The disaster at Altamont threw the youth prophets and merchandisers into a painful dilemma; a new gruesome reality had suddenly emerged and had to be somehow confronted and, hopefully, packaged and sold. Caught in this crunch were several veteran cinema-verite documentarians, David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, whose cameras had captured all the action, including the murder. Like the dazed, bleeding hippies the Maysles were caught in the center of violent change. Altamont became for the Maysles, as it had for the hippies, a symbolic, watershed event. Altamont was the cauldron in which the Maysles' method of film-making, both vices and virtues, were tested and magnified and it is a test which they failed.

The Maysles brothers were probably not the best representatives of cinema-verite to take this test; even before Altamont, they had one of the shiftiest aesthetics going. When accused of altering reality, they would...