Digital Video magazine — January 2013
Birds of a Feather: Iconoclasts Albert Maysles and Iris Apfel Team on Documentary

“We are in the throes of making a portrait film of Iris Apfel in all her stylish splendor,” reads the Maysles Films web site, the online home of pioneering documentarian Albert Maysles. The notice comes with a link to a film trailer (see below), cut by New York-based editor Lynn True, featuring the fashion icon and self-declared “geriatric starlet,” now in her 91st year, in her trademark round, black glasses. “I think style is all attitude. Attitude, attitude, attitude,” Apfel declares at the beginning of the work-in-progress documentary, clearly in her element.

Along with his brother David, Maysles is one of the forerunners of cinéma vérité’s North American cousin, direct cinema, which relies on the handheld camera. The best-known collaborations from the brothers include the legendary Grey Gardens (1976), which documents the relationship of a reclusive mother and daughter living in a decaying East Hampton mansion, along with the 1970 Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter, and Salesman (1968), which was named to the National Film Registry in 1992.

Maysles was first drawn to film Apfel by a close-up photo that ran as a full page in the weekly New York Observer. “That face is really something special,” he says of the decision to begin filming Apfel despite having secured only partial funding for project. “You see that face of Iris’ and you’re immediately engaged. She is such a character. She’s in her nineties, full of sparkle and energy and love of life. She wants to be an eccentric, and it’s charming.” (Read more…)