Is Grey Gardens Cinema Verite Or Direct Cineam

'Grey Gardens': Cinéma Verité or Sideshow?

Feb. 22, 1976

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February 22, 1976

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On Oct. 22, 1971, at the urging of sonic annoyed townsfolk, the Suffolk County police raided a house in East Hampton. There, in the house called Grey Gardens, they found two women, many cats, much litter and quite a few violations of local ordinances. What made the case more noteworthy than the usual recluse‐in‐messyold‐house story was the discovery that the inhabitants were related to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Seventy‐seven‐year‐old Edith Bouvier Beale was the sister of Jackie's father, which, naturally, made Mrs. Beale's daughter, 54‐year‐old Edie, Jackie's cousin.

Among those attracted to the incident, in a professional way, were Albert and David MaysIes, exponents of cinema verité, or "direct cinema," as they prefer to call it, documentaries without a narrator or a musical score, filmed and recorded with lightweight portable equipment. The brothers Maysles had won a considerable reputation in recent years, especially with "Salesman," a generally admired study of four door‐to‐door Bible salesmen from Boston, and "Gimme Shelter," a controversial account of the Rolling Stones's 1969 tour of this country, which climaxed In a killing during a concert at the Altamont Speedway in California —a fortuitous denouement since it provided a climax for the movie. In 1973, they and three associates turned their talents upon the occupants of that rundown house in East Hampton. They made a film which is successful enough in their terms and distasteful enough in other terms to call their whole enterprise into question.

"Grey Gardens" consists of 94 minutes of almost nonstop, often simultaneous monologues by Mrs. Beale and Edie. Their talk runs on, meeting, crossing, diverging, breaking off now and then—once as they listen to a heartily inspirational radio sermon by Norman Vincent Peale—hut never stopping for long. The talk is the blood of their relationship; while it flows, they seem not to feel so cut off from things.

The mother talks of her past happiness ('I had a perfect marriage, beautiful children, terribly successful marriage'); her singing career, remembered as brilliant; her fine husband and her talented accompanist. In the bed she shares with her cats and the cans and cartons of several days of food for them and for herself, she raises her arms, flabby and creased, and preens a hit, puts on a large hat out of another era, and sings, in poignant semblance of the voice and style she once boasted, "Tea for Two."

The daughter talks about her present unhappiness, about Mrs. Beale's rejection of her last suitor, about being forced by her mother to return to Grey Gardens from New York City more than 20 years before, and her resolve to leave again. "I think my days at Grey Gardens are limited," she says by rote. "My days are limited." She changes outfits, going from one odd costume to another. Her hair covered, her legs exposed well up the heavy thighs, she dances, much as she must have when she was a young girl with the prospect of entering Long Island society.

On the evidence of her scrapbook, Edie was a very attractive girl, and her mother, to whose portrait the camera keeps returning, was beautiful. Now, to judge from the film, their days are spent in incessant banter, sometimes querulous, sometimes kidding, about whatever comes to mind, Edie playing and overplaying to the outsiders, Mrs. Beale dry and sharp: Edie: She made me leave the Barbizon.

Mrs. Beale: Well, I thought you'd been in New York long enough. You were getting lines in your face.

Edie: But I was getting my audition—in 1952.

Mrs. Beale: Well, you didn't get it—you missed out.

Edie: I was just getting up what you call a little nerve when she said I had to come home. She started to high‐pressure me to come back in March of 1952, and she kept it up until the end of July, and July 29th I checked out, got on the train and came back, and was never able to get back.

Mrs. Beale: It's very hot in New York on July 29th. Why, in fact, did Edie return to her mother and to Grey Gardens? Why did she never marry or make any kind of career? What part did the long‐gone Mr. Beale play in derailing these two lives? How did things manage to turn out as they did? No answers are forthcoming. Their quarrel is a litany, carried on without rancor, almost without interest. They are not listening very hard, having heard themselves so many times before, yet not wishing perhaps to disappoint the ingratiating outsiders. They talk on, drifting together in a place where the mists of the past meet the fumes of the present. As Edie says, "It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult."

I found the film sad, of course; who can fail to be saddened by the remnants of two lives expiring in a haze? But I felt angry, too. Would anyone have bothered with these people had they not been related to Jackie Onassis? The Maysleses were not out to ridicule the Beales, but the film presents them as a pair of grotesques. Why were they put on exhibition this way? Albert Maysles is quoted in publicity material as saying, "The essential thing about our work is not making believe but finding out." Although we see the women in pitiable circumstances and absurd poses, however, we find out remarkably little about how they got there. They have reached an accommodation; why not let them get by as well as they can now without this public display of their weaknesses, peculiarities, touches of wackiness?

To the practitioner of cinéma verité, evidently, such con siderations are not compelling. The Beales agreed to be photographed. The contracts are In order, the women having been represented, by a family attorney. They were paid for their cooperation and are due to participate in any profits. They are fair game.

For all the undoubted virtues of cinéma verité and the large claims made for it. the Maysleses' own Career demonstrates that the form does not present the whole verité and nothing but the verité. The audience for "Salesman," for example, had no way of knowing that the filmmakers had given the Bible peddlers money which enabled them to go to Miami and be photographed there. It the money had not been forthcoming, the Miami scenes could not have been shot. Thus do our cinéastes create their own verité. Also, if one did not know while watching "Gimme Shelter," that the film had been commissioned by the Rolling Stones, the kindly spirit in which Mick Jagger was treated would probably have been mystifying.

Even if "Grey Gardens" turns out to be free of such irregularities, to pretend that truth creates its own movies would diminish the credit due the brothers Maysles, It is their camera work—surprisingly spotty and arbitrary this time—the selection of film footage, and the editing which create their truth. From five weeks of shooting in Grey Gardens in the fall of 1973, only 94 minutes worth of film were used. Were the decisions on what to discard based on grave esthetic considerations? Were any scenes left out simply because they were not sufficiently bizarre?

Further, as has often been pointed out, the camera itself is capable of transforming its subjects, that intrusive, inescapable camera which is, in truth, the star of direct cinema. I don't think I have ever seen the camera's allure conveyed more strikingly than in the behavior of Edie Beale. She is always on, per forming for it and for its operator. She eyes the lens shrewdly; a parody of sexiness, she simpers, wiggles, tugs at her swim suit, carries on a seduction of the instrument before our eyes. She and the camera expose each other. How much the Maysleses themselves encouraged her displays, we cannot know — their muffled offcamera responses to Edie's questions and comments tend to be noncommital or condescending—but their very presence was clearly encouraging, if not inciting. "Darling David," Edie coos into the "where have you been all my life? Where have you been?" A scene of this woman in her 50's waving a small American flag as she does a drum majorette routine that may have seemed cute 40 years ago becomes a high spot of the movie. Is it the moviemakers' fault that their camera has this sort of effect on certain sorts of people? Are they not, after all, only observers of certain corners of life? "We believe in shooting life as it is being lived," their publicity material tells us. But would ft have been lived in quite this way without them? Why were they in Grey Gardens anyhow? Why?

Can it be that these makers of documentaries whom we glimpse in a mirror, Albert's eye tight against the camera viewfinder, David's ears clamped in his headset, have stopped hearing and seeing their subjects as altogether human—as human, say, as themselves, and see them instead as . . well, subjects, raw material for their productions? That, at any rate, would explain how direct cinema, with all its pretensions to art and high seriousness, has here been reduced to a form of tabloid journalism, not to say a circus sideshow.

The Maysleses have let it be known that they love the Beales. "The truth couldn't possibly hurt them," said David at a New York Film Festival screening last fall, the implication being, first, that he has captured the truth and, second, that if he believed it would hurt the women, he wouldn't have made his film. Well, if my grip on things should one day become as uncertain as that of Edie Beale and I decide that it would be a good idea to take off my clothes in Times Square and do a tap dance, I hope that my friends will try to stop me rather than make a movie of the performance for my enjoyment, their profit and the public curiosity.

It's certain that many viewers will find "Grey Gardens" sadly affecting, as did—but perhaps some will be angered by It, too, as I was. The sagging flesh, the ludicrous poses, the prized and private recollections strewn about among the tins of cat food—everything is grist for that merciless camera. The sadness for mother and daughter turns to disgust at the brothers. ■