and takes audience questions (courtesy of Hammer Museum at UCLA, March 10, 2009 on YouTube).

'The documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles describes how using his digital video camera inspired him "to tape the little things that I witness in everyday life. They’d be pieces of poetry"', Aisling Kelliher, Everyday Cinema, MIT Media Lab

'We can see two types of truth here. One is the raw material, which is the footage, the kind of truth that you get in literature in diary form – it’s immediate, no one has tampered with it. Then there’s the other kind of truth that comes in extracting and juxtaposing the raw material into a more meaningful and coherent storytelling form, which finally can be said to be more than just raw data.' Stella Bruzzi citing Albert Maysles in 'The Talented Mr Ripley', EnterText 1.2, Spring 2001

It's Thanksgiving and Albert Maysles's birthday today. It's very much a poignant timing for the latter occasion as the artist (and partner to Christo) Jeanne-Claude (Denat de Guillebo), who featured in a series of the Maysles's Brothers' films, died on November 18, 2009. But, this year, Film Studies For Free is marking all three observances, and giving thanks for the Maysles's highly influential filmmaking, with its usual tribute of links, below, to high-quality scholarly and other interesting online resources, in addition to the great video embedded above.

Video and website resources:

• Albert Maysles interviewed about In Transit (with clips) at Index Magazine, 2008

• Albert Maysles's video interview at the People's Archive

• Kevin B. Lee's video essay on Grey Gardens (1975, Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer) with commentary by Vadim Rizov

• Shooting People's Albert Maysles Glasses website

• Grey Gardens Online - official website

• RealPlayer video of Albert Maysles with Christo and Jeanne-Claude

• Gimme Shelter at Google Video

• Elaine Heinzman, 'A Musical Trip to Grey Gardens', NPR, March 5, 2008

Interviews with or about the Maysles:

• Williams Cole, 'Uncontrolled Cinema: Albert Maysles', The Brooklyn Rail, July 2006

• Jonathan B. Vogels, 'Conversations with Scholars' series, Americana, Spring 2009

• Joy Yoon, 'Albert Maysles: The Ultimate Salesman', New Order, 2002

Scholarly/critical articles:

• Chloe Aaron, 'The Video Underground', Art in America, May 1971

• Søren Birkvad, 'A Battle for Public Mythology: History and Genre in the Portrait Documentary', Nordicom Review 2/2000
  

• Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray, 'Dark Days: A narrative of environmental adaptation', Jump Cut, No. 48, Winter 2006
  

• Tim O'Farrell, 'Review of Jonathan B Vogels, The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2005', Screening the Past, Vol. 20, 2006
  
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• Tim O’Farrell, 'No Direction Home: Looking Forward from Don’t Look Back', Senses of Cinema, 38, 2006

• H. Russell Searight, 'Review of: The Beales of Grey Gardens By Albert and David Maysles (Directors)'

• Warren Spector, 'Review of Salesman', Cinema Texas Program Notes, Vol. 14, No. 3, March 27, 1978

Thursday Links (Renoir's Toni, Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, McElhaney's Minnelli)

Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
(Chantal Akerman, 1975)

And on it goes... That is to say, some more, assorted, quality links to online, openly-accessible, film studies material of note, today, from the relatively indefatigible Film Studies For Free.

This blog is preparing for a legendary links post on Monday, its first birthday, so please come back for that. Until then, do enjoy the below gems:

• Matthew Flanagan's blog Landscape Suicide (named for James Benning's 1986 film) goes from strength to strength with an astonishingly beautiful post on Jean Renoir's hugely influential 1934 film Toni: 'Toni & Boating, or: Realism(s) #1'. Here's looking forward to '#2'!
• There's another good essay on Toni by Michael Campi for Senses of Cinema (2006). And you must read Charles Musser's brillant article 'Social Roles / Political Responsibilities: Jean Renoir's Search for Artistic Integrity, 1928-1939 'Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No. 1 (1994): 3-30.

• Over at The Auteurs, you can find a good, short essay by Ivone Margulies (author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday ): 'A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'. A little taster:
  

Despite their apparent simplicity, Akerman’s assured framing and narrative, built out of blocks of real time intercut by radical ellipses, are not easily replicated. Rather, the film’s impact is indirectly evident in the emergence of a new phenomenological sensibility and approach to observation and the weight of time in the work of contemporary filmmakers as diverse as Abbas Kiarostami, Gus van Sant, Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Haynes, Jia Zhangke, and Tsai Ming-liang.

• You can read another excellent Akerman essay online by Margulies: 'La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator' at Rouge 10, 2006.
  
• See a great essay by Maria Fosheim Lund, 'Deja-Vu Melodrama: An Iconographical and Iconological Analysis of "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles"' at Out 1 Film Journal (January 27, 2009).
• And you can read Ed Henderson's thoughtful review of 'Jeanne Dielman' for Slant Magazine, June 8, 2003.
  

• Joe McElhaney's fantastic edited collection on director Vincente Minnelli (Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009) has been deservedly garnering a lot of online attention (see Girish Shambu here; Jonathan Rosenbaum here; and some other review snippets here) and it certainly looks like an excellent book to own. Film Studies For Free wanted you to know, however, that some of McElhaney's hugely important work on this Hollywood director has already very generously been made available online for free: see his overview essay 'Vincente Minnelli' at Senses of Cinema. Also see The Band Wagon by Joe McElhaney, Cabin in the Sky by Rick Thompson, Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture by Lesley Stern (Includes discussion of performance in The Band Wagon); and Some Came Running by Dana Polan at the same journal.
  
• And you can also read McElhaney's brilliant article 'Medium Shot Gestures: Vincente Minnelli and Some Came Running' at 16:9, June 2003 (as well as his 2006 essay for the same journal on Fritz Lang HERE).