Friday, April 30, 2010 - North Shore News - A13
PULSE
YOUR NORTH SHORE GUIDE to ARTS & CULTURE
Ways of seeing explored in new exhibit at Presentation House Gallery: Page 16 City of Bhangra fest a feast for the senses: Page 19
photo submitted
DAVID Maysles, left, Mick Jagger, Albert Maysles and Charlie Watts on a photo shoot in 1969 for the Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! album cover. Albert Maysles is in town this weekend to talk about documentary filmmaking at Pacific Cinémathèque and Capilano University.
Shari Ulrich filling in the blanks one song at a time: Page 20
DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER ALBERT MAYSLES
Live and direct
Kate Nash has more to offer on sophomore effort: Page 20 Band of Skulls keep to themselves: Page 21 Enter to win a deluxe edition of Iggy & the Stooges classic punk rock album Raw Power: Page 21 Vincent in Brixton — Portrait of an artist as a misfit lodger: Page 22 Gunless takes dead aim at Western cliches: Page 43 More online at www.nsnews.com
■ Three by Albert Maysles: Gimme Shelter (1970), Grey Gardens (1976), Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! (1969-2009) screening at Pacific Cinémathèque tonight and Saturday night beginning at 7 p.m. Director will be in attendance tonight. Go to www. cinematheque.bc.ca for more details. ■ An Evening with Albert Maysles, Capilano University, Saturday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. in the Birch Theatre. To reserve a ticket to that event, please contact mmason@capilanou.ca. General admission tickets $10/$5 for students.
John Goodman
QA and
ALBERT MAYSLES
jgoodman@nsnews.com
LEGENDARY documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles visits Vancouver this weekend for two major events at Pacific Cinémathèque and Capilano University. Tonight Maysles will be in attendance at the Cinémathèque when several of his classic films are shown and Saturday Vancouver Sun film critic Katherine Monk will moderate a Maysles retrospective at Capilano University. It’s impossible to discuss Albert Maysles without also mentioning his late brother David who died of a stroke in 1987. The two were inseparable, working as a cinematic tandem to record sound and image on film for more than a quarter of a century. The brothers are credited with developing portable equipment and a nonobtrusive methodology that revolutionized documentary cinema in the early ’60s. Albert operated the lightweight, modified Auricon 16mm cameras while his brother David took care of the sound on films that covered a wide range of
topics and gave them a chance to work with the Beatles, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and many others. The Maysles’ 1970 film of the Rolling Stones American tour, Gimme Shelter, is cinéma vérité of the first order and their 1976 intimate portrait of a reclusive mother and daughter in Grey Gardens is a cult classic. In 1992 the U.S. Library of Congress named the brothers’ 1968 feature documentary Salesman one of the 25 best American films ever made. Albert Maysles talked with the North Shore News in advance of his trip here this weekend. North Shore News: A big picture question to start things off — How did you get involved in documentaty filmmaking? Albert Maysles: I started off life as a psychologist and had already been teaching at the university in Boston when I was 28 in 1955. I thought it would be interesting to go to Russia during summer vacation and to do something that would be good for us all: Namely take some pictures of ordinary people and because I was a psychologist I thought I should go to mental hospitals. Anyway, I borrowed a movie camera and visited Russia and made my first film in mental hospitals. That’s how I got started. North Shore News: Wasn’t it difficult to get approval to shoot in the Soviet Union at that time? Albert Maysles: It would have been except I crashed a party and met the top leaders and they gave me full permission. North Shore News: In other words you started at the top? Albert Maysles: Right with a simple wind-up 16mm camera and no sound. North Shore News: How did you develop your approach to documentary filmmaking? Albert Maysles: In 1960 I joined several other filmmakers and we had a big See Portable page 44