Special Series: Month of Maysles
In honor of recently passed cinema giant and documentary pioneer Albert Maysles, FilmScene proudly presents "Month of Maysles," a month-long Maysles series on the big screen.
The four selected films comprise a snapshot of a remarkable career: his direct cinema landmark, SALESMAN; the incredible portrait of a moment, GIMME SHELTER; the master portrait of GREY GARDENS; and Maysles' most recent film, IRIS.
This is a filmmaker you must know if you don't and who commands greater appreciation from all who do. Buy a SERIES PASS and get intimate with a legend of cinema!
GREY GARDENS
Janus Films Restoration
"Richly detailed and boundlessly evocative! There's no excuse to miss the restoration of the Maysles' 1976 study of spirited decrepitude...Remains elusive and dreamlike, no matter how its corners have been brightened." -Village Voice
"An otherwordly experience not quite like anything else in the history of cinema! So many things made afterward have followed in its footsteps." -Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"To my mother and me, GREY GARDENS is a breakthrough to something beautiful and precious called life." -Edie Beale, 1974
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive cousins of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York, mansion, making for an eerily ramshackle echo of the American Camelot. An impossibly intimate portrait, this 1976 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, codirected by Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, quickly became a cult classic and established Little Edie as a fashion icon and philosopher queen.
About the Janus Films restoration:
This new 2K digital restoration was undertaken in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The original 16 mm A/B camera negative, held in the Academy’s collections, was used to create two separate 2K scans, of the A and B rolls, on a Lasergraphics film scanner. These were then assembled into a final master using the existing 35 mm blowup color reversal internegative (CRI) as a reference. In addition, a handful of shots in the final master were replaced from the CRI. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, and jitter were manually removed.
The original monaural soundtrack was restored by Audio Mechanics in Burbank, California, under the supervision of the Academy Film Archive, from an existing 16-bit transfer made from the original 3-track magnetic tracks. Crackle was attenuated and clicks, thumps, and dropouts manually removed using Sonic HD, while hiss and hum were reduced using Cedar.