Event

Three Artist Films with Albert Maysles

Christo's Valley Curtain
by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Ellen Giffard
USA, 1973, 28 minutes, digital projection

Nominated for an Academy Award, Valley Curtain celebrates the Bulgarian-born artist's dramatic hanging of a huge orange curtain between two Colorado mountains. Since the late 1950s, Christo's large-scale temporary works of art have helped change our perception of art and society. Valley Curtain is the permanent record of a project that rocked the artistic community and turned skeptical iron-workers into astonished fans. Conceived and financed by Christo and his wife and partner Jeanne-Claude, this was no ordinary curtain. Made of nine tons of orange nylon polymide fabric, it stretched a full quarter-mile and was suspended from four steel cables 365 feet above Rifle Gap, Colorado (pop. 2,150). The workers who hung the curtain across the valley discovered a new form of art.

Anastasia
by Albert and David Maysles
USA, 1962, 8 minutes, digital projection

An early Maysles Bros. "work for hire" for the NBC network news program Update. Produced at the height of the Cold War by acclaimed screenwriter Bo Goldman, the subject is one Anastasia Stevens, an American dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet.

Salvador Dali's Fantastic Dream
by Albert and David Maysles
USA, 1966, 5 minutes, digital projection

Produced by 20th Century Fox, this Maysles Brothers short was intended to help promote the release of Disney's Fantastic Voyage (1966) for which Salvador Dali was artistic consultant. Shot in and around New York, the film features a cameo by a bikini clad Raquel Welch, star of Fantastic Voyage and Dali's muse for a series of portraits of