Grey Gardens, People Get Ready, and A Life’s Work

So having thought long and hard about what makes Gimme Shelter such a great film, this led me to thinking about another Maysles film, Grey Gardens, and what makes that so exceptional. I’ve written about Grey Gardens here and on Extra Criticum, but let me just lift a comment I wrote on the E.C. post.

“The first time I saw Grey Gardens it made me very uncomfortable. I thought the Maysles were exploiting mental illness. Then I watched it again years later and I didn’t see mental illness but instead a couple of wonderful eccentrics caught in a relationship neither could (or would, if they could, I suspect) get out of. I saw a lot of my relationship with my parents in this film–the orneriness, the battle of wills, and the love, difficult love, too. The third time I saw it I found them to be very funny; I wasn’t laughing at them, but most definitely with them. One of my favorite moments on film is when Big Edie gets a call on her birthday, and she says to caller, who is singing Happy Birthday to her, ‘Are you going to sing the whole thing, Dear?’ You can’t script it.

I think what makes this film so powerful for me is that it can be viewed through all these lenses, and more. It communicates more like a poem than a narrative.”

What does this have to do with A Life’s Work? The shapeshifting quality of Grey Gardens reminds me of something Robert Darden said about People Get Ready, the classic gospel song written by Curtis Mayfield. No coincidence that Robert titled his excellent book, People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music.

… [in black gospel music] there’s messages revealed to people at different times, just like people talk about the Bible being a gradual revelation as people are more able to understand it, as they get sophisticated from baby Christians to full Christians. What they can handle is revealed to them. Maybe the songs that I heard just for the beat in the old days has something else that it’s telling me that I’m now, just now, ready to hear. People Get Ready continues to move me in any version. When I hear People Get Ready, there is something in that song that speaks to me.  And I don’t know what itch it’s scratching and I don’t know what it means but on that day it made me stop.

This is another thing great art does. It speaks to different people in different ways, and if the artist is lucky, he or she will have created something that speaks to one person throughout his/her life in different ways at different times. I suspect you can’t plan on doing that. The best you can do is hope it happens.

Here’s Curtis Mayfield.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOXmaSCt4ZE[/youtube]