The Screengrab : maysles brothers

Screengrab Review: HBO's Grey Gardens

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

If I recall correctly, I first saw the Maysles Brothers documentary Grey Gardens on VHS in the early 1990s, and like every generation encountering the pop culture artifacts of a previous generation for the very first time, I thought I’d stumbled across some rare find that only a handful of lucky people knew about (in the same way Columbus thought he’d discovered America, several million resident natives notwithstanding).

Having missed the first wave of Grey Gardens mania in 1975, I was surprised when my “secret” documentary suddenly became a Broadway musical in 2006, indicating a much larger fan base for the Maysles’ film (and its subjects) than I’d previously suspected -- so later, when I heard Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore were taking on the roles of Jackie O’s eccentric relatives Big & Little Edie in a (relatively) big budget HBO biopic, I already knew the cats (and raccoons) were pretty much out of the bag.

There are three separate audiences for the HBO film: fans of the original documentary, superfans who also caught the Broadway musical, and newcomers who don’t yet know the strange but true story of “Big” Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little” Edith Bouvier Beale, two colorful odd ducks from a privileged background who wound up living in the hideous squalor of a crumbling, critter-infested mansion in East Hampton, New York until they were rescued, in different ways, from poverty, encroaching madness (and, one suspects, rabies) by (A) the Suffolk County Health Department, who threatened to condemn their home, thus generating National Enquirer and New York magazine stories that brought their plight to the attention of (B) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who paid to upgrade their living conditions and (C) the Maysles Brothers, who became aware of the Beales thanks to the ensuing publicity (and also their work on a documentary about the Bouviers which they wisely ditched so they could make Grey Gardens instead). The story is so bizarre, I can see newcomers being somewhat baffled at first by the HBO film -- and then slowly seduced by the warm, funny and vividly dysfunctional central relationship, not to mention the Emmy (and, frankly, Oscar) worthy performances by Lange (buried beneath old age prosthetics that somehow counteract her late-career Botox, thus enabling the actress’ best and most expressive performance in years) and a radiant Barrymore, acting the shit out of the hands-down best role of her career.

Superfans loyal to the original documentary and/or the stage version (featuring Christine Ebersole’s Tony-winning Broadway performance as Little Edie) may pooh-pooh the new pay cable incarnation -- and I don’t want to oversell what is basically just a very good HBO Original Movie -- but as a fan with fond memories of the Maysles film, yet only a vague sense of the history surrounding it, I was fascinated to watch Michael Sucsy’s biopic fill in the gaps, chronicling the events that led two beautiful, independent women into such co-dependent desperation.

Viewers who snickered at the original Grey Gardens as nothing more than a freak show (or condescendingly tut-tutted it as exploitation) may be surprised by the biopic’s depiction of the Beales as smart women trapped in the wrong decade and social circle, with few options worthy of their outsized aspirations. Lange’s Big Edie has nothing of her own but the house she clings to with ferocious, to-hell-with-the-world tenacity, and Barrymore’s Little Edie is heartbreaking as a fragile firecracker of potential unable to escape her mother’s orbit simply because she can’t find anyone else to recognize what a S-T-A-U-N-C-H character she truly is. For all the disappointments and deprivations we see the Beales suffer, what got my waterworks flowing (and makes this one of my favorite films of the year so far) is the moment when the two proud, neglected women finally find someone to listen to their story.

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The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Though we love movie-related lists as much as anybody -- indeed, as we love movie-related lists even more than anybody -- we've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in the recent flood-tide of best-ofs: the documentary often gets the short shrift. Stuck somewhere between a feature film and an educational short, even with the new wave of populist docs that actually make money at the box office, doumentaries are rarely considered part of the mainstream corpus which gets shuffled around for various critics' Top Whatever lists, and thus, leave the average fan with no idea where to start when it comes to the medium.

That's something that Jonathan Kahana, a professor of cinema studies at NYU (and author of the recently released Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary) aims to change with this list.

Originally created as a feature for an in-flight magazine and later severely truncated (a process all to familiar to those of us who have tilled that particular soil), Kahana's list contains a dozen of the finest documentaries in history from the 1920s to the present, available on DVD and otherwise. Compiled by the author to "pay it forward" to an upcoming generations of documentary fans, the list is a solid one -- we'll present it below in chronological order, but please do check out the link for Kahana's insightful commentary on each choice.

1. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand, 1921) & Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929)
2. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
3. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
4. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
5. Salesman (Alfred & David Maysles, 1969)
6. Harlan County U.S.A. & American Dream (Barbara Kopple, 1975 & 1991)
7. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1982)
8. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989)
9. Little Dieter Wants to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1998)
10. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
11. The Corporation (Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar, 2003)
12. Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2004)

What do you think, Screengrab readers? What did Kahana include that you'd have left off, and what did he omit that you'd make sure got in? What are your 12 favorite documentaries?

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Stones, Scorsese Rock the Berlin Film Festival

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's movie about the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light, has opened the Berlin Film Festival, marking "the first time a major film festival has dared to open with a non-fiction movie." Scorsese has been auditioning for this job for a long time. He worked on as an editor on such earlier rock docs as Woodstock, The Medicine Ball Caravan, and Elvis on Tour long before redefining the use of rock music in narrative movies in Mean Streets (where Robert De Niro's crazy badass Johnny Boy makes a show-boating entrance gliding into a bar to the tune of "Jumpin' Jack Flash") and perfecting the concert-documentary form with the 1978 The Last Waltz. As for the Stones, this project represents something of a return to one of their old habits — linking up with a name filmmaker to perhaps capture the "definitive" Rolling Stones experience on film — that for most of the past several years has been sublimated by Pay-Per-View TV gigs. (Classic examples include Jean-Luc Godard's studio-set Sympathy for the Devil, the Maysles brothers' end-of-the-60s Gimme Shelter, and Hal Ashby's 1983 Let's Spend the Night Together, which turned out as an accidental record of why the 1980s would not be remembered as the creative high point of either the Stones' or Hal Ashby's careers. The most notable of all these films is probably Robert Frank's 1972 Cocksucker Blues, which Mick Jagger had legally suppressed, thus giving it automatic street cred.) The new movie, which reportedly brought the house down in Berlin, was filmed over the course of two days at New York City's Beacon Theater in 2006, with guest appearances by Jack White, Buddy Guy, and Christina Aguilera, by an all-star camera crew headed by Robert Richardson. (The performance footage is intercut with highlights from decades' worth of Stones interviews. Questioner: What do you do before going on stage? Keith Richards: "I wake up." Not at a couple of shows I've seen, you didn't. Hiiiiiii-oh!) In addition to giving audiences the chance to see the band perform some of its standard numbers on a big screen, the movie also gave Scorsese the chance to preserve one of his standard numbers: it opens with him having a high-pitched meltdown because nobody will give him a finalized song list, and without it, he can't be sure that he'll have one of his seventeen cameras pointed right where he wants it for the first shot.

The Movie Moment: High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My father, a much more avid reader than I, once told me that “the more books you read, the more you need to read.” In my experience, that’s just as true for movie watching, and every year I find myself with more directors whose films I feel compelled to seek out. This year, one of my biggest moviegoing resolutions has been to acquaint myself with the work of Frederick Wiseman, who over the past four decades has become one of the most celebrated documentarians in film history.

Wiseman was an early proponent of a style called “direct cinema.” During the 1960s, the availability of handheld 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders afforded filmmakers to chronicle their subjects relatively unobtrusively. “Direct cinema” capitalized on this technology, and its practitioners attempted to overturn the traditional documentary style. By doing away with such artifices as narrators and talking-head interviews, directors like Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers told their stories primarily through footage shot on the fly.

Wiseman’s 1968 film High School was only his second feature after 1967’s Titicut Follies, a muckraking portrait of a mental hospital. In High School, the surroundings are much more mundane, but the students are in their own ways just as institutionalized as Follies’ inmates. The world of High School is a place of learning, not just about academics but also about the traditional order of things. If Wiseman’s greatness as a filmmaker lies, to paraphrase Film Comment’s Kent Jones, in his portrayal of how institutions work rather than how they fail, then High School is as relevant today as it was forty years ago.

Consider an early scene in the Dean’s office, in which the Dean speaks with a student named Michael about an incident involving Michael and his teacher. Michael protests his assigned detention because he believes he was falsely accused of the initial infraction, plus in his words, “I don’t feel like I have to take anybody screaming at me.” But the Dean isn’t about to excuse Michael from his responsibility in the incident, for having stormed out of the classroom. According to the Dean, Michael needs to respect those in authority even when he disagrees, and to accept the detention he’s been given. “We have to establish that you can be a man and that you can take orders,” says the Dean, and Michael acquiesces, saying that he’ll take the detention, “but under protest.”

It’s scenes like this that play to the strengths of direct cinema. Rather than taking sides in the argument, Wiseman allows the scene to play out more or less in real time, with each party making his own points. A lesser film might have cut away from the scene with Michael speaking his mind, but Wiseman also shows us the Dean's side. Here’s a man who deals with disciplinary issues all day long, who’s there primarily to preserve the order in the school by upholding the authority of the teachers. It’s nothing personal- it’s just the job.

For all the talk of “objectivity” in direct cinema, the truth is that all documentaries impose to some extent their own agendas and theses on the footage they shoot. Time and again, Wiseman shows us scenes in which teachers and school administrators impart traditional notions of morality and behavior to the students: Do the work that’s assigned. No using the pay phone without a pass. Don’t have sex until you’re married. Walk tall. Type what’s on the page. Don’t jump up and down unless Simon says. As a principal tells a student, “we’re gonna do in this school what the majority wants.” Fair enough, but which majority does he mean?