Last night, Albert Maysles passed away peacefully in his Manhattan home. The innovative filmmaker was 88 years old.
Maysles, along with his brother David (who passed away in 1987 due to a stroke), were pioneers in the art of documentary film making. Albert had over forty directing (or co-directing) credits to his name including the controversial Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter (1970), the wildly popular film Grey Gardens (1976) that examined the mental state of Edith and Edie Beale, and several features following the larger-than-life and awe-inspiring works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1973’s Christo’s Valley Curtain, 1978’s Running Fence, 1986’s Christo in Paris and Islands, 1994’s Umbrellas, 2007’s The Gates). Maysles’ films always found the beauty and the essence of their subject’s truth. This authenticity partially came through the unique subjects that the duo chose to cover—from movie stars and famous musicians to hospice workers and door-to-door Bible salesmen—but also due to the Maysles brothers’s commitment to creating these films without actually interviewing the subjects.
In an interview with The New York Times, Albert once stated that “making a film isn’t finding the answer to a question; it’s trying to capture life as it is.” For sixty years, Maysles not only captured precious and unique moments of life, he captured the attention of the world every time he turned the camera on.
