2008 Peabody Award Winner
In 1979, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed one of the largest public art installations in history: a "golden river" of 7,503 fabric-paneled gates in Central Park. Transcending controversy, it was finally completed in 2005. Antonio Ferrera and
Albert Maysles' film chronicles the artists' twenty-six year commitment to transform the winter darkness of the iconic park into a garden of light and color. Weaving together archival interviews with committees, politicians and on-site conversations with visitors, the film ultimately poses the question: what is art?In 1980 David and Albert Maysles began filming Christo and Jeanne-Claude as they proposed The Gates project to the City of New York. The recording of these debates and discussions continued until the project was declined one year later in 1981 and the footage was vaulted uncut for 23 years.
In 2004 Mayor Michael Bloomberg granted Christo and Jeanne-Claude permission to realize their vision of transforming Central Park into a public exhibition that would attract over four million visitors over two weeks. The production brought together the best of New York City's film community resulting in a chronicle of two visionary artists, a mayor and patron of the arts, and a public divided over the relevance or definition of art.
The Gates film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival as the Gala screening.
Filmmaker Biographies
Antonio Ferrera
A native of Schenectady, NY Antonio Ferrera is an independent filmmaker. The Gates is Mr. Ferrera's first feature length film as director. He conceived, produced and co-directed With The Filmmaker: Portraits by Albert Maysles, featuring half-hour portraits of Robert Duvall, Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, and Wes Anderson for the IFC channel. Before working with Maysles, Ferrera co-directed and shot Voices of Cabrini, which follows the re-development of Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project and the ensuing effects of displacement on the African-American community as people are uprooted from their homes and community.
Ferrera produced the short film for Bill Moyers Now, entitled Before I Leave, a ten-minute human monologue and meditation on remembrance, memory, and death. Other films of note include, It's an Adventure, a documentary about director Wes Anderson with Bill Murray, working in Rome on Wes Anderson's film A Life Aquatic and Masada: Live at Tonic 1999 capturing acclaimed multi-instrumentalist John Zorn in concert.
Antonio is currently working on: a series called As Seen By..., a film called New York City Symphony Film and a film about energy.
Albert Maysles
"... the dean of documentary filmmakers, Albert Maysles."
-The New York Times, May 6, 2002
Albert Maysles is a pioneer of Direct Cinema who, with his brother David were the first to make nonfiction feature films (Gimme Shelter, Salesman, Grey Gardens) where the drama of life unfolds as is without scripts, sets, interviews or narration. His first film, Psychiatry In Russia (1955) he made in transition from psychologist to documentary filmmaker. In 1960 he served as co-filmmaker of Primary. His 36 films include What's Happening? The Beatles In The USA (1964), five films of the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1972 to 1995), and a sixth, The Gates (2007), Meet Marlon Brando (1965) and three documentaries for HBO. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1965), a Peabody, an Emmy, five Lifetime Achievement Awards, the award for best cinematography at Sundance (2002) for Lalee's Kin which was also nominated in 2001 for an Academy Award and the Columbia Dupont Award (2004). In 1999 Eastman Kodak saluted him as one of the 100 world's finest cinematographers.
Featured Reviews
By Roger Ebert
Nov 2, 2007
Ebert Rating
Many people missed the point of "The Gates," those 7,500 frames flowing with orange curtains that were installed along the pathways of Central Park in 2005. The point was not to look at them, but to use them, to walk through them and under them. One New York park board member, opposed to the proposal by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, said the addition of "The Gates" to the park "would be like Picasso painting 'Guernica' on top of 'The Last Supper,' " demonstrating that he did not grasp the difference between a painting and a frame. He might have saved himself embarrassment by consulting A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, the most important architect alive, who would have had something to say about gates, entrances, exits, doors, portals and views.
Entrances have everything to do with what we feel about what we are entering. All buildings until the birth of modern architecture knew this, and you can see it in church doors, temple gates, city walls, shop entrances and cottage doorsteps. Now the doors of a modern building are likely to be a continuation of the same hostile slab of glass or steel that makes the rest of the building sterile and aloof. There will be no place to rest for a moment, inside or out, and no shelf to rest a burden on, and no decorative details to declare, "This is not just any place you are entering, but this honorable place." I believe even criminals feel differently about the judges they encounter inside an old courthouse than inside a new one.
My wife and I walked under "The Gates" and beneath the curtains. Thousands of others were doing the same. Many of them no doubt made the same journey daily, scarcely thinking of it.
Certainly our walk was enriched by trees, grass, shrubbery, ponds, views. But now "The Gates," by framing those sights, gave them a new aspect and importance. Not "grass on a hill," but this view of a grassy hill. Not a pond, but look at the pond. A frame of any sort values what it encloses. And as we walked, we felt subtly ceremonial. We were not walking, but walking through the gates. People walked a little more slowly, and sometimes had little smiles, and talked less on their cell phones, and perhaps felt more there.
"The Gates," a documentary by Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles, records the struggle starting in 1979 as Christo and Jeanne-Claude tried to get permission to install their gates (for only two weeks, but you'd think they were planning to leave them forever). This despite the fact that the artists were going to pay for it all themselves. One mayor after another, perhaps too timid to support duh artz, said no. Bloomberg said yes instantly. So, I believe, would have our own Mayor Daley, whose wrought-iron fences and islands of flowers and neo-classical columns and Millennium Park declare, "This is a city worthy of such pomp and formality, such beauty and pride." Those who say Daley has the mentality of a bungalow owner have no idea of the pride a bungalow owner can take in his home. Maybe they live in high-rises where committees buy hideously tortured iron and dump it in the lobby.
The documentary is pretty much what you'd expect: Two decades of ignorant contempt, followed by the city finding it was really surprisingly fond of "The Gates." How far do you think our beloved Chicago sidewalk cows would have gotten among the philistines of 50 years ago? Why does London cling to manifestly impractical red pillar boxes for its postal system, pillars that look like bright red Victorian fire hydrants? Because they're fun, that's why.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude age during the film, their hair turning gray (or red, in her case), but they never stop campaigning. It must have seemed so simple to them: Hey, people, lighten up! Don't be afraid of fancy and imagination! They actually had to use two high-powered lawyers, Scott Hodes of Chicago and Theodore W. Kheel of New York, to argue the case in favor of their gift to the city. The one thing lacking is a good sit-down chat with Christopher Alexander, explaining why cities require more, not less, attention to human feelings that cannot be reasoned away.
Daily Variety
The Gates
By Ronnie Scheib
May 3, 2007
Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles' glorious documentary on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park "Gates" follows the project from its initial, hotly debated proposal in 1979 to its final, triumphant installation in February 2005. Maysles' sixth collaboration with the Christos climaxes with a beautifully choreographed sequence that basks in the art-piece's ultimate commingling of trees, New Yorkers and 23 miles of framed orange fabric. Celebrating the city the immigrant artists have called home for 40 years, docu fittingly closes Gotham's Tribeca fest, and fully merits an arthouse run before HBO's skedded third-anniversary airing in February.
At an inaugural meeting to discuss strategy in 1979 (filmed by Maysles and his late brother David), the Christos' lawyer suggests quite firmly that the artists first deal with all the possible negative aspects to the undertaking, covering every conceivable objection anyone might have (and in New York, the "conceivable" covers a lot of ground). Then and only then might the endeavor conclude on a positive note.
The film's structure precisely mirrors the internal logic of the attorney's advice. "The Gates," in fact, registers as two distinct films, one from 1979, about a rejected, aborted work of art (with most of the positives cut out), and a second, from 2006, about the process of finally creating that work of art (with the negatives cut out). The first reads as sociopolitical tragicomedy, while the second waxes exultant like an urban operetta.
The Christos entirely self-financed their project by selling off ancillary artwork and preliminary sketches. It's one thing for outraged citizens to become furious over how officials misspend the public's money, but apparently, people can also harangue artists for splurging their own millions to interfere with nature and "the work of art that is Central Park" (even if the event only spans two weeks in the dead of winter).
The Community Board hearings set off the usual complaints about social irresponsibility and elitism, often couched in marvelous metaphors and fine hyperbole. Christo at first dynamically explains his vision; with the pride of one who has escaped the handcuffs of communist social realism, he declares he wants to build the gates for no reason at all except own artistic desire to do so. As the hearings proceed, he slumps more and more glumly in the frame as counterarguments range from the merely outlandish to the truly incensed.
Predictions of gloom and doom carry over into the second part of the film. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg gives his enthusiastic support, 9/11 lending a certain solemnity to the notion of consecrating the city in orange nylon. The voices of dissatisfaction start to sound like Mel Brooks' yentaisms in Pintoff's "The Critic," like unending comic counterpoint to an abstract work-in-progress.
Ferrara and Maysles orchestrate the construction, installation and deployment of the gates as a three-part symphony, ending with a two-week improvisational interlude, as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers flock to the park in February. As the mega-artwork is transformed by snow, sunsets and streams of people, the brightly colored 23 miles of pathways transform the wintry landscape into a fantastical garden of dancing cloth.
Flick Filosopher
You will hear, Let them eat gates.
By MaryAnn Johanson
May 4, 2007
I can't imagine a better choice for the closing-night film of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival: The Gates -- a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving documentary about the art project by installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude -- will have its world premiere on Saturday night with a gala screening. (There are additional public screenings on Saturday and Sunday nights, and the film, coproduced by HBO, will debut on the cable network in February 2008.) A valentine to New York City and to Central Park, the site of the installation, The Gates is a celebration of the same spirit that initially inspired the festival: to do something magnificent in the greatest city in the world.
Not that I'm biased or anything.
Now, Christo insists at a pre-project press conference that appears the film that this whole deal has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. He categorically denies that he is motivated by any desire to help the city heal in the wake of that terrible day, and he cheerfully admits the project is "irrational, irresponsible, selfish" -- and the fact that, as the film demonstrates, Christo and wife/artmaking partner Jeanne-Claude have been lobbying the city for permission to do this since 1979(!) is testament enough to that fact. The absence of political correctness is refreshing -- geez, not everything that happens in NYC has to do with 9/11! -- and is a wonderful indication of how filmmakers Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles work as pure documentarians here, literally simply documenting the project in all its phases without feeling the need to editorialize or in any other way step on the toes of the artists or the art.
The artists come across as thoroughly charming, in a creative, off-kilter kind of way: Christo, for instance, characterizes the "bureaucratic horror" they slogged through with the city as "like poetry." There's a delicious meta twistiness to the film that suggests that the making of the art was as much a work of art as The Gates themselves, and that there was a certain splendor in the audacity it took to even try to mount such an ambitious undertaking as merely proposing to blanket Central Park in 7,500 flame-orange flagged "gates" for two weeks.
But for all the uphill battle Christo and Jeanne-Claude faced, much of it from naysayers who decried the project as elitist and a frivolous waste of money, the final half hour of the film is a commanding refutation of all such complaints. Without musical accompaniment or distracting narration, Ferrera and Maysles give us, simply, The Gates as they were in February 2005 -- the filmmakers stand aside and let the project speak for itself, which is does most eloquently. Quiet scenes of the park and the throngs of awed people strolling under the giant orange gates express the grand scale of the project that even being there in person couldn't quite do. The crowds and their reaction become part of the art itself, and wide, high views of the streams of brilliantly colored flags flapping in the wind from gates snaking along the park's paths, caressing the curve of the park's hills, lend a perspective that wouldn't have been available down on the ground.
But I was there, one bitterly cold day that winter, and though The Gates did not make me bittersweetly sad and all messy from sobbing with joy, The Gates did. I had marvelled at the time how the gates sketched out the landscape of the park in a way that I had never appreciated before, but seeing images of the project two years later, I now realized that the ephemeralness of the gates was perhaps the most important aspect of its artistic nature. The Gates were beautiful in part because they were unusual -- they transformed something so everyday as a walk in the park into a profoundly touching experience unlike anything I had ever felt before. The Gates made me simultaneously wish that they had never been taken down and understand that if they had not been removed, we would have stopped seeing them after a while.
I'm not quite sure what that means yet -- it probably has something to do with getting a sense of my own mortality and inevitable death, and I'd rather not think too much about that at the moment. But I do know that it makes The Gates as essential a part of the art of The Gates as the gates were themselves.
Back Seat Manifesto
By Tom Hall
SilverDocs June 18, 2007
That evening, I took in my final screening of the fest; Antonio Ferrera, Albert Maysles and Matthew Prinzing's look at Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park installation The Gates. Frankly, I adored the movie, despite the feeling that it was a little slight and not really loving The Gates when they were up. But individual taste is irrelevant and that is the point; An absolute warts-and-all love letter to New York City, The Gates shows the people of New York City as an unclassifiable community of diverse people that not only take their city seriously, but are willing to open their hearts to collectiv experience. For all of its flowing fabric, what The Gates really brought to New York City was a chance to come together in Central Park, a place that everyone loves, and be New Yorkers together. The movie itself follows Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 1979 attempt to get the City to permit the project (it failed under the weight of ridiculous arguments against 'defacing the perfection of the park') through to the last days of the installation itself, and the second half of the movie, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude step aside and The Gates project is in full swing, reminded me of a late-1970's/early 1980's Woody Allen film, when you simply fall in love with New York City in all of its rich splendor (and the wonderful jazzy soundtrack for the film, although very un-Maysles like, certainly contributes to the Woody Allen feel). Ultimately, though, what The Gates represented was a triumph of large-hearted humanism and art over not only the conservative objections of literal-minded critics, but the post-9/11 malaise that still materializes now and again here in New York. And frankly, who doesn't like to see art save the day?
Credits
DIRECTED BY
Antonio Ferrera, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Matthew Prinzing
DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maylses
EDITED BY
Antonio Ferrera and Matthew Prinzing
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Sabine Kertscher
PRODUCERS
Antonio Ferrera, Maureen A. Ryan, and Vladimir Yavachev
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Rebecca Losick and Tanja Meding
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
CVJ
For Home Box Office
SUPERVISING PRODUCER
Lisa Heller
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Sheila Nevins
STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS
Wolfgang Volz and Sylvie Volz
Media Contact:
Julia Pacetti
juliapacetti@earthlink.net
Theatrical and Exhibition Contact:
Richard Matson
Matson Films/Alive Mind
917.559.5559
richard@matsonfilms.com