Albert Maysles at the premiere of Simon Trevor's White Gold Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
On October 4, the morning before the world premiere of Steven Spielberg's Bridge Of Spies, starring Tom Hanks, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, Mark Rylance, Billy Magnussen and Eve Hewson (Bono and Ali's daughter), during the New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Maysles family will host a tribute to Albert Maysles.
Filmmakers Morgan Neville, Fabien Constant, Varon Bonicos and Guy Maddin, together with Gay Talese and Frédéric Boyer, sent a tribute when they heard the news about Albert's passing on March 5.
Iris Apfel at The Paris Theatre Iris premiere on Albert Maysles: "Oh, he was the greatest. I'm very lucky, very lucky." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
The event at Alice Tully Hall will include a selection of clips from the career of the master documentarian and his brother David. In 2014, the New York Film Festival presented the world premiere of Albert's Iris, his extraordinary portrait about the way Iris Apfel presents herself. His final collaboration In Transit, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.
New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones: “Al Maysles’s touch with the camera is as distinctive as Richter’s on the piano or Miles Davis’s with his horn. And his sensitivity to human energies is inseparable from his fierce love for the people he filmed - all those faces over all those years. Make that: for people, period. That love was with him to the very end. It was always great to see Al, to hang out with him. He was modest, thoughtful, and unfailingly generous, to young people in particular. In fact, he was so unassuming that it comes as a shock, still, to realize that he and his brother David were two of the people who actually opened up and expanded the art of cinema.”
I last saw Albert Maysles at the Museum of Modern Art's African Environmental Film Foundation White Gold premiere for Simon Trevor's documentary on the ivory poaching crisis. A great supporter of other filmmakers, the Maysles Documentary Center, a nonprofit organisation he founded in 2005, continues on.
Free tickets will be distributed on Sunday, at 9am in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall (1941 Broadway at 65th Street) on a first-come, first-served basis starting one hour prior to the event at 10am.