just another person there…. We both had this feeling of empathy and people would trust us,” Maysles says.
Their films were not just windows into other people’s lives. They made critical investigations into their worlds. In general, the Maysleses’ films thwart definitive reads of the people on-screen, using details to call attention to the uniqueness of the images presented. Characteristics are not symbols to be read but rather proof of uniqueness, proof that our world is a complex and plural experience. Their films pull us into different ways of watching cinema—especially how we view people in cinema. Psychiatry in Russia (1955) used the camera to tell us about Freudian alternatives. I claim that his subsequent work with the Drew Associates offered experiences of alternative mindsets.
The Rolling Stones were part of the so-called British Invasion. In 1964 they trailed the Beatles across the Atlantic to reinvigorate popular music in the United States. Mick Jagger has said of the 1960s, “Suddenly popular music became bigger than it had ever been before. It became an important, perhaps the most important, art form of the period, after not at all being regarded as an art form before” (The Rolling Stones: n.d.). “Big” meant that you could produce a movie about your band. The Beatles had Hard Day’s Night (1964). Bob Dylan had Dont Look Back (1967). Both of these films were collaborations with notable directors—Richard Lester and D. A. Pennebaker, respectively. By 1969 the Rolling Stones had a large promotion budget and they wanted a film of their own (Booth 2012: 177). The Maysles brothers were getting critical acclaim yet little financial success with Salesman (1969), their film about a traveling Bible salesman. A film about the Rolling Stones had an easier target audience.
In our interview, Maysles recounts getting a phone call in 1969: “I got a call from Haskell Wexler. He’s a famous cinematographer, moviemaker from Hollywood. He said, ‘I’ve just been talking to the Stones. They’re about to go on tour around America. They’re going to be at the Plaza Hotel tomorrow. You might want to look them up.’ Neither my brother nor I knew anything about these guys, but I took Haskell’s word for it. We went to the Plaza Hotel, knocked on the door, got to talking with them. They said, ‘Well, tomorrow night, we’re performing in Baltimore. You want to come along?’ So we went along with them.”
“To shoot or just to go?” I ask.
“Just to go. I don’t think we shot anything there. Anyway, we thought, ‘Yeah. These guys are good.’”
“What impressed you about them?”
“We loved the music. And of course we felt we had good rapport with them. We were eager to get to know them better and to get to know their music and to record it. So, a couple days later, they’re performing at Madison Square Garden and there we are. I think it was two days of performances and then off to Muscle Shoals and then Altamont.”
What happened at Altamont completely altered the course of the film, turning it into much more than a simple concert film. To some viewers, it indicted the band in the melee, but in the end, the band allowed the film to screen. Interestingly, the Rolling Stones would not give a pass to Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues (1972), which contains many unseemly shots of backstage parties. The Maysleses’ film has less backstage access yet brings out an intimacy with a complex rock and roll tour.
The intimacy found in much of direct cinema comes from filmmaker and fellow Drew Associate Richard Leacock. His philosophy of “being there” is a strategy of being present while shooting and conveying the feeling of presence for a film audience through the edit. Albert Maysles has his own spin on Leacock’s concept of “being there.” He’s also very good at making friends. In our interview, Maysles tells me about his process:
“Immediately upon meeting the person who is to be filmed—immediately—the person catches something in the cameraperson’s eyes that conveys the possibilities of love. If you have that kind of relationship and have that kind of heart-to-heart feeling yourself as a photographer, then it reaches the subject and you get the same in return.”
His cinematography capitalizes on cinema’s ability to pass the relationships he develops through shooting on to his audiences with the film.
“I’m interested in the humanization process, how people make friendships,… but at the same time, extending that privilege to anyone who sees the film. They see and hear exactly what I’m getting.”
From internationally acclaimed actor Marlon Brando to Bible salesman Paul Brennan, Maysles’s trust made through friendship is palpable.
Not so with Mick Jagger.
“Mick Jagger was a little difficult,” says Maysles. “He doesn’t get that close to people.”
Jagger’s distance from the Maysleses gives Gimme Shelter distinction. Instead of developing an intimacy with characters, the film pulls us into the image-making apparatus of large-scale rock and roll. “Being there” is being in the studio, at the concert, in a production meeting, on the stage, at a photo shoot, a hotel room, and so on. As a critical way into the mediated apparatus, the film intervenes by creating a sense of spontaneity, an understanding of complexity, and an engagement with struggle. The interplay of these comes through a structure of the film that is unpredictable but encourages us to think about connections.
Alternative Structuring
The structure of Gimme Shelter embodies the philosopher William James’s interest in making truth through engaging in spontaneity and employing an unconventional structure. Many films—even documentary—follow a standard five-part dramatic arc. An exposition establishes time, place, characters, and conflict. Rising action introduces complications for the protagonist leading to a climax. The climax brings the drama to its highest point of conflict and suspense. Falling action leads toward the end, resolving the conflict. During the dénouement, the characters return to their normal lives, often changed from the conflict. Maysles has often looked for alternative structural models.
He says, “Too many people making a documentary film figure, ‘Well, if it doesn’t have a conflict, if it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, then who’s going to watch it for any length of time?’”
For Gimme Shelter, they borrowed from literature. Specifically, they borrowed Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) in which a true story of a murder is told from multiple perspectives out of chronological order. The book is a nonfiction novel. After making the film With Love from Truman: A Visit with Truman Capote (1966), the Maysleses and Zwerin looked to make films the way Capote wrote books. In the film, Capote states his desire to make art from factual material. There is a kinship between direct cinema and the nonfiction novel. Salesman was one of the first films for which the editor—in this case Charlotte Zwerin—was recognized as a coauthor of the film, and Gimme Shelter makes that acknowledgment of the editor-as-author through the transparency of filming the editing process. Zwerin’s editing strategy offers a sense of unpredictability that culminates in a sense of complexity.
Her privileging of spontaneity begins structurally when members of the Rolling Stones begin to review the film in the editing room. Zwerin invited the band to come view the material and told them that they might be filmed then. Dialogic editing has its antecedents in documentary. Robert Flaherty watched his dailies with “Nanook” (Allakariallak) in the early 1920s, while shooting Nanook of the North (1922). Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin famously end their 1961 cinéma vérité opus, Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) watching and discussing the film with their subjects. In general, on-screen discussion of the cinematic experience reveals the limitations of cinematic truth.
Structurally, Zwerin uses
