Albert Maysles: a film-maker who had an artist's sense of what was important

The late director was – despite his modesty – much more than just a simple technician; in Grey Gardens, he and his brother David created one of the great American works of art

Before reality TV became a cornerstone of popular culture, and perhaps even before direct cinema and cinéma vérité were widely understood, Albert and David Maysles had created their masterpieces of documentary movie-making. Albert (who yesterday died at the age of 88; David died of a stroke in 1987 at 55) pioneered the art of the cameraman being the unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall in documentary. Which is to say: his camera was unobtrusive only as far as the documentary subject was concerned. The audience watching the finished product would be highly conscious of the film-maker with his camera, observing, selecting, intervening.

The Maysles’ movie Salesman (1969) was a study of salesmen going door-to-door in the US, selling Bibles, and this hard-hitting study forms a kind of link – though perhaps not exactly a missing link – between Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross. The brutally plain capitalist imperative in selling is in contradistinction to the rejection of money and materialism inherent in Christianity. Selling and the service economy is the purest example of the American ideal of making something of yourself, lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, without any primary source material other than yourself and your self-belief. The Maysles’ movie Salesman was to be a locus classicus in this field, freighted with implied irony and tragedy.

Related: Albert Maysles: Stones, socialites and monsters

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