Two families and two films draw a line from the formative years of direct cinema to the most famous example of the style. With both productions, Albert Maysles is either partly or wholly responsible for the intuitive, pioneering camerawork, while three women of the Bouvier family are the subjects. Either their participation was peripheral, as with Jackie Kennedy Onassis in Primary (1960), or they gave themselves over in their entirety to the process of filming. The personalities and shared lifestyle of Edith Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale — Little Edie and Big Edie, respectively — made Grey Gardens (1975) the pop culture artifact that it is, with prequels, stage shows and a made-for-television film now part of the legend. But these women are also one of the reasons why the original Grey Gardens is a late-era accomplishment of what direct cinema had set out to be at the end of the 1950s.

While Primary did not invent the visual language, it certainly embellished it. This striking form of hand-held camerawork — enabled by the advancement of light-weight film technology, synchronous sound equipment and human innovation — became increasingly popular throughout its early development in North America and Europe. Whether the theoretical distinctions between direct cinema and cinéma vérité are necessary — when considering the similarities of the visual product — the former is usually referred to as the North American version of the latter, which is a convenience I will take advantage of. Using the pageantry of political campaigns, the Primary filmmakers transformed the charm of politicians at their most desperate into a marathon of balletic, pupil-dilating imagery. Amidst it all, the faces of John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis more than any draw the viewer’s eye as they campaign across Wisconsin for the Democratic nomination for the President of the United States. 

Primary was made by a cohort of North American and English filmmakers who were then known collectively as the Drew Associates. Led by Robert Drew, among the key filmmakers who shot and edited Primary were Albert Maysles, D. A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Terence Macartney-Filgate. Primary is as much a document of a defining political event as it is a production which perfectly utilized a developing film language which became so influential that its significance is almost lost in a haze of now-conventional cinematic techniques. Albert Maysles left the Drew Associates in 1961 to work with his brother, David, and over the next decade and a half they produced a number of films which can be used to define direct cinema, arguably peaking with Grey Gardens in 1975.

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Onassis, whose father was John Vernou Bouvier III, was part of an extended family which bore its share of American public figures who were well-known merely for the fortune of their relatives. The Beales of Grey Gardens were members of this elite social club, but the passage of time left them with no money and little in the way of supportive friends and family. The two women let their once lavish Grey Gardens estate fester, living amongst cats, racoons and rotting possessions. A shocking though illuminating detail is that when Onassis, Little Edie’s cousin and Big Edie’s niece, stepped in to assist after the Beales were threatened with eviction, bags of cat excrement had to be removed during the clean-up. The Maysles began their work on Grey Gardens after Onassis’ intervention. However, the film shows that its subjects, the younger in her fifties and the older in her seventies, continued to live in a home that many would consider uninhabitable.

Part of the reason why the comparison is necessary — between the two Edies and Onassis — is because this connection will forever follow the Beale women in plot synopses, reviews, features, academia and so on. Their familial ties and former lifestyles give Grey Gardens a narrative which otherwise would have depended solely on the women’s powerful presence, an artistic possibility I imagine would’ve still drawn in any curious filmmaker. But without this selling point, the casual viewer might not become so immediately interested if the film’s primary allure is its status as a direct cinema masterpiece and a moving portrait of two lost ordinary souls. In his crass but enthusiastic Criterion essay for Albert Maysles’ 2006 follow-up, The Beales of Grey Gardens, Michael Musto explains why he thinks Grey Gardens had the effect it did. “It [the film] appeals to the dark side of human nature, the one that likes to see people who have it all reduced to our level, or even lower… scare-tactic entertainment gives us some controlled fright and a chance to wallow in other people’s pain.”

Many writers have written about the Beales with nothing but respect and a genuine fondness. But there are those — such as Musto — who have discussed Grey Gardens for what it might actually be: a glorification of two people’s sorrow and degradation, veiled by the obvious artistic skill of the film and the charisma of its two subjects. This is a difficult position to take because it means speaking for two people who were supposedly cognizant enough to understand the risk of allowing people to come into their home and film them for public consumption. But the obvious facts about their situation — the semi-isolation, the squalor, the mild mania — are generally ignored as indicators of Little and Big Edie’s mental wellbeing. Such details of a person’s life would be key factors leading to a psychiatric diagnosis to the extent that if they were ignored by a medical professional, it would be an egregious and incompetent error. Instead, their personal and interpersonal behaviour is attributed to their eccentricity, which is of itself responsible for their iconic status. The Beales are undeniably likable and even admirable, having weathered their hardship for so long. But there is the sense that their objectively strange behaviour has been presented to viewers for cheap amusement.

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When the premise of a documentary relies on the erratic behaviour of its subjects, including their degradation, then the viewer has a responsibility to consider their own participation, as well as the intentions of the filmmakers. Walter Goodman’s 1976 piece for The New York Times, “Grey Gardens: Cinéma Verité or Sideshow?” (which is referenced in the made-for-television film from 2009), is clear about the fact that the Maysles and the Beales engaged in a legal agreement before shooting. There is no question of consent, so Goodman is right to probe the next question: to whom was it beneficial to publicly display “their [the Beales] weaknesses, peculiarities, touches of wackiness?” 

The obvious answer is the filmmakers. There is no avoiding the process by which artists — especially ones which rely explicitly on non-fiction forms — find and make use of real-life subjects to create a piece of work that they and others will think is of aesthetic and intellectual worth. But then again, there is little to suggest that the Maysles, as well as co-directors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, were engaging in outright exploitation. What comes across through Grey Gardens, and in subsequent interviews, is their compassion and, as some have argued, love towards their subjects. As is the case with storytelling, the intrinsic role of the Beales within the context of the film is that of tools for the filmmakers’ and the audience’s own reflections. However, in the 2001 Grey Gardens commentary (a discussion between the surviving filmmakers), they posit that the film shows “the aristocracy in decay,” an example of how the Beales’ vulnerability as film subjects can be easily side-lined in favour of an intellectualisation of their troubled reality. This is the inevitable risk that direct cinema — and similar forms of documentary — takes when making private lives public, especially when those lives are so clearly open to ridicule and the wrong kind of engagement.

Similar judgements can be made of other direct cinema works, particularly Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967). The film is a document of the daily lives of the inmates and staff of Bridgewater State Hospital, a prison for the criminally insane. The extremity of the situation is far from the ostensibly light-hearted nature of Grey Gardens, and the same arguments can be made concerning the vulnerability of the subjects in Wiseman’s production. The justification for its existence, however, lies in the film’s political and social purpose. Showing the disturbingly poor treatment of the inmates through their meticulous footage warrants the intrusive nature of direct cinema. By revealing the failures of an American institution, Titicut Follies provides proof of a complex injustice, where state-led humanity is necessary for treating people who are unable to comprehend the horror of their crimes. Grey Gardens, in comparison, has no such purpose.  

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Charles Michener asks in his 1975 Film Comment review of Grey Gardens, “How much are the filmmakers manipulating, exploiting their subjects? And how much are the subjects manipulating, exploiting them?” It’s true that the Beales are constantly performing, and their theatrically is sometimes so natural that it’s almost as if the Maysles had given them another chance to live out their past lives as American socialites. Michener’s point astutely transfers the means of power from the filmmakers to their subjects, and I have considered that my issue with Grey Gardens might stem from discomfort at my own unfair opinions of the Beales, at having judged them with the same insensitivity that I am criticising. Predictably, my guilt is the product of having a great appreciation of the film itself. The utter sadness of Little and Big Edie’s story is why Grey Gardens is so moving — direct cinema allowed this story to be explored with a level of intimacy previously unavailable. But, paradoxically, this is also the cause of the guilt that stains the luxury of watching, from the comfort of my own situation, two people for whom the cruelty of life is reflected in everything but the warmth of Little Edie’s smile.

Mark Seneviratne (@sene_mark) is a data analyst for an arts funding organisation and is based in Manchester, UK. He also writes for The State of the Arts and Film Inquiry, and will have a short story published for the first time in Not One of Us come October 2020. At university, he thought having a Michael Haneke poster made him edgy.