A haunted palace needs no ghosts, only memories. Grey Gardens, the dilapidated Hamptons mansion at the center of the Maysles brothers' eponymous masterpiece, is perhaps the greatest haunted house in cinema history, and its ghosts are tremendously, stubbornly alive. Edith Bouvier Beale ("Big Edie") and her daughter, Edith ("Little Edie"), aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, are not simply the subjects of a documentary; they are the priestesses of a domestic cult, the vestal virgins of a long-extinguished fire, whose ashes they continue to sprinkle over their bodies and throughout the rooms invaded by cats, raccoons, and the debris of a life that once was.

To see "Grey Gardens" in 1975, and to see it again today, is an experience that transcends voyeuristic curiosity to land in a territory that borders on American Gothic, Greek tragedy, and a Samuel Beckett play rewritten by Tennessee Williams. It is a chamber drama where the chamber is decaying, an elegy for a self-devouring WASP aristocracy, an existential treatise on the performance of self when there is no audience left, save for a film crew and an omnipresent mother.

Albert and David Maysles, pioneers of direct cinema, arrived at Grey Gardens almost by chance after a project on Lee Radziwill, Jackie O’s sister, fell through. They found themselves facing a self-sufficient universe, a microcosm hermetically sealed against the injuries of time and society. Their camera is not an invisible, objective eye; it is a catalyst, a confessor, a silent third character whose presence legitimizes and amplifies the two women’s daily ritual. The ethical question, which was certainly raised at the time—are the Maysles exploiting two vulnerable women or giving them the spotlight they always craved?—dissolves in the face of the overwhelming evidence: the Edies are not passive victims of the lens, but active co-authors of their own legend. Little Edie, in particular, with her "costumes for the day"—skirts worn as head coverings, sweaters tied at the waist, stockings secured with a safety pin—is not a crazed relic, but a proto-performance artist, a decayed Marchesa Casati staging her spectacle among the ruins of her empire.

Their language is an idiolect made of cyclical recriminations, half-hummed pre-war songs, and aphorisms of a disarming lucidity ("It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present," Little Edie confesses, providing the hermeneutic key to the entire film). Their dialogue is an atonal score in which every note of affection is immediately followed by a dissonance of resentment. Big Edie, lying in bed amidst piles of rubbish, accuses her daughter of preventing her from having a life; Little Edie, dancing with an American flag in a fit of surreal patriotism, accuses her mother of sabotaging her ambitions to be a dancer in New York and a potential marriage to Joe Kennedy Jr. It is a psychological trench war fought for decades, in which every foot of independence has been lost and the only possible victory is symbiotic survival.

The film is an extraordinary meditation on the corrosive and preservative power of memory. Grey Gardens is not just a house; it is an archive, a storehouse of the unconscious where every object is a signifier saturated with history. The portraits of a young and beautiful Big Edie, the photo of Little Edie as a debutante, the vinyl records—everything contributes to creating a present that is solely an echo of the past. As in a William Faulkner novel, where the past is never dead, it’s not even past, the two women live in an eternal return, continually re-enacting and renegotiating the traumas and triumphs of a vanished era. Their reclusion is not just physical, but temporal. They are trapped in the amber of their own memories, an amber that has darkened and cracked but which preserves them in a form of eternal stasis.

The narrative structure, seemingly random and fragmented, perfectly mimics the mental state of its protagonists. There is no developmental arc, no catharsis. There is only repetition, ritual, variation on a theme. Big Edie boiling corn on her bedside table, Little Edie complaining about the raccoons that have dug a hole in the wall—all in a flow that has the dreamlike and disturbing quality of a David Lynch film, had Lynch decided to shoot a documentary about the poor relations of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The accumulation of filth, the visual chaos, the physical decay of the environment become a kind of Kurt Schwitters Merzbau, an involuntary installation built from the fragments of a life, transforming squalor into a radical and desperate form of art.

Beneath its eccentric surface, "Grey Gardens" is a profoundly American text. The Beales are the repressed of Camelot, the dark side of the Kennedy dream. While Jackie was building an icon of style and power, her closest relatives were staging the deconstruction of that very social class, revealing the fragility and absurdity hidden behind the façade of East Coast respectability. Their "staunchness," their proud ability to resist and be themselves to the last, is a perverse and moving form of American individualism. They refuse to be "saved," to conform, to clean the house. They choose, or are perhaps forced to choose, the absolute freedom of marginality.

The Maysles' camera, unlike that of many subsequent documentarians, does not judge. It observes with a mixture of empathy, amazement, and respect. There is a palpable tenderness in the way they film Little Edie performing her improvised ballets or Big Edie singing "Tea for Two" in a voice that is the shadow of a shadow. They are not specimens to be studied in an anthropological diorama, but complex human beings whose tragedy is inseparable from their comedy. The film achieves the miracle of rendering them at once ridiculous and sublime, pathetic and regal.

In an age of reality shows that manufacture artificial drama and one-dimensional characters, "Grey Gardens" remains a monument to the most radical and unsettling authenticity. It is a work that defies all easy categorization: it is not just a documentary, but a gothic poem, a psychological analysis, a sociological essay, and one of the greatest, and strangest, love stories ever brought to the screen. It is the cinematic equivalent of a Diane Arbus photograph: an incursion into the unusual that reveals a universal truth about family, identity, and the inexorable, creative undoing of all things. A masterpiece whose dust, like that which covers every surface of the house, will never truly settle.