Albert Maysles on Gimme Shelter

Chicago Tribune, October 199?

“I had no idea that it was going to be what they called a ‘bummer.’ No idea whatsoever. But you know, we make our films in a serendipitous fashion. In serendipity you rely on the process of discovery. We were quite content to rely on the good possibilities of finding something interesting in discovering it as it took place.”

Once again Albert Maysles finds himself discussing GIMME SHELTER, the 1970 documentary he directed with his late brother David and their partner Charlotte Zwerin that immortalized the disastrous events at the Rolling Stones’ 1969 free concert at Altamont Speedway.

In the late 1960s, the Maysles Brothers spearheaded a wave of documentary filmmakers that included D.A. Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock, “cinema verité” (“cinema truth”) pioneers who eschewed the spit & polish of written drama to depict raw, unvarnished reality. The Maysles called their style “direct cinema,” reflecting their belief in the cinema’s untapped powers of immediacy.

Through films like 1969’s SALESMAN, a penetrating slice of the lives of four door-to-door Bible salesmen, and 1976’s GREY GARDENS, a haunting portrait of Jackie Onassis’s eccentric Aunt Edith Bouvier Beale and her equally off-center daughter Edie, Albert and David Maysles delivered a working manifesto for a more truthful style of filmmaking. But GIMME SHELTER may prove to be the most influential of all.

Newly restored from the original camera negative for its 30th anniversary, GIMME SHELTER now sports a surround stereo soundtrack and previously unseen footage. The forthcoming Criterion Collection DVD release additionally boasts essays, filmmakers commentary, 90 minutes of KSAN’s post-Altamont radio broadcast, and a half dozen previously unreleased live performances by the Stones.

But what remains unaltered is the palpable sense of an ideal having passed its sell-by date. The Stones’ ill-informed decision to enlist the Hells Angels as a “security force” culminated in the stabbing death of 19 year-old Meredith Hunter, who was intercepted by an Angel as he rushed the stage, pistol in hand. The murder was captured on film, and for many GIMME SHELTER is an epitaph for the Woodstock generation, the tombstone for the failed promises of the summer of love.

“Most people responding to the film, whether they’re critics or just average viewgoers, feel that it put a mark on the end of the decade. And the correct one,” says Maysles today. “In Woodstock, everything came up roses. But it wasn’t that way. I was at Woodstock, and it wasn’t near as bad as it was at Altamont, but four or five deaths occurred there. People wallowed in mud.” But what showed up in the film, he says: “was one interview after another (where) all the rhetorical questions were asked: “Isn’t it wonderful? Aren’t we great, we’re the flower generation.”

“My god, anyone with any kind of perception making that film would have observed what a disaster the drug scene was. There must have been a number of people from Woodstock that never recovered from the LSD. There were some serious things going on in Woodstock, but the filmmakers made it look as though everything was rosey-dosey. You know, “Oh, aren’t we all so great, having a great time, without any consequences.”

Even so, for Maysles the picture isn’t drawn in black & white. Asked whether he felt the events of Altamont were inevitable, he says “We knew the music was good because the night before we started we went to Baltimore and attended a concert of the Stones and said ‘Oh yeah, the music is great, they’re gonna be interesting.’ But we wanted to make something more than a concert film, and in a truly serendipitous fashion we felt `Don’t worry, something will be interesting.’ And had it turned out all very happy, but had made an interesting film, we would have been just as happy. Actually even more happy. It just happened to go the other way.”

But some critics accused the Maysles of being opportunistic about the tragedy, or worse yet, having had a hand in orchestrating it. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kale famously accused: “If events are created to be photographed, is the movie that records them a documentary, or does it function in a twilight zone?”

“Of what? She’s full of baloney” is Maysles rankled reply. “Obviously Pauline never got fact checked for that article. Whole pieces were totally fraudulent. Speaking of serendipity, how could you possibly have a more fortuitous outcome than have the Rolling Stones with their lyrics, “Sympathy For The Devil” and so forth, to accompany the events that took place? Totally fortuitous. I wouldn’t for a moment claim, the way some claimed at that time and still do, that the Stones contributed to the violence by the nature of the lyrics or whatever. Or their personalities. I don’t go for that, I think it was just a coincidence.”

The Stones’ own responsibility, or lack of it, is the crux of the argument fuelling GIMME SHELTER’s moral controversy. In the film, Jagger is photographed as he watches the footage of the stabbing, and his enigmatic response comes off like the counterculture’s version of CITIZEN KANE’s “Rosebud.”

To presume to understand Jagger’s reaction is to try to capture a vapor, but regardless of one’s bias, it’s hard to escape the sense that the lines were already forming in the rock star’s youthful face. The Stones come off looking like children first confronted with a sense of their own mortality, the notion that they aren’t indestructible after all. A sobering realization for anyone, and one that for rock’s designated bad boys registers like a lava flow recorded as it hardens into pumice.

It’s that final, enigmatic freeze-fame of Jagger that still haunts, an impenetrably blank response to horror that is all the more troubling in its ambiguity. “Because he was so hard to read we couldn’t really come out with a reading except to present what we saw,” Maysles says. “As I was filming him, I don’t think that we’d missed anything that would have been more revealing. I wish it were more revealing, but it just didn’t happen.”

But that hasn’t stopped critics and admirers alike from projecting their own agendas on the film, which has been accused of both letting the Stones off the hook, and making them all-too convenient fall guys for the death of a dream. But ultimately, that unwillingness to point fingers may be the film’s greatest strength. Says Maysles, “I think that it’s very dangerous to read into people’s behaviors, their motivations…leave that to psychiatrists, who usually bungle that.”

The Maysles, who before turning to filmmaking received degrees in psychology, possessed the wisdom to present the truth as they saw it, unadorned and without judgement. “My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a postal clerk. My brother and I were taught to be modest and put things in a proper perspective, and it served us well.”