* (restored)

 

Misconceptions

‘Werewolves don’t eat humans. They never have and I doubt they ever will. I know a few lycanthropes, perfectly nice people. I’m sure that far more cannibalistic humans have eaten their fellow beings than werewolves, who are generally immune to most insanity. The ludicrous myth that werewolves eat humans is based on the equally ludicrous myth that wolves eat humans.

‘The silver bullet thing is half-true. All werewolves are strongly allergic to silver. if it gets into the bloodstream it will kill almost instantly. An iron bullet through the heart will kill them, but a silver bullet grazing one, say, through the hand and infecting them will also kill. Skin-surface silverburn begins by burning like touching a hot stove, fading away to a tingle. The area around the burnt skin and the burn itself is temporally paralyzed, the nerves contracting. I have seen a burnt hand curl into a twisted, helpless claw for about two or three days from accidentally brushing against some jewelry. Please note that I am first aid certified.

‘Werewolves are about as far from licentious as can be. They mate for life, staying devoted to their chosen mate until both die. Widows or widowers will not re-“marry”, and will mourn their lost mate, grief-stricken. Most werewolves die within a month of their mate. There’s never been a Christian werewolf. Church ceremonies would be impossible. I’ve never seen a werewolf that could sit still for more than ten minutes at a stretch unless they were stalking something.

‘Werewolves have no aversion to running water or garlic. One of my lycanthrope friends’ great joys in life is wading through water. Something about mud between her toes, she says. She also makes great garlic-parmesan spaghetti.

‘Lycanthropy is hereditary. The child of two werewolves is a werewolf. If a werewolf bites a human, the human will bleed and most likely sue the werewolf, but lycanthropy isn’t contagious.

‘Werewolves can change from wolf to humanoid at any time, not limited by the full moon, and are undistinguishable from wolves in wolf-state. A werewolf in human-state can be distinguished by their general disgust towards most humans, and vegetables (referred to collectively as ‘plants, the things that cows eat’.)

‘I hope this has been of some help.’ — werewolf page.com

 

 

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Transformations

 

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Quotes

‘A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.’ — Lana Turner

‘In its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body.’ — Karl Marx

‘I’m hairy on the inside.’ — Angela Carter

‘The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.’ — Marshall McLuhan

‘I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.’ — Shirley Jackson

‘There is a beast in man that should be exercised, not exorcised.’ — Anton LaVey

‘Welcome to the mystery that is men. I think it goes something like, they grow body hair, they lose all ability to tell you what they really want.’ — Buffy the Vampire Slayer

 

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Heads 1

 

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The Werewolves of France

 

1. The Werewolves of Paris were a man-eating wolf pack that entered Paris during the winter of 1450 through breaches in the city walls, killing forty people. A wolf named Courtaud, or “Bobtail”, was the leader of the pack. Eventually the wolves were destroyed when Parisians, furious at the depredations, lured Courtaud and his pack into the heart of the city, where they were stoned and speared to death before the gates of Notre Dame Cathedral.

2. In 1521, Jean Boin, Inquisitor of Besancon, tried Philibert Montot, Pierre Bourgot, and Michel Verdun for having made a pact with the devil and for lycanthropy. These men became known as the werewolves of Poligny.

These men came under suspicion when a traveler passing through the area was attacked by a wolf. While defending himself, he was able to wound the animal, forcing it to retreat. Following the trail of the injured creature, the man came upon a hut where he found a local resident, Michel Verdun, under the care of his wife, who was washing a wound on his body. Believing Verdun’s injury to be a sympathetic wound, the man notified the authorities. Arrested and tortured, Verdun admitted that he was a shape-shifter; he also revealed the names of his two werewolf accomplices, as well as confessing to hideous crimes: diabolism, murder, and eating human flesh.
The three men were promptly executed.

3. In the sixteenth century town of Dole, a proclamation was publicly read in the town square. It’s contents gave permission for the people to track down and kill the werewolf, that had been terrorizing the village.

While walking through the forest, a group of peasants heard the screams of a small child accompanied by the howling of a wolf. When they arrived they saw a wounded child fighting off a monstrous creature whom they later identified as Gilles Garner. When a ten year old boy disappeared in the vicinity of Garrier’s home, he was arrested and confessed to being a werewolf. He was then burned at the stake.

4. The Wolf of Soissons was a man-eating wolf which terrorized the commune of Soissons northeast of Paris over a period of two days in 1765, attacking eighteen people.

The first victims of the wolf were a pregnant woman and her unborn child, attacked in the parish of Septmont on the last day of February. Diligent locals had taken the infant, a scant four or five months old, from the womb to be baptized before it died when the wolf struck again not three hundred yards from the scene of the first attack. One Madame d’Amberief and her son survived only by fighting together.

On the first of March near the hamlet of Courcelles a man was attacked by the wolf and survived with head wounds. The next victims were two young boys, named Boucher and Maréchal, who were savaged on the road to Paris, both badly wounded. A farmer on horseback lost part of his face to the wolf before escaping to a local mill, where a boy of seventeen was caught unawares and slain. After these atrocities the wolf fled to Bazoches, where it partially decapitated a woman and severely wounded a girl, who ran screaming to the village for help.

Four citizens of Bazoches set an ambush at the body of the latest victim, but when the wolf returned it proved too much for them and the villagers soon found themselves fighting for their lives. The arrival of more peasants from the village finally put the wolf to flight, chasing it into a courtyard where it fought with a chained dog. When the chain broke the wolf was pursued through a pasture, where it killed a number of sheep, and into a stable, where a servant and cattle were mutilated.

The episode ended when one Antoine Saverelle, former member of the local militia, tracked the wolf to small lane armed with a pitchfork. The wolf sprang at him but he managed to pin its head to the ground with the instrument, holding it down for roughly fifteen minutes before an armed peasant came to his aid and killed the animal. Saverelle received a reward of three-hundred livres from Louis XV of France for his bravery.

5. Dark times lived in Gascony, France in 1603. Innocent children were plucked from their beds to suffer a hideous fate. Mass hysteria descended on the village when 13-year-old Marguerite Poirer swore before the magistrate that on the night of the full moon she was savagely attacked by a wolf-like beast while tending her cattle. Luckily she was able to drive the creature off with her sturdy, iron pointed staff.

Jeanne Gaboriaut, 18-years-old, told the judge that 14-year-old Jean Grenier had made advances on her and when she denied him because of his yellow complexion and dirty appearance he told her “That is because of the wolf’s skin I wear.” The creepy jerk told shepherdess that his wealthy employer gave him a pelt to put on that he might go “haunting” the woods and fields. There where nine other like himself, who roamed the forest between dusk and dawn. Grenier immediately was arrested.

6. One of the worst-ever lycanthropes was the Werewolf of Chalons, otherwise known as the Demon Tailor. He was arraigned in Paris on 14 December 1598 on murder charges which were so appalling that the court ordered all documents of the hearing to be destroyed. Even his real name has become lost in history.

Burnt to death for his crimes, he was believed to decoy children of both sexes into his shop, and having abused them he would slice their throats and then powder and dress their bodies, jointing them as a butcher cuts up meat. In the twilight, under the shape of a wolf, he roamed the woods to leap out on stray passers-by and tear their throats to shreds. Barrels of bleached bones were found concealed in his cellars as well as other foul and hideous things. He died (it was said) unrepentant and blaspheming.

 

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Cat Power ‘Werewolf’

 

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The Ginger Snaps Trilogy

 

‘Try to imagine what Buffy the Vampire Slayer would look like if it had been written by Angela Carter and you might get close to the heady cocktail of high-school pubescence and feminist folklore that is Ginger Snaps. This is the story of 16-year-old Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and 15-year-old Brigitte (Emily Perkins), two repressed, weird, goth-styled sisters whose bland Canadian suburb happens to be plagued by a werewolf. Ginger Snaps is a sparky, sharp film marked by intelligent dialogue and a complex view of that moment when girls hover on the brink of womanhood but would rather not take the next step.

‘Ginger Snaps is a radical film in a number of ways, not least in its twist on the economies of punishment that haunt the horror genre. Ginger Snaps‘ sister heroines are essentially female Peter Pans who have contrived to delay the onset of menstruation for years, masking their terror of adulthood with a performance of supreme adolescent alienation. And who can blame them for not wanting to join the ranks of women? Ginger Snaps glories in the notion that being a woman is in itself such a crime, one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.

‘Ginger Snaps is haunted by stories of high-school massacres (notably Taber and from across the border Columbine) which makes its glorious take on a schoolgirl gone (literally) wild a sensitive subject. The film also nods to contemporary notions of sexual morality in its casting of werewolfism as a blood-borne disease that can be caught through the ‘consumption’ of carnality. Where the early-90s spate of vampirism-as-Aids narratives figured ‘haemosexuality’ as a metaphor for STDs (mirroring Bram Stoker’s syphilis in the 1890s), here it’s werewolfism that’s sexually transmitted.’ — Linda Ruth Williams, Sight & Sound

Excerpt: ‘Ginger Snaps’ (2000)

Trailer: ‘Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed’ (2003)

Trailer: ‘Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning’ (2004)

 

________

Movie stars

 

______

A Boat

O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.

— Richard Brautigan

 

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RIP: Deikitsen Wolfram Lupus

 

‘Adrian Baine Manley, also known as Deikitsen Wolfram Lupus, leader of the San Antonio Crimson Wolf Pack, age 16, passed away September 29, 2010. The boy’s mother said her son, who wore long hair, chains and a tail, was bullied at school before he killed himself. She found him wearing a collar and hanging in his closet by a leash. “He stuck out because he chose to wear the tail, and they made a spectacle of him,” she said. “Because he was different, he’d get teased.” The boy had recently been expelled from Brandeis High School for bringing a knife to campus and was attending Bexar County’s Juvenile Justice Academy, Northside Independent School District spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. The mother of the 16-year-old boy Friday night organized a candlelight vigil at her home that was attended by about 75 friends, some members of the wolf pack. Packmates at the vigil described the boy as “sweet” and “kindhearted.” Steven Suwanasung, 17, who sports fangs and a tail, described the wolf pack as a support group. “It’s a big family, all of us,” he said. “We care for each other.” The pack’s “alpha” leader, Sarah Rodriguez, is known as Wolfie Blackheart. She said Friday that the boy who killed himself recently asked her if he could start his own wolf pack at Brandeis. She told him he could. “He’s one of my submissives, but he leads a group of others,” Blackheart said.’ — mySA

 

________

Heads 2

Werewolf heads appear again and again in your work. I’m not sure if this has a specific meaning for you or not.

David Altmejd: I started using that three years ago. At the beginning it was just an alternative to the human body. I made a chopped-up werewolf. Body art is so familiar, in terms of experience. By making a monster leg, it has something of the familiar feeling but there is an added level of weirdness. Then I was very interested in the werewolf because of its complexity, its symbolic potential. It represents both good
and evil, human and animal, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – extremes on both sides.

Every time I talk about my work I use the word “energy” a lot, not in a new age kind of way. The werewolf head with crystals on it is an energy-generating object. A man transforms into the werewolf, which is the most intense transformation, physically and mentally. The werewolf goes from one state, man, to a totally opposite state, animal, in the matter of minutes or even seconds. In movies it always happens in, like, thirty seconds. It even looks painful.

Were you thinking of pop movies like Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf or Michael Jackson in Thriller? Do you deal with Pop issues?

David Altmejd: I do deal with Pop, but that’s not where the werewolf comes from. For me, it is more of a Romantic notion from the end of the 19th century. In a story I made up about the werewolf, in the seconds right after the super-intense transformation from man into werewolf, the head is chopped off. It is put on a table, and instead of rotting the head crystallizes. The energy related to the transformation is kept inside the head and it crystallizes and becomes an energy-generating object. The architectural structure I use in the installation presents the object in such a way that triggers this energy and circulates or channels it throughout the piece.

So even where there is a decapitated werewolf you are being optimistic?

David Altmejd: Yes, totally. It is intended to be alive. Maybe weird and dark, but certainly alive.

 

_________________

The Cramps ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’

 

_________________

 

__________________

A History of Little Red Riding Hood
from reconstruction.eserver.org

 

The story most commonly known today as Little Red Riding Hood has a far-reaching and controversial history. One of the most studied and interpreted fairy tales, this story has many variants, problematizing interpretation, namely, which version is considered by folklorists as the “authoritative” version of the tale. LRRH is a multi-voiced, multi-cultural tale that has been told and retold, suffering endless plot and character morphing and reinterpretation.

As many readers are unfamiliar with any oral variant of LRRH it seems prudent to reproduce one here (the version which, according to Paul Delarue, was the source material for the Perrault tale). The translation here is from Delarue via Jack Zipes from his Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood:

 

The Story of Grandmother

 

There was a woman who had made some bread. She said to her daughter: “Go carry this hot loaf and bottle of milk to your granny.”
—-So the little girl departed. At the crossway she met bzou, the werewolf, who said to her: “Where are you going?”
—-“I’m taking this hot loaf and bottle of milk to my granny.”
—-“What path are you taking.” said the werewolf, “the path of needles or the path of pins?”
—-“The path of needles,” the little girl said.
—-“All right, then I’ll take the path of pins.”
—-The little girl entertained herself by gathering needles. Meanwhile the werewolf arrived at the grandmother’s house, killed her, and put some of her meat in the cupboard and a bottle of her blood on the shelf. The little girl arrived and knocked at the door.
—
–“Push the door,” said the werewolf, “It’s barred by a piece of wet straw.”
—-“Good day, granny. I’ve brought you a hot loaf of bread and a bottle of milk.”
—-“Put it in the cupboard, my child. Take some of the meat which is inside and the bottle of wine on the shelf.”
—-After she had eaten, there was a little cat which said: “Phooey!… A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her granny.”
—-“Undress yourself, my child,” the werewolf said, “And come lie down beside me.”
—-“Where should I put my apron?”
—-“Throw it into the fire, my child, you won’t be needing it any more.”
—-And each time she asked where she should put all her other Clothes, the bodice, the dress, the petticoat, the long stockings,
the wolf responded: “Throw them into the fire, my child, you won’t be needing
them anymore.”
—-When she laid herself down in the bed, the little girl said: “Oh granny, how hairy you are!”
—-“The better to keep myself warm, my child!”
—-“Oh granny, what big nails you have!”
—-“The better to scratch me with, my child!”
—-“Oh granny, what big shoulders you have!”
—-“The better to carry the firewood, my child!”
—-“Oh granny, what big ears you have!”
—-“The better to hear you with, my child!”
—-“Oh granny, what big nostrils you have!”
—-“The better to snuff my tobacco with, my child!”
—-“Oh granny, what a big mouth you have!”
—-“The better to eat you with, my child!”
—-“Oh granny, I have to go badly. Let me go outside.”
—-“Do it in the bed, my child!”
—-“Oh no, granny, I want to go outside.”
—-“All right, but make it quick.”
—-The werewolf attached a woolen rope to her foot and let her go outside. When the little girl was outside, she tied the end of the rope to a plum tree in the courtyard. The werewolf became impatient and said: “Are you making a load out there? Are you making a load?”
—-When he realized that nobody was answering him, he jumped out of bed and saw that the little girl had escaped. He followed her but arrived at her house just at the moment she entered.

Grimm’s major change in the story is the addition of a male character who comes in, divines the problem, and rescues the two women from the wolf’s belly. With a pair of scissors, the hunter cuts the belly open and out pop Red Ridinghood and Grandmother in a male-effected birth. The Grimms here illustrate a movement from a primarily female identified (oral) story to a tale ending with two insertions of male power: first in the rescue and then in the male birth. The hunter then kills the wolf by stuffing his open cavity with stones which causes him to fall down dead. The hunter gets the wolf pelt for his troubles and the women go home happy. Perrault’s moral is summed up in the Grimm version as Red’s last thought to herself ” Never again will you stray from the path by yourself and go into the forest when your mother has forbidden it”.

 

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Red Sword (2012)

 

‘Long, long ago, there was a wolfman tribe who had no women. All through history these desperate wolf men have attacked and raped female humans as a way to continue their species. But the wolf men have a terrible legend where every hundred years, on the night of a red moon, a little girl is born and she is destined to destroy the wolf-man tribe. The lecherous wolf men are so afraid of females that they have developed a code which requires they kill baby girls soon after they are born. But only the lovely Beniko Akatsuki survives this terrible fate.

‘These days, Beniko fights endless battles against the wolf men. Poor Beniko’s mother was ruthlessly raped by a wolf man and gave birth to Beniko. To save her baby girl, Beniko’s mother had to sacrifice her own life. Now, Beniko wears a memento of her beloved mother, a red riding hood, and she has dedicated her life to killing all the wolf men. One day, Beniko senses that the evil wolf men are sneaking into a high school. The clever Beniko pretends she is a school girl and starts attending school, only to find vicious, horny pack of female-deprived wolf men. Beniko protects her fellow school girls as she fights them off with her sword and her red riding hood.

‘Will the brave, sexy Beniko Red Riding Hood be able to finally kill the vicious pack of sex-starved wolf-men?’ — Director Naoyuki “Erotibot” Tomomatsu

 

________________

Werewolf Porn

Liru the Werewolf
Fucked By A Werewolf
Queer Werewolf Stories
Lady Cop and the Horny Werewolf
Hot Asian Girl Fucks Werewolf
Lezley Zen fucked by werewolf
Just because Buffy slays vampires, doesn’t mean she can’t fuck the shit out of werewolf!
Gay Werewolf Movies By Title
Werewuff Fullsuit

 

_________________

Robert Ashley ‘The Wolfman’

 

_________________

The Last Werewolf

‘ … Adrenaline isn’t interested in ennui. Adrenaline floods, regardless, in my state not just the human fibres but lupine leftovers too, those creature dregs that hadn’t fully conceded transformation. Phantom wolf energies and their Homo sapiens correlates wriggled and belched in my scalp, shoulders, wrists, knees. My bladder tingled as in the too fast pitch down from a Ferris wheel’s summit. The absurdity was being unable, shin-deep in snow, to quicken my pace. Harley had tried to press a Smith & Wesson automatic on me before I’d left but I’d laughed it away. Stop being a granny. I imagined him watching now on CCTV saying, Yes, Harley the granny. I hope you’re happy, Marlowe, you [expletive] idiot. …

‘If, then . . . If, then . . . This, aside from the business of monthly transformation, the inestimable drag of Being a Werewolf, is what I’m sick of, the endless logistics. There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore. …

‘My face was hot and tender. The snow’s recording studio hush made small sounds distinct: someone opening a can of beer; a burp; a purse snapping shut. Across the road three drunk young men hysterically scuffled with one another. A cabbie wrapped in a tartan blanket stood by his vehicle’s open door complaining into a mobile. Outside Flamingo two hotdog-eating bouncers in Cossack hats presided over a line of shivering clubbers. Nothing like the blood and meat of the young. You can taste the audacity of hope. Post-Curse these thoughts still shoot up like the inappropriate erections of adolescence. …

‘These, you’ll say, were not the calculations of a being worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete. Granted. But it’s one thing to know death’s twenty-seven days away, quite another to know it might be making your acquaintance any second now. To be murdered here, in human shape, would be gross, precipitate and — despite there being no such thing as justice — unjust. Besides, the person tracking me couldn’t be Grainer. As Harley said, his lordship prized the wulf not the wer, and the thought of being despatched by anyone less than the Hunt’s finest was repugnant. And this was to say nothing of my one diarist’s duty still undischarged: If I was snuffed out here and now who would tell the untellable tale? The whole disease of your life written but for that last lesion of the heart, its malignancy and muse. God’s gone, Meaning too, and yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame. …

‘At which point a silenced bullet hit the street lamp’s concrete three inches above my head.’

— Glen Duncan

—-

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, to be fair, my assessment of Pollard’s inability to write a bad song is not exactly the consensus opinion. Yes, it’s my current circumstances with the film that cause me to maybe sort of wish I could schmooze. Actually, I’m being called upon to schmooze this evening in a Zoom call with a potential investor in the film, and I’m trying to figure out a way I can do that while remaining completely sincere. There must be a way. I’d even take a hat of one of those boringly attention seeking Dubai record breakers over my Tour Montparnasse hat. I think the head cold is in its death rattle phase, I think, I think. Dinner was super yum and you should’ve been there, but one of these days. It’s kind of boring that your dream description made ‘Twin Peaks’ spring immediately to mind. Not that ‘TP’ is remotely boring, of course. Love wondering how the world would change if pigeons were incredibly charismatic, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, and ‘Gimme Shelter’ is no slouch either. ** _Black_Acrylic, I predict that your new apartment’s interior is going to look very exciting. I’ve still never seen ‘Lords of Chaos’, and it’s on Youtube? Okay, then, problem solved. Thanks, buddy. ** l@rst, Hi, man! Enjoy the parental units. And it sounds like you are. Which can be, in circumstances unlike yours, not the easiest task. So, congrats! And I highly look forward to your new spoken poem. Whoop! Everyone, l@rst aka the fine writer Laurence Lillvik has a new spoken poem up on bandcamp that he would like to share with all and sundry, and, more immediately, you. Put on your headphones (or not), and join him/me here. ** Bzzt 2.0, Hi, Quinn! Wow! I was just thinking about you yesterday and wondering how and where you are. Paris is in splendid form. Maybe a little too warm, but that’s the New World for you. We are inching ever forward towards shooting the new film this fall. Not without difficulties, but steadily. I’ve always had this little romance with the idea of working at a movie theater, I don’t know precisely why, so … congrats. Bipolarity is definitely nothing to be ashamed of, for sure. Some of my favorite and most interesting friends have been and are. Tough, though, as my recent novel lays out in an extreme case. I’m glad you’re on it and seeing the bright side. There always is one and sometimes it’s really bright. Yes, I too really enjoyed seeing you here back then. And I’m very glad to hear from you and know you’re doing okay and interestingly. Please keep me up on you and yours, if you feel like it. Love, me. ** Paul Curran, Hi! July-ish, okay. I think at this point the idea to give ourselves the gift of a Japan trip as a reward for finishing our film, which will probably mean late this year or possibly early in the next one depending. Can … not … wait! Fantastic news about the signing off on your new novel!!!! So excited! And not even hugely long to wait. Great, Paul! <3 <3 ** Okay. I thought it was a good idea to restore the old Werewolf Day, am I wrong? See you tomorrow.

 

‘Ever since the Lumière brothers first set up their cameras, there have been a number of film-makers who have attempted, in various ways, to capture “truth” on celluloid. Albert Maysles came from a long line of documentary seekers of truth and was himself an inspiration for many who followed. In the tradition of kino-pravda (“cinema truth”) in the USSR in the 1920s, free cinema in Britain in the 50s, and cinéma vérité in France in the 60s, came the US direct cinema movement, as it was named by Maysles.

‘Unlike the contemporaneous cinéma vérité, the practitioners of direct cinema were less ideological and believed that the camera should be as unobtrusive as possible. Albert, as cameraman, carried the lightweight, silent camera that he perfected on his shoulder, its accessories built in and ready for adjustment. His younger brother, David, as soundman, had a sensitive directional mike and a Nagra recorder. They looked upon their work as a discovery of how people really behaved, first spending time with them to get acquainted, then filming their lives as lived. They emphasised that nothing was staged. It was “theatre without actors; plays without playwrights”.

‘It might have helped that both brothers, born of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brookline, Massachusetts, took degrees in psychology before becoming film-makers. After serving in the US army tank corps during the second world war, Albert Maysles taught psychology at Boston University. This subject, his family background and an interest in photography, inspired him to travel by motorcycle throughout Russia in 1954, taking photographs inside hospitals for the mentally ill. Although he was unable to sell this photo-essay, CBS gave him a 16mm camera and unlimited film stock with an agreement that it would pay him $1 per foot of any developed film it chose to use. Maysles returned to the Soviet Union and made his first film, Psychiatry in Russia (1955).

‘Two years later, he and his brother shot Youth in Poland, footage of a student revolt in Warsaw, which they sold to NBC. Shortly afterwards, Albert met the film-maker DA Pennebaker, who in turn introduced him to the pioneers of cinéma vérité Robert Drew and Richard Leacock. They were all around the same age and shared a similar vision of documentary cinema. Their first association was Primary (1960), vibrantly shot during John F Kennedy’s campaign against Hubert Humphrey for the Democrat party nomination in Wisconsin. While Drew was credited as director, it was a true collaborative effort, Maysles sharing the hand-held cinematography with Leacock. The film was one of the first American documentary films that allowed the camera to capture the events “as they happened”, with little narrative shaping or comment.

‘According to Albert: “Somebody had to break through the stupidity of documentaries depending solely on a narrator to explain what was going on and just interviews. There’s a world out there where things have to be observed, should be observed. And the rewards are that you really get to know the world, not the philosophy or point-of-view of the narrator or a corporation.”

‘The Maysles brothers then started making films on celebrities, such as Showman (1963), about the producer Joseph E Levine, Meet Marlon Brando (1965) and A Visit With Truman Capote (1966), all of which show their subjects in an affectionate light without flattering them.

‘Salesman (1968), at the opposite end of the fame scale, focused on four Irish door-to-door Bible salesmen. “We found out that there were 4,000 guys out there selling the Bible. That they would be selling this as a product rather than a spiritual testament made it all the more interesting,” Albert recalled. “When we were kids, there was so much antisemitism in Boston. There was hardly a day when some Irish kid wouldn’t come up to me and go, ‘Let’s go outside and get into a fight.’ So the film was kind of a way of getting to know the Irish in a very meaningful way. Giving them recognition.”

‘The Maysleses’ philosophy of allowing events to happen in front of the camera ran into some trouble when the brothers, with Charlotte Zwerin, made their most controversial film, Gimme Shelter (1970), a documentary of the Rolling Stones’ free concert held at Altamont Speedway, near San Francisco, in December 1969, in which the fatal stabbing of a black youth by a member of the Hell’s Angels was caught on film. Many critics felt that it was exploitative, some suggesting that the film-makers were complicit in the murder, photographing it and then profiting from the film’s theatrical release. The directors seemed to have compounded their error by using the structural device of having the Stones witness slow-motion footage of the killing.

‘The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael put the rhetorical question: “If events are created to be photographed, is the movie that records them a documentary, or does it function in a twilight zone? Is it the cinema of fact when the facts are manufactured for the cinema?”

‘More questions about whether objectivity is possible in documentaries were raised in Grey Gardens (1975), a fascinating “non-fiction feature” on an eccentric mother and daughter who may or may not be performing for the camera in their decaying Long Island mansion.

‘Maysles, who shot all his own pictures, always worked as part of a collective, often sharing the director’s credit with his soundman and co-producer brother, editors and another cameraman. Later in life he concentrated on portraits of classical music performers – Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic (1985), Ozawa (1985), about the conductor Seiji Ozawa, Jessye Norman Sings Carmen (1989) – as well as environmental art, with Christo in Paris (1990). He also dealt for the first time with social issues, co-directing with Deborah Dickson and Susan Frömke Abortion: Desperate Choices (1992), which traces the history of abortion in the US, and Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2001), an account of an African-American family in the Mississippi Delta trying to cope with poverty. By letting people speak for themselves, the directors avoided sentimentality. Maysles was against documentaries that expressed the film-maker’s bias.

‘Among his last released feature films as cinematographer and director was The Love We Make (2011), which was based on the 16mm, black-and-white material he shot while following Paul McCartney as he prepared for his appearance at the Concert for New York at Madison Square Garden soon after the attacks on the World Trade Centre.

‘“As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality,” Maysles declared on his website. “It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences – all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality, the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It’s my way of making the world a better place.”’ — Ronald Bergan

 

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Stills

 

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Further

MAYSLES FILMS
Albert Maysles @ IMDb
The Maysles Documentary Center
Cut to: The Maysles Brothers Had a Few Sisters
When the Maysles Brothers Filmed the Beatles
The Maysles Brothers and “Direct Cinema”
GERALD PEARY: The Maysles Brothers
Witness to a killing: the Maysles brothers on Gimme Shelter
Directing the Truth: An Interview with Albert Maysles
The Maysles @ The Criterion Collection
The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles
The Maysles Brothers @ Letterboxd
Grey Gardens Lives On: A Tribute to the Maysles Brothers, and some others
THE MAYSLES BROTHERS WERE RIGHT
When does the observer become the observed? The Maysles meet the Beales.
Albert And David Maysles: Through The Documentary Lens
Albert Maysles’ Last Film: Why ‘In Transit’ Has Been Kept Out of Theaters Since 2015
When Tragedy Struck A Rolling Stones Festival, And The Maysles Brothers Caught It On Film
A Filmmaker Unafraid to Probe Darkness
The Late Great Albert Maysles
Errol Morris remembers Albert Maysles

 

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Extras

Albert and David Maysles on Letterman, June 21, 1982

Albert Maysles – The best way to approach documentary film making

Interview With Albert and David Maysles, 1968

 

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Interview
by Tom Ryan

 

Did you and your brother form any guiding principles for how you wanted your company to work?

It’s kind of an odd company from a business point of view. I remember that there were a couple of graduate students from Harvard University Business School who, as a project, analysed the company, and they could never quite figure out how it worked. But they concluded that, nevertheless, it was successful. These days it’s been more difficult because of the war and the recession.

When you say “difficult”, you mean to get projects up?

Well, to get financing. But I think it’s all the more important these days to make good films because the level of television has dropped so far down. It’s got worse and worse.

Do you have the money and the distribution in place before you begin a production or is that something that happens after you’re under way?

We do it both ways. For example, this month I’m going to be shooting a film of the Dalai Lama’s visit to New York. I don’t have any distribution set up, but I happened to meet Richard Gere, who is very close to him, and through him we’re getting the financing. But we haven’t made any arrangements for distribution yet [author’s note: I can find no evidence of this film ever being completed].

On the other hand, I’ve made several films where we had the financing ahead of time. And with the distribution set up as well, making films for Home Box Office. I made four half-hour film portraits of filmmakers for the Independent Film Channel. They paid for them and they showed them and they gave me complete creative control.

I notice your credits have changed over the years, that they’ve gone from being “directed by Albert Maysles” to a recurrent “with Albert Maysles” (as on Concert of Wills and Lalee’s Kin). What does this mean?

It doesn’t mean that anything’s different from my role before, except that I wanted to give others more light in the credits. So that more attention is paid to them. Because if my name appeared earlier, I think it would take away too much from their work.

Over the years, have there been any guidelines dictating your choice of subjects?

I believe that the strongest kind of film is the one where, somehow or other, it’s related to something very personal on the part of the filmmaker. Early images, early experiences, something basic to your own interests and personality. That’s why so many films don’t quite make it, because they’re assignments rather than coming from the filmmaker’s heart. So, for example, when my brother and I made Salesman, we didn’t think of it quite at the time, we weren’t quite conscious of it, but later on we realised that part of our motivation was related to the fact that Paul Brennan, in a strangely obverse way, was very much like our father. And when you discover something like that, which may be a conscious or an unconscious motivation, then you’re probably on the track of something very strong.

I wonder how that actually affects your perception of the character as you’re filming what happens?

I think that it makes you even keener to discover more of what’s going on and to capture it in all of its significance. I think this is true of art in general. I think that an assignment is not as strong as a work that comes from conviction.

In your short about Truman Capote (With Love from Truman, 1966), Capote describes style as “something to be arrived at, bit by bit”. How did yours develop?

I think, in some part, it came from my personality. As a child, and even now, I’m a product of Attention Deficit Disorder. I didn’t know that until relatively recently. But people with this disorder tend to be much better listeners and observers and that’s been a wonderful advantage for me. I observe, I listen, I watch. When I’m paying attention, I have a very, very acute sense of what’s going on and, in a strange way, I have this faculty for anticipating something interesting that’s supposed to take place and I’m ready for it.

I was on a bus not so long ago in New York and I saw this woman sitting across from me. She was a black woman, very much overweight, and I found that, somehow or another, I was able to look at her without offending her. She was just sort of looking up. And I nudged the woman next to me so that she also was looking at her. Now I still don’t know what made me think that something was gonna happen. But, anyway, at that very moment, a little girl next to the woman I was watching – who was also black and had to be the woman’s daughter, maybe eight or nine years old – gets up, walks around in front of her mother and nestles her head between her mother’s enormous breasts and falls asleep. It changed everything. The woman next to me said, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so glad that you called my attention to what was going on.’

A really good photographer is somebody who notices something where somebody else might just see that something without noticing it. And that sort of thing has happened to me over and over.

Because of the retrospective, I’ve been able to watch a lot of the films on DVD at home with my teenage daughter. She turned to me at the end of Salesman, in fact, and was horrified by some of the people but said what was remarkable is that the film didn’t judge them. And I think she’s right.

That’s right. It’s very important.

This is a constant for you?

It’s very important. I’m at the complete opposite end of the scale from, let’s say, somebody like Michael Moore, who is intent on doing people in.

Yes. Sometimes with good reason. (laughter)

Nowadays, there’s too much attention paid to making films that are on social issues rather than on something more basic. I’ve done some filming already for a project where I get on long-distance trains and I’ll find somebody during the course of the trip where I only discover the story that is gonna take place when they get off the train. It could turn out to be very, very interesting. I’m planning to film in maybe four or five countries and find a wonderful story in each country. But all of it has to do with the train, which is kind of a metaphor for life itself as it goes from station to station.

In connection with that, so many of us have said, and truthfully so, ‘I just saw this film based on a book, but the book is better.’ The book is almost always better than the film! But I can see where, in making documentary films, we can – what shall I say? – do something that is sort of a translation of a literary form. The documentary feature could be like a non-fiction novel. And we should also look for poetry. That scene I described, with the woman suddenly becoming a mother, could have been a piece of poetry.

But I don’t think kids who go to film school are taught to recognise that kind of potential. And I think that they would do well to keep their eye open for a poem rather than think, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta spend $100,000 of money I don’t have to make a full-length film.’ That little thing, those three minutes, would have cost me 50 cents.

If you’d had the camera with you…

Yeah.

Did actually witnessing that scene bring on the train idea?

No. I’ve had it for many years. One thing that I’ve already shot was when I was travelling across the country with a camera some years back. As we were pulling out of Pittsburgh station, I was walking through the train and I saw in the cafeteria coach a young woman in her 20s. Across the aisle were her two children. She was sitting at an empty table and I could see there was something nervous about her. I asked if I could join her and told her that I’d like to do some filming if it was OK with her. She said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ And then right away she told me why she was on the train.

When she was three years old, her parents had broken up in an ugly divorce and her father got custodianship over her. And he vowed that the mother would never see her again. Here she was, 26 years old, 23 years had gone by, and she had never seen her mother. The night before she’d got a call from a woman in Philadelphia saying that it was her mother, that she should get on the train as soon as possible. There was no time to exchange photographs; they didn’t know what each other looked like. But she’d be waiting for her at the train station.

So I’m filming all of this, we get off the train and she looks around. There’s nobody there. She walks up the stairs and there’s this woman who suddenly flings open her arms, embraces her, and the mother puts her head over her daughter’s shoulder and says to me, ‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’ When you can get that kind of stuff…!

It happened!

Yes. And it should be captured.

How do you get people to agree to let you use them in a film? Say with somebody like Joe Levine (in Showman)?

I think it’s been very easy for me to gain access to them because I just have a genuine liking for people. Even if it’s somebody I may differ from greatly, I feel that I really want to know them and that the potential’s there to like them. So, from the very start, as soon as I see somebody, the way I look at that person conveys a kind of empathy. And so it’s been very easy for me to gain the trust that you need. And I get it right away, no matter who it is.

When I first met Fidel Castro, for example, from the next day I was with him day and night. But the very first thing I shot of him is one of the best things I’ve ever filmed.[This was for Yanki, No! (1960), directed by Robert Drew for the ABC Close-Up TV series and shot by Maysles.]

How did you come across the Beales, Edith and Edie?

I got a call one day from Lee Radziwill. The Beales are her aunt and cousin and she wanted to make a film about her childhood in the Hamptons, on Long Island. And so she came to me with a list of some 40 or so things that she thought were going on that might be interesting for the film. Item number 34 was her aunt and cousin.

We began to film and within a few days she introduced us to the two women. A few days later she asked to see what we’d shot and I think that, when she saw them on film, there was no way for her to compete with these two characters. So she kind of lost interest, and then several months later my brother and I devoted six weeks to filming the two women.

And they had no objection to you being there?

No objection. They loved every bit of it.

One of them says at one stage, ‘Where have you been all my life?’

(laughter) Well, the daughter told us later on, after her mother had died, that, at one point, she’d asked her if there was something else she wanted to say. And her mother said, ‘There’s nothing more to say. It’s all in the film.’ So the film had to be something that they believed to be quite a truthful account of who they were. And something that was very important to them.

So they were pleased with it?

Oh, yeah. They were delighted. I remember the first word that came out of the daughter when we showed them the film: she said, in a very loud voice, ‘You know, the Maysles have created a classic.’

And you were quite happy to go along with that?

(laughter) Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!

I find that fascinating because, in so many ways, they’re such a sad couple. And the film strikes me as very poignant. Those images of the cats furtively looking out through the grass: it’s as if they’re like the women.

But you know, when you come to think of it, how many people, courageous enough to share their actual lives with a camera, would be as interesting to the larger population as these two women? Just the way their lives occurred made a feature film. I met a woman who’d seen it 120 times. That was a year ago. I saw her more recently and it’s up to 126 now. But it’s not uncommon for people to see it five or ten times.

Are there any specific rules governing the way you work?

Oh, yeah. I avoid interviews and narration. I avoid a host, somebody telling us all along what’s going on. I think what a documentary is very special at doing very well is depicting somebody experiencing something, so that the viewer experiences that as well. The most powerful moments are when, through the process of identification, you’re that person on the street. That’s quite a gift to be able to do that and it helps to establish a common ground by which we can understand, connect with, engage ourselves with, the emotions of people whom we might never otherwise come in contact with.

That’s interesting because the idea of being engaged with someone’s experience does seem on the face of it to contradict that idea of remaining detached from your subject. It must be a difficult line to walk?

Well, it was very difficult to be detached from these two women in the film. But I’m sure that there are some people who watch the film and, because they’re afraid to connect with these two people who might appear to them to be crazy, they resist this kind of engagement. You know what I mean? People come up with all kinds of excuses: ‘Oh, no, this is exploitation. Some people shouldn’t be filmed.’ Maybe they’re just afraid of this process of revelation, that they themselves might get caught up in it. I think. Weird things happen to some people when they see this film.

I know that when it was reviewed by The New York Times, Walter Goodman just hated the film. He didn’t say so because he didn’t want to offend the two women. But what he was saying was extremely offensive to them. ‘Why are they showing all of this flabby flesh?’ Obviously he had problems with age. And he thought that this was a terrible thing, that we should be disgusted with ourselves for having made this film. He couldn’t say they were crazy because he’s supposed to be defending them against these awful filmmakers. But between the lines that’s what he was saying.

You, above almost all other documentary filmmakers, seem to have foregrounded the importance of the editor in shaping the material?

Oh, they’re very important. I handle the camera. I’m the one who does all the shooting. So I’ll say it’s all in the camerawork. (laughter) And the editors will say, ‘No, it’s all in the editing.’ Which is fine, although it’s not true. It’s all in both of these things. But if you’re taking on all the responsibility, of both shooting and editing, so much the better for the film.

Capote also talks about how all material has “an organic shape, like an apple”. Does the material you shoot always have an inherent shape, do you think? Say with Gimme Shelter?

That’d be best answered by Charlotte Zwerin. (laughter)

And she’d probably always say, ‘No’?

(laughter) It’s her job to give it shape. Right? But I think also, just as it is in shooting, the editorial process is one of discovering something that’s already there. And she’s the best editor I’ve ever met. She’s fabulous. She edited both Salesman and Gimme Shelter.

The decision to structure Gimme Shelter around the Rolling Stones looking at the monitors gives it a shape that it otherwise mightn’t have had.

Oh, yeah. When we finished shooting at Altamont and the film was being put together, we remembered that the Stones had said they’d like to see some of this stuff. And so we took them up on that and showed it to them, and that became our opportunity to get their reaction to the event in a very spontaneous fashion.

Can you remember who actually came up with that brainwave?

I think it was Mick.

Do you have guidelines for how many cameras you will use?

For Grey Gardens and Salesman, it was just my camera. That’s all. In a way that’s better because more than that is an imposition. Now, when you’re filming something like Altamont, you want a number of cameras all over the place.

Apparently George Lucas and Walter Murch both shot some footage for Gimme Shelter?

That’s right. The odd thing is that, unfortunately, George Lucas’s camera, which we rented at the last moment, was defective. I don’t remember that we could use any of his material, but we credited him in the film.

What do you think about digital video?

Love it. It’s a turning point for the better in documentary filmmaking. I can now do all kinds of things that I can’t do with a film camera. For one thing, it doesn’t run out for 40 minutes or an hour, whereas with a film camera, every ten minutes you’ve gotta reload. You lose a lotta good stuff that way. And it’s also much more sensitive to light and you don’t have to change film stocks when you’re indoors or outdoors. With the flip of a switch, you can go from one to the other. Actually, I came up with 30 reasons why I switched to digital, and almost any one of them is enough to make a change.

That’s interesting because others, including Frederick Wiseman, have refused to use it.

Well, he’s not a cameraman.

Does ‘direct cinema’ mean the same thing now as it meant 40 years ago?

Pretty much. Although, you know, Robert Capa was once asked what advice he’d give a young photographer and he said, ‘Get close. Get very close.’ And so, especially with this new video equipment, you can get that much closer to what’s going on without interfering. And that advice is still about as good as you can get.

I love the way that meanings in your films emerge gradually, that – as with a painting – you have to look at everything in order to make sense of the parts. Because at the end of your films I feel that I’ve come to understand the bits in a way that I never could have if I’d seen them in isolation.

That’s great. Also I think that with a good documentary, whether it’s mine or somebody else’s, you can’t get it all in one screening. You want to see it again. Very few people have seen Gimme Shelter only once. The only film I’ve ever seen more than twice is La Strada (1954). And I think that’s because I had a personal connection with it. I had an uncle who was just like the main character, and I think that in a way I was watching another version of my uncle every time I watched it.

Do you try to keep up with the work of other documentary filmmakers?

I saw a five and a half hour film by Jonas Mekas [presumably As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)] that was extraordinary. And yet, from a purely technical point of view, it was a disaster. He couldn’t keep the camera steady, things were out of focus and so forth. But he had a poetic eye. And that was most important.

 

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16 of the Maysles’ 57 films

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Psychiatry in Russia (1955)
‘In 1955, Albert Maysles traveled to Russia, 16mm camera in hand. During this trip, he shot what was to become his first film, PSYCHIATRY IN RUSSIA, an unprecedented view into Soviet mental healthcare.’ — Movie Lover 93

the entirety

 

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Showman (1963)
‘Before making “Salesman,” their documentary about door-to-door Bible peddlers, the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, directed this 1963 portrait of the wheeler-dealer film distributor and producer Joseph E. Levine, which covers similar ground but from the top down. After years as a hustling film booker, Levine made a name with “Godzilla” and a fortune with “Hercules”; here, he’s seen masterminding the American release of “Two Women,” a film by Vittorio De Sica starring Sophia Loren, with a similar blend of savvy and hucksterism—as well as with an army of reps equipped with facts and figures. Loren is often around (one of her junkets opens the film), and her magical allure contrasts painfully with the hard-nosed milieu that brings it to the screen. (So does Kim Novak’s; her cameo is clever, unvarnished, and electrifying.) Levine, intensely aware of the probing camera, tries to keep his flamboyant vulgarity under wraps, but his lewd grin as he describes Loren’s appearance suggests exactly where he thinks art and commerce intersect.’ — Richard Brody

the entirety

 

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What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964)
‘A humorous, freewheeling and candid account of the Beatles arrival in America in February 1964. The Maysles follow the Fab Four for five days, from the crazed JFK airport reception to unguarded moments inside the Plaza Hotel in preparation for their landmark Ed Sullivan Show appearance to their equally frenzied homecoming.’ — maysles.org

Excerpt

The Making of …

 

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Cut Piece (1965)
‘Yoko Ono sits motionless on the concert hall stage, wearing her best suit of clothing, with a pair of scissors placed on the floor in front of her. inviting the audience to come up on stage – one at a time – and cut a bit of her clothes off which they were allowed to keep, covering her breasts at the moment of unbosoming.’ — paulanow

the entirety

 

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Meet Marlon Brando (1966)
‘Journalists from all over America meet Marlon Brando in a New York hotel room to interview him about his new film, Morituri. Seeing this as an opportunity to let the legendary actor promote the film, they find Brando unwilling to talk about it, instead he is more interested in larking about and turning on the charm when being interviewed by a former winner of the Miss USA competition.’ — Letterboxd

Excerpt

 

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Orson Welles in Spain (1966)
‘‘This will be a film about the spectacle of death’, Orson Welles said about this film by him and the Maysles brothers. At least, that was his intention, until the collaboration was cancelled and the film plans shelved once and for all. In this short introduction, Welles explains the project to a group of interested people. Impassioned, he tells of the horrors of the bullfight and explains that people who are more or less addicted to the spectacle will be the protagonists of the film. The reason for co-operating with the Maysles brothers becomes clear when he explains about the intended method of filming. The directors will use professional actors, but the course of the story has not been laid down in a script. It will be a largely improvised story that will be shot like a documentary.’ — IDFA

Excerpt

 

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Salesman (1969)
‘This radically influential portrait of American dreams and disillusionment from Direct Cinema pioneers David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin captures, with indelible humanity, the worlds of four dogged door-to-door Bible salesmen as they travel from Boston to Florida on a seemingly futile quest to sell luxury editions of the Good Book to working-class Catholics. A vivid evocation of midcentury malaise that unfolds against a backdrop of cheap motels, smoky diners, and suburban living rooms, Salesman assumes poignant dimensions as it uncovers the way its subjects’ fast-talking bravado masks frustration, disappointment, and despair. Revolutionizing the art of nonfiction storytelling with its nonjudgmental, observational style, this landmark documentary is one of the most penetrating films ever made about how deeply embedded consumerism is in America’s sense of its own values.’ — The Criterion Collection

the entirety

 

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Gimme Shelter (1970)
‘Called the greatest rock film ever made, this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour. When three hundred thousand members of the Love Generation collided with a few dozen Hells Angels at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, Direct Cinema pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin were there to immortalize on film the bloody slash that transformed a decade’s dreams into disillusionment.’ — maysles.org

the entirety

 

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Christo’s Valley Curtain (1973)
‘Christo, an artist, wants to put a piece of orange fabric across a valley. This Oscar-nominated film documents his success showing how a large piece of fabric can look small when accomplished.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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Grey Gardens (1975)
‘The making of Grey Gardens actually came about by accident. Impressed with their work, the Maysles were approached by Lee Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, about doing a documentary about their lives growing up in the Bouvier family. Their family, of course, included their eccentric aunt and cousin in East Hampton.

‘The brothers agreed to make the film; they shot footage over two weeks and immediately came to a startling realization: the charming and eccentric Beales would make much better film subjects than Jackie and Lee. As such, the Bouvier family documentary was quickly scrapped, much to the dismay of Lee. She, however, confiscated the initial footage of the Beales (reportedly over one and a half hours) and it has yet to see the light of day. There are rumors that she plans to release the footage sometime in the future.

‘The Maysles spent close to $50,000 on film and equipment before they went back to visit the Beales with their new proposal a year later. The women were ecstatic with the prospect of being filmed; it not only might offer them the fame that Jackie and Lee were accustom to, but would also give them the chance to make some much-needed money. The Maysles’ offer included an advance of $10,000 ($5,000 for Big Edie and $5,000 for Little Edie) and 20 percent of the future profits. With the green light, the Maysles, along with co-directors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, filmed the Beales for approximately six weeks in the fall of 1973. They practically lived at the mansion and resorted to wearing flea collars around their ankles to keep the bugs at bay.’ — greygardensonline

the entirety

 

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Muhammad and Larry (1980)
‘In October of 1980 Muhammad Ali was preparing to fight for an unprecedented fourth heavyweight title against his friend and former sparring partner Larry Holmes. To say that the great Ali was in the twilight of his career would be generous; most of his admiring fans, friends and fight scribes considered his bravado delusional. What was left for him to prove? In the weeks of training before the fight, documentarians Albert and David Maysles took an intimate look at Ali trying to convince the world and perhaps himself, that he was still “The Greatest.” At the same time, they documented the mild-mannered and undervalued champion Holmes as he confidently prepared to put an end to the career of a man for whom he had an abiding and deep affection.’ — Letterboxd

Excerpt

 

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w/ Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson Letting Go: A Hospice Journey (1996)
‘In our society, death fills the airwaves, it targets strangers, creates statistics. Yet when it finally gets personal, we are ill-equipped. Exploring this almost taboo subject through the stories of three hospice patients, the film creates an understanding of the hospice movement.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

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w/ Deborah Dickson, Susan Froemke LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2001)
‘The principal character in LALEE’S KIN is 62-year-old LaLee Wallace, mother of a family of eight children in Tallahatchie County, in the Mississippi Delta in the South of the United States. LaLee belongs to the numerous undereducated labourers who left school at a young age to earn a living in the cotton industry. As a result of the advancing mechanisation in agriculture, most of them have now become unemployed. Due to their low level of education and their poverty, their situation has become pretty desperate. Another important character in the film is Reggie Barnes, who has been appointed chief inspector of all district schools. He is determined to break the vicious circle and devotes himself to improving the pupils’ level of education.’ — IDFA

Excerpt

 

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The Secret of Trees (2013)
‘What do trees know that we don’t? 13-year-old inventor Aidan realized that trees use a mathematical formula to gather sunlight in crowded forests. Then he wondered why we don’t collect solar energy in the same way.’ — Forward Focus

the entirety

 

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Iris (2015)
‘IRIS pairs legendary 87-year-old documentarian Albert Maysles with Iris Apfel, the quick-witted, flamboyantly dressed 93-year-old style maven who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades. More than a fashion film, the documentary is a story about creativity and how, even in Iris’ dotage, a soaring free spirit continues to inspire. IRIS portrays a singular woman whose enthusiasm for fashion, art and people are life’s sustenance and reminds us that dressing, and indeed life, is nothing but an experiment. Despite the abundance of glamour in her current life, she continues to embrace the values and work ethic established during a middle-class Queens upbringing during the Great Depression. “I feel lucky to be working. If you’re lucky enough to do something you love, everything else follows.”‘ — maysles.org

Trailer

 

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In Transit (2015)
‘The last film by documentary giant Albert Maysles takes place entirely on the Empire Builder, a train that runs between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest over three days. Some passengers are heading toward new opportunities, while others are just trying to get away.

‘One scene features a young man travelling from Mississippi to Seattle. He says, “Nobody at work knew I was fixing to just pack up all my stuff and leave. … They actually thought I was going to be at work last night. … Sometimes you just gotta do it. You know, what do you have really to lose?”

‘In Transit caps a long and distinguished career for Albert Maysles. The documentary was finished more than two years ago, just before the award-winning director died at the age of 88. Since then, Maysles’ last movie has been difficult to see because of questions about who owns the rights. (Audiences in New York can see it on two screens this week, including the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem.)

‘Rebekah Maysles, the filmmaker’s daughter, says, “He had always thought that it would be wonderful to make a film about people who were on these trains — meet them, and then follow them off the train. It was a place where you could have access to all different people with all different stories.”‘ — npr

Trailer

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Maybe if they revive ‘The Jetsons’ it’ll happen in a dream sequence in one of the episodes. Otherwise, … nah. Our weather has just gone uncharacteristically hot today, and not for the last time this year, needless to say. I’ll nibble at some Kimchi and see, thanks. And thank you for the stars. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Awesome, it’s a fantastic novel, really. I know this sounds insane to say, but of the many thousands of songs Pollard has written and recorded, there’s only one that isn’t at the very least quite interesting. I knew this boy named Ben when I was young. I knew him from when we were both about 10 years old through high school. Until he hit his early-mid teens he was insanely cute. He was the ultimate dream date of pretty much all of his classmates, the girls and the gay boys and maybe even some of the straight ones. He was famous at the schools for being mindblowingly cute. But then he hit mid-puberty, and his face was suddenly eaten alive by extreme acne that left it permanently ravaged with scars, and everything changed, and I always wondered how he coped with going from being a god to other kids to being a scary looking guy. It must have been really traumatising. I just can’t schmooze. I just can’t be that level of insincere and fake and manipulative. People expect and want me to, and I sometimes wish I could, but it’s not in my makeup. I’m a bit too painfully sincere. Sucks? Nice hats. I’m pretty sure I would be wearing a boring Eiffel Tower hat. Oh, no, wait, I just checked, and I’d be wearing a Tour Montparnasse hat, and it’s by far the most boring, ugliest building in Paris, so that’s depressing. Your love may not have completed succeeded, but steady improvement continues, and it’s the thought that counts, right? Two writer friends of mine have booked a table for four at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant tonight, and I don’t think Zac can go, so love is buying you a round-trip ticket to Paris for this afternoon, a room in a ***** hotel, and a seat at the table, all on love’s massive expense account, G. ** Bill, Thanks, man. I’m getting there, health-wise. Warmerdam: on the hunt. I was going to see ‘Vortex’ today, but the plan got delayed. It’s hot here, so I guess I’ll spend my day cringing and cowering. It would be worse, I suppose. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, the never to be read genius! Everyone, Mr. E points any of you interested at a ‘neat’ documentary on Marcel Proust. Here. ** TomK, Hi, Tom Thank you! It was a total honor! I’m excited for the world! ** Steve Erickson, Good to hear about ‘Vortex’. I was going too see it today, but, due to unforeseen circumstances, now probably later in the week. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Obongjayar’s album SOME NIGHTS I DREAM OF DOORS for Slant Magazine here. Sucks about the Grandrieux essay. I was looking forward to it. I’ve read Sarah’s book, and have Peter Staley’s book here to read, and that’s seems like enough. ** RYANRAZE, A lot of the greatest things in the world in every medium involve high concepts realised via ‘amateur’ means. Well, if it’s like ‘Hausu’ in some way, you’ll win. I think I’ve seen Tamotsu Yato’s photos around. The work looks very familiar. I’ll look further when I’m out of the p.s. factory. 6’9″. That’s a very tall drink of water, as they used to say. Gotcha on the self-identification. I’m not even interested in homoeroticism, so I don’t know what the fuck I am, ha ha. Later, have fun, me. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul! Maestro! Robot neighbor! I’m glad things are getting back to normal there. Zac and I are still watching your country’s status like hawks looking for the first safe opportunity to swoop down on you guys. Any writings progress/news? Hugs from way the fuck over here! ** Okay. I’ve never devoted a day to the great Maysles brothers before, and that’s weird, and now that neglect is a nonissue. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.