FILM CLASSICS MATTHEW TINKCOMGrey Gardens ‘The Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975) is one of the most important documentary films of the past thirty years. In the past decade the film has gained the status of cult classic, inspiring both a Broadway musical and a 2009 HBO feature film. In this first single volume study of the film, Matthew Tinkcom argues that Grey Gardens reshaped documentary cinema by moving the non- fiction camera to the heart of the household, a private space into which film- makers had seldom previously ventured. Already well-established figures in the ‘direct cinema’ movement of the 1960s (with their previous films, including Salesman and Gimme Shelter), the brothers’ visual record of a summer spent in the Beale household demonstrated that the private lives of their subjects were rich materials for the camera By the time the film-makers appeared on their front porch, the film's two central figures, ‘Big Edie’ Beale and her daughter ‘Little Edie’, had been living for two decades in near-poverty in their beach-side East Hampton mansion (the ‘Grey Gardens’ of the title). Close relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by the early 1970s the Beales had lost much of their personal wealth and their everyday lives had descended into a state of barely-controlled squalor. However, as the film-makers discovered, the women were hardly victims of their poverty; rather they saw themselves as artists who were willing to make seemingly any sacrifice for their singing and dancing talents. When the Edies perform for the camera, audiences are challenged by the question of how much anyone would be willing to give up in order to lead a life of eccentric pleasure. Tinkcom argues that the film is one of the first to combine documentary with the conventions of fiction film melodrama, and that the film's appeal arrives in the rich melodramatic dimensions of the Beales’ everyday lives in which they argue, dress up, flirt, laugh, sing, dance and reminisce about their experiences in New York's social elite in the first half of the twentieth century. MATTHEW TINKCOM is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture and Technology at Georgetown University, USA. He is the author of Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (2002) and co-editor of Key Frames: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies (2003). He is currently working on a book about the digital moving image and its relation to online queer discursive communities remy $980 1-88457-395-0 oMrargae's73950 in china ‘A BF book published by Palgrave MacmillanBFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author's personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: lagnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry. Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating, insights into the evolution of cinema.” Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William PB, Germano, The Cooper L the Advancement of Science and Art Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Dana Polan, Ni on for Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Au: Lee Grieveson, Univers Nick James, Editor, College London t & Sound B. Ruby Rich, Un Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell UniversityMatthew Tinkcom A BF book published by Palgrave MacmillanIn Memory of Michael Ragussis © Matthew Tinkcorn 201 I rights reserved Na reproduction, copy or ta nay be made snthout wntten permission No portion ofthis pulliction m comedic: tyansmitred save orth written pemmussion or in accordance with the p x pyrig Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limite: Designs and Patents ith the Copyzight, Designs and Patents A First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on hehalt of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Su warw bfi org.uk ‘There's mare ta discover about film and television thrau; ‘cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources Macmillan Publishers Limited. x ingetcke, Hampshire RG fenise, New York, NY panies and bas companies (® aye registered trademarks ze Maclin He UKs engi England, oanponysutnber 735998, of ound Nacmitlan inthe U8 ib dvsion of St Martins Press LLG, US ith Palgrave Mactan isthe global impr of the abo ani representatives thfougnout the worl Palgrave ana Macril tthe Ur ted Seas, she Jon, Eat ind other count Series text design: ketchup’! Images fram Grey Gardens, @ Portrait Films, brian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey ig and made from fully managed and spstained r crm to the per suitable for recye Legging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected nly of engin Contents Introduction 1 ‘We Belong Together’; Grey Gardens Aelodrama as Non-Fiction in 2 ‘The Revolutionary Costume’: Little Edie and Fashion 3°TF you can't get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead!": Direct Cinema and the Problem of Seduction Conclusion: ‘I'm pulverized by this latest thing’: Grey Gardens and its Lives Notes Credits “I 62 84 3 94Introduction made Grey Cardens in order to get some food for my mother little Edie Beale In early February of 1954, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale sent a telegram from Easthampton, New York, to her brother, John Vernou Bouvier TH, in New York City, It read: STILL WAITING FOR MY MONTHI ECK. SEND IMMEDIATELY. URGENT, TERRIBLY COLD AND DANGEROUS HERE FOR ME; MUST ARRANGE TO COME O CITY... PLEASE ACT [MMEDIATELY; THIS [S MY SEVENTH WINTER HERE PLEASE UNDERSTAND, EDITH John Bouvier or ‘Black Jack’, as Mrs Beale’s brother was known within the family, was the father of future US first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and was the trustee for Edith Beale’s inheritance from the Wall Street law firm of Bouvier and Beale, Edith Beale ~ or ‘Big Edie’, as she came to be known — had, since her separation from her husband in the early 1930s, relied upon the Proceeds of the Bouvier family trust to maintain her household in Easthampton, The urgency of her message - particularly the fact that it was by then her seventh year living in the family’s summer house at Grey Gardens ~ was probably borne of the fact that she was Supporting not only herself but also her unmarried daughter. Her (only) daughter, also named Edith and nicknamed ‘Little Edie’, had lived with her since 1952 after a modelling career in New York had, under circumstances that are still unclear, come to an end, at which point she had returned to live with her mother on Long Island, Although it remains unknown whether Edith Ewing Beale received any immediate aid from her brother in response to hertelegram, what is known is that the situation would not improve for nearly another twenty years. In 1972, the modest financial circumstances to which the two women had become accustomed became known to the Suffolk County Health Department and, in an event that would receive widespread newspaper and television coverage, their home was deemed uninhabitable; only after their relative, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, intervened and underwrote the cleaning and partial renovation of the house, were they allowed to remain there. Although the help that Onassis provided allowed the women to stay in the house for several more years, it hardly altered their circumstances beyond the genteel - and extreme ~ poverty that they had come to know. ‘The financial conditions that led the Beales to the situation in which they found themselves living for nearly four decades would probably be of little interest to anyone beyond devotees of the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis were it not for the fact that they became the subjects of a film that has come to inhabit a special place in the visual culture of the United States in the 1970s and in the history of the documentary film, Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens. Filmed over the course of six weeks late in the summer of 1973 and released in 1975, the film has achieved a cule status among its audience; further, it has been the sponsoring text for a number of productions, inchnding a subsequent documentary release by Albert Maysles (The Beales of Grey Gardens, 2006), an off-Broadway play, a Broadway musical, a 2009 feature fiction film made for the HBO cable channel that featured actresses Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, a documentary about the making of the original film, Liliana Greenfield-Sanders’ Ghosts of Grey Gardens, as well as any number of drag performances, fashion designs by such figures as John Bartlett, Marc Jacobs and Todd Oldham, websites, blogs, fan publications and art. Clearly, the danger that Big Fdie telegraphed to her brother so long ago has taken hold within the imaginations of the many audiences for Grey Garden! What, though, is the appeal of this film? Why does this ninety- five-minute cinematic portrait of a mother and daughter talking, cating, listening to music, discussing family photographs, feeding their many pets and bickering over events that had occurred decades previously fascinate its viewers? Even within the Ma: ysles brothers” substantial oeuvre of documentary, on, as the preferred to call it, ‘direct cinema’, which includes such canonical titles as What's Happening! The Beatles in America (1964), Salesman (1968) and Ginune Shelter (1970), Grey Gardens has come to have a unique status asa film that altered the possibilities of the documentary image. It did so by allowing the n . fiction film to organize its materials through two previously unexamined aspects of everyday life: first, the psychodynamics of the family ~ in particular, the bond between mother and daughter ~ and, second, the role of fantasy in femininity and glamour, not least in fashion culture. Further, it introduced a particular relation between film-maker and photographic subject thar can only be called a seduction, whereby the person being photographed ~ in this case, Little Edie Beale ~ woos and courts David Maysles, the brother responsible for the film's soundtrack. While other projects in the moving-image culture of the period had also inaugurated the documentary into similar concerns not least the films of Andy Warhol in the 1960s, the performance : films of Shirley Clarke, such as The Connection (1962) and Portrait of Jason (1967), and the US public television series, Az American Family (which aired in the year of Grey Gardens" production), the images and sounds of Big Edie and Little Edie brought these three fascinations together in a way that remains still pertinent to the film's audience after over thirty years. Indeed, it is remarkable that Grey Gardens has endured and its fascinations have become even more pronounced since its original release, particularly in the past decade. This in part can be explained asa result of new distribution modes for the film — the VHS tape. DVD, cable and satellite channels, web-facilitated commentary ~all make the film available to new audiences. This fact, though, fails ¢o address the appeal of the film’s narrative and protagonists, and worth noting is that the Maysleses crafted Grey Gardens with immense care