Millenium Festival: everything is for sale

(Gimme Shelter)

In collaboration with Cinematek and Flagey, the fifth edition of the Millenium Festival is devoting a retrospective to the brothers David and Albert Maysles. The godfathers of direct cinema are perhaps best known for Gimme Shelter, their documentary about the Rolling Stones.

The Millenium Festival is a documentary film festival that is faring extremely well. It is screening more than one hundred films from more than fifty different countries this year. The fifth edition’s programme focuses on the theme “Everything Is for Sale”, inspired by the disconcerting trend that everything is becoming a commodity, even people and ideals. Many of the documentaries on the programme highlight the less attractive – or even downright cruel and unjust – facets of world trade. Critical and/or socially committed documentaries that find their way to audiences via cinemas or DVD rather than on television are becoming increasingly prevalent.
Albert Maysles is overjoyed by this trend. “The democratisation of documentaries makes me happy. Unfortunately, however, I am too busy with my own documentaries to see as many as I should. But the fact that they’re getting made is great,” he told The Guardian two years ago. Retirement has not even crossed his mind, despite being 86 years old and having lost his brother and closest collaborator David Mayles. “There are still too many documentaries to make. Where there are people, there are stories – and I want to tell them.” His very first story was about psychiatric patients in Russia, in 1955. Maysles later filmed JF Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Salvador Dalí, Fidel Castro, Truman Capote, The Beatles, and the Dalai Lama.

Real people
The brothers pioneered direct cinema, the Anglo-American counterpoint to cinéma vérité. Documentaries in this style do not rely on commentary or interviews; the images tell the whole story. Lighter cameras and audio equipment enable the filmmakers to capture spontaneous events or to follow their subjects day in day out. The documentary filmmaker endeavours to influence the situation as little as possible.

(Grey Gardens)

In December 1969, Mayles did not stop filming when a gang of Hells Angels murdered the black teenager Meredith Hunter during a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California. The infamous Gimme Shelter is only one of the documentaries that will be screened at Flagey. What’s happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964) offered a fresh, humorous take on the incredible reaction to The Beatles during their February 1964 tour of the United States. Showman (1963) follows Joseph Levine, one of the biggest producers in American cinema, during the release of Two Women, a film starring Sophia Loren. There will also be a compilation of the brothers’ short films in which they attempt to make mythical artists like Yoko Ono, Marlon Brando, Christo, Muhammad Ali, and Orson Welles back into real people by focusing on details, events backstage, and free time. Salesman (1968), follows four travelling salesmen who go door-to-door with the Bible: “the world’s bestselling book”. Which dovetails nicely with the theme of the Millenium Festival: everything is for sale.

Millenium: International Documentary Film Festival • 31/5 > 9/6, www.festivalmillenium.org
Retrospective Flagey • 1 > 8/6, Cinematek, www.cinematek.be