The end of Citizen Kane, maybe the most famous movie so far, takes place in an enormous hollow-sounding room in the character's Florida castle. The place is choked with the things Kane collected during his tumultuous life – statues, paintings, furniture, still unopened packing crates.
It's an overwhelming collection of stuff, and it's a visual I kept thinking about all through Iris, Albert Maysles's new film about an icon of style in New York.
The documentary's subject, Iris Apfel, is a fixture in the New York fashion scene. Now 93 years old, she's in constant motion. She goes to fashion shows; she teaches classes with students visiting from the University of Texas; she dotes on her husband who celebrates his 100th birthday during the film; she speaks at museums and she shows off her stuff.
Apfel is famous for her personal style – clothes of wild, colorful patterns – and so much heavy costume jewelry you wonder that this wisp of a person doesn't topple over from the sheer weight of huge necklaces wound around and around her tiny neck and bulky lines of bracelets running up her arms.
When Apfel is at home – in Manhattan or Long Island or Palm Beach – the sheer amount of things she's collected numbs the brain. Apfel is rich, very rich. If she were poor and amassed so much stuff, she'd be called a hoarder, but in her circumstances, Iris is a collector, and a phenomenon in her chic and toney world. Museum directors, designers, other collectors and people who know fashion, fawn over her, and to the eye of the camera, she's entirely comfortable living at the center of adulation.
She's also genuinely accomplished. Apfel has helped decorate interior spaces all over the country, including the White House under a number of presidents. But a counter thought persists – is Iris Apfel a figure of real substance or, amid her acres of art objects, does she represent that side of New York culture that's more narcissistic and frivolous than it is perceptive and profound?
Iris is the last film by the remarkable Albert Maysles, who recently died at the age of 88. He began his career in the late 1950s, and with his brother David, along with Richard Leacock, Donn Pennebaker and Robert Drew, Maysles developed a style of observational filmmaking they called "direct cinema." It meant that they would observe and film life as it unfolded. They did no interviews; they set up no scenes. Their goal was to be unobtrusive.
The idea that one can film people without affecting what's going on is an illusion, but these filmmakers have done stunning work. Albert and David Maysles made Salesman about bible salesmen, Gimme Shelter about the Rolling Stones and the terrible Altamount concert in California. The Maysles also made Grey Gardens, with the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy in their rotting mansion, and several films with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists famous for wrapping things like trees and coastlines. Like Iris, these films neither investigate a subject nor come to any conclusion or judgment. They go for the immediate experience rather than background. Viewers may judge the Bible salesmen or Mick Jagger, but the films themselves hold back. They watch; they observe.
David Maysles died in 1987, but working alone Albert Maysles has developed a fascinating quality in his documentaries. He starts with images designed to annoy and provoke, but then the movie slowly leads you around to understanding something either about the subject or about yourself, sometimes both.
However you react to Iris, Albert Maysles has put Iris Apfel at the center of a movie that won't let you disengage. Yes, those young people may condescend to Iris as if she were just a cute curiosity, but you can also see how they're dumbfounded by her great age and energy, and don't know how to treat her.
Yes, Iris is beyond self-indulgent, but look at those magnificent textiles she's collected, and this woman's love for things made by human beings.
