ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes documentary films constructed as offbeat portraits of eccentric individuals, or “anticelebrities,” 1 with a particular focus on the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975) and Chris Smith and Sarah Price’s American Movie (1999). The fascination these films engender is rooted in a set of mismatched gazes and desires among filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. Earlier celebrity portrait films in the Direct Cinema tradition were premised upon the inherent interest to the public of their subjects—the lives of the famous conveyed with the pretense of neutral observation that characterized the movement. In anticelebrity portraits like these, the interest is constructed by the awkward interactions between subjects and filmmakers. These relations are expressed through a set of gazes that instantiate mis-recognition: faulty identifications, mutually incompatible forms of need, and discomfiting oscillations between intimacy and distance.
