![]() But by choosing simply “Iris” and all the person that Iris Apfels entails, Maysles has afforded himself the freedom to ramble through her life and work, to jump around in time, to pull in ideas about style, fashion, individuality, aging, and mortality. This may seem obvious, but Maysles’s movie could have taken many different routes-perhaps a more process-oriented film about building the initial 2005 exhibition or the launch of her clothing line (like The Gates), or a more time-delimited piece, following Iris over a proscribed period (like What ’ s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A or Gimme Shelter). Iris benefits much from Maylses having chosen Iris Apfels as his subject. She jokes in the film about being a ninety-year-old “ It Girl,” and between a teaching gig with UT Austin, constant interviews, public appearances, photo shoots, design consulting, and selling her own line of accessories, Ms. Rara Avis: The Irreverent Iris Apfel, toured the U.S. Her outsized personal style, a riotous blend of fabrics, colors, patterns, and assorted bric-a-brac, took center stage in 2005 when a planned Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion show fell through and Iris pulled from her personal collection to save the day. ![]() ![]() This led to a slew of interior design projects over the course of the company’s 40-plus year lifespan, including work in the White House for nine different presidents. We learn about Iris’s professional life, which kicked into gear after marrying Carl in 1948 and founding with him the textile importing firm Old World Weavers two years later. We also hear from her circle: husband Carl, various curators, designers, journalists -even a nebbishy nephew worried his aunt works too hard pops up on-screen every now and again. We are told much from Iris herself, both in interview and in situ addressing Al’s camera with a warm familiarity. Iris, a genial portrait of nonagenarian fashion icon Iris Apfel, “tells” us almost as much about its subject as it “shows” (to use a crude distinction often operative in documentary that implicitly places higher value on the latter). It’s even a step away from later, less discussed works like Letting Go: A Hospice Journey (1996), LaLee ’ s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2001), or The Gates (2007), all of which exhibit various evolutions from the legacy films Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens (1976), each of which, in its own way, tussled with the now hallowed purism attributed to Direct Cinema. While it doesn’t descend to the banality of other fashion-concerned documentaries like The September Issue, Iris displays a different kind of filmmaking than we have come to expect from Al Maysles, who here takes his first solo credit as a director since a short made in 1961. These are all elements that would have been verboten in the wild olden days when the Drew Associates gang was roving around with their handheld cameras. In it, we can see the influence of the intervening years on his practice-we can see it in the inclusion of a flashy graphic montage in talking heads interviews with impressively titled folks sounding off on the singularity of the subject’s artistic practice in an overall architecture that allows for the doling out of biographical and chronological information neatly. It’s now 45 years since Gimme Shelter, and the recently departed Albert Maysles has a new documentary called Iris. Facts have value in nonfiction filmmaking, but it’s surprising how often they obscure the truth of things. Perhaps, for good measure, a soupçon of Rashomon-style mystery that’s gradually chiseled down to make way for the establishment of a comforting master narrative. A film of “this then this then this” reportage and interviews. If the Maysles’ now legendary 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter were released today, how would it be received? Would 21st century audiences and critics, grown accustomed to nonfiction filmmaking obsessed with dotting i’s and crossing t’s, soak up the film’s hazy ambiguities? Or would they ask that the film do more, and pick at all its lingering questions: Who was the man who was stabbed? Who was the Hell’s Angel who stabbed him? What were their lives like? What happened after? Was there a trial? (And, finally, where’s the petition to stop rock violence?) One can imagine the dictates of contemporary mainstream documentary filmmaking forcing a very different kind of Gimme Shelter from the same material, one that downplays the original’s unhurried documenting of place, interrogation of the celebrity icon, and clear-eyed capturing of that moment when the dream of the sixties inexorably gave away to the blankly hungover seventies, in favor of something more mundane.
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