The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005 / PHOTOS: RICHARD LACAYO
I caught an advance look at The Gates, a documentary about the 2005 Christo and Jeanne-Claude project in New York’s Central Park. It has its television premiere on HBO on Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 10 p.m. Then it’s repeated on various dates and times through March.
The credits on this film get complicated. Albert Maysles and his late brother David are credited as co-directors with cinematographer/editor Antonio Ferrera and editor Matthew Prinzing. But it’s very much a film with the Maysles stamp, that narrator-free cinema verite style that’s now so universal we forget how much of it can be traced back to them and their early films like Salesman and Gimme Shelter. And their connection to Christo and J-C — gee, I just noticed, that’s quite a messianic pairing of names there — goes back to a film the brothers made about the Valley Curtain project in Colorado in the early 1970s.
I first met the Maysles on the Cornell campus a few years later, when they came up to preview Grey Gardens, their documentary about the Beales, the phantasmagorical mother and daughter shut-ins. (Running into daughter Edie one night on a disco dance floor — she was wearing a headscarf and earmuffs — remains for me a cherished memory of Manhattan in the late ’70s. I’m not sure why.) The Maysles invited me to visit them in New York. Somewhat to their surprise, I think, I actually showed up at their door one day, and they were kind enough to let me watch them edit their next film. It turned out to be Running Fence, about the Christo-J.C. project that stretched a fabric barrier across 25 miles of rolling hills in northern California.
What I realized even then was that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a perfect Maysles subject. They’ve always insisted that the social processes involved in getting their work approved and built — all the bureaucratic hassles, community forums and press conferences — were an integral part of their art. And the Maysles love all those processes. What else after all is the whole middle section of Gimme Shelter about? The scenes where the Rolling Stones and their attorney Melvin Belli struggle to get permits for the outdoor concert that eventually ended up at Altamont are as crucial to the film as the concert segments. More crucial actually, since you hardly see any of the Altamont performances.
In The Gates there’s also a well connected lawyer, the eminent Theodore Kheel, who shepherds Christo and J.C. though the New York power structure in the same way that Belli works the phones in Gimme Shelter. We first see Kheel at a kind of launch party for The Gates in 2005. But the film then does a fade back to a much younger Kheel meeting Christo and J-C for the first time in his offices in the late 1970s, when the pair made their first abortive attempt to get The Gates approved. It’s the rare documentary that can dissolve back 25 years and still be showing you footage shot by its own creators, but the Maysles started following the Gates project that long ago. (David died in 1987; Albert, who’s now 81, went on to make many more films.)
The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005
The other thing that makes the Maysles style perfect for The Gates is what you could call their gift for quiet lyricism. They were always good at those moments of vagrant beauty that a lot of documentaries don’t have time for — think of any of the offhand shots of cats padding around in Grey Gardens — but which are essential to communicating the strange power, the sheer enigmatic pageantry, of The Gates. In their beckoning but impenetrable Other-ness, their aloofness from whatever meanings we would try to attach to them, The Gates always reminded me of that jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the one that “did not give of bird or bush/like nothing else in Tennessee.” They came down three years ago this week. The Gates — which ends with a deadpan funny New York joke — commemorates them in just the right way. It’s a work of art about a work of art.