"Concentrated Ground": Grey Gardens and the Cinema of the Domestic

Abstract

Grey Gardens is the East Hampton, Long Island mansion that was the home of Big Edie Beale and Little Edie Beale, and which lent its name to the eponymous 1976 documentary portrait of the two women, directed by David and Albert Maysles.1 That this film (beautiful, notorious, the object of cultic devotion) should derive its name from the house is fitting, for this is a film that in some very fundamental way is about the practice (albeit here a highly specific practice) of living in a house, about the inhabiting, the use and enjoyment, of domestic space. But Grey Gardens is not just any house, and Grey Gardens (US) is not just any documentary. My intention here is to think specifically about the film and the house and the Edies who lived there and in so doing to privilege, at various moments, this house, Grey Gardens, to think about what ways it might have lent itself to and perhaps even left its own impress on the Edies and their fantastic methods of inhabiting it, and, further, to think about how this house accommodates and is accommodated by the Maysles and their filmmaking practice. In approaching the film through the lens of domestic architecture and domestic space, I hope I will be able to open the doors wider, so to speak, to think more broadly about what this film has to tell us about the entwinement of domestic space and cinematic space. While the film is, on one level, simply a documentary portrait of two women, it also lends itself to being interpreted as an exercise in genre or genres. Is this a domestic melodrama, shot through with intergenerational mother-daughter conflict? Is it an exercise in gothic horror, a story about a big house and its historical hauntings? Is it a musical? The desire to respond to Grey Gardens in terms of genre is strong and it is a desire that, as I will argue, is generated by the film's deep investigation of [End Page 83] Click for larger view Figure 1 Little Edie Beale in front of Grey Gardens in a publicity still for the film. Courtesy of Photofest.