‘GIMME’ INSIGHT

I very much admire the work of Albert and David Maysles (“Sanctuary of ‘Grey Gardens,’ ” by Kristine McKenna, Aug. 16).

For years, however, journalists have used the murder they captured on film in “Gimme Shelter” as the moment when the ‘60s turned dark. McKenna repeats this bit of “Gimme Shelter” lore when she states, “In retrospect, this diabolical bacchanal seems to mark the moment when the utopian ‘60s began dissolving into darkness--and the brothers captured exactly that in this terrifying film.”

Perhaps the more insightful way to look at this film is that it signaled not the beginning of the dissolution of the idealism of the ‘60s, but the inevitable end to a decade that countered our innocence, political activism and idealism by assassinating the leaders who tried to, and would have, made a difference--Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Those murders more surely signaled an end to the utopia that could have been than the incident so terrifyingly captured by the Maysles in “Gimme Shelter.”

Albert Maysles could have been speaking for all of us in that tumultuous decade when he said, “You get so caught up in what you’re doing that you don’t realize the danger, and we weren’t as frightened as we should’ve been.”

BONNIE VOLAND

Los Angeles