Fr. 23.90

Grey Gardens

English · Paperback / Softback

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Description

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The Maysles brothers'' Grey Gardens (1975) is one of the most important documentary films of the post-war period. Since its release, the film, which chronicles the everyday lives of two eccentric upper-class women, Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother Edith, 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. In his afterword for this new edition, Matthew Tinkcom reconsiders the film fifty years after its release, in the context of the Mayles'' subsequent film-making and the continuing cult status of Grey Gardens eccentric stars. ...

About the author

Matthew Tinkcom is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture and Technology and Affiliate Faculty of English at Georgetown University, USA. He is the author of Working Like a Homosexual: Camp: Capital, Cinema and Grey Gardens, co-editor of Key Frames: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies as well as articles that have appeared in Cinema Journal, South Atlantic Quarterly and collections from Duke University Press and the British Film Institute. He has served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar and Director of the Program in American Studies.

Product details

Authors Matthew Tinkcom
Publisher British Film Institute
 
Languages English
Product format Paperback / Softback
Released 04.09.2025
 
EAN 9781839029295
ISBN 978-1-83902-929-5
No. of pages 96
Dimensions 134 mm x 186 mm x 12 mm
Series BFI Film Classics
Subjects Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet

PERFORMING ARTS / General, Films, cinema, Documentary films, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / General, Film Theory & Criticism, Film history, theory or criticism, Film guides and reviews, Film Guides & Reviews

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