Although Albert Maysles’s solipsist tales of making documentaries have grown stale through countless repeatings (I’ve heard them on three occasions), he himself, to his credit, never gets tired. At 70, there he was with a digital camera last year in the pits of Avalon, shooting up to the stage where Mission of Burma rocked out. And his world-acclaimed 16mm cinéma-vérité films, which he directed with his late brother, David, never fade away: Salesman (1969), Grey Gardens (1975), Gimme Shelter (1970).

The Maysleses’ less famous works are immensely interesting also, and the Brattle is offering four of these, paired into double features, as part of its " Real to Reel " Tuesday documentary series. This Tuesday, May 27, you get Running Fence (1978) and Christo in Paris (1990), films in which the Maysles Brothers follow Christo, the Bulgarian-born artist, and Jeanne-Claude, his French-born wife, as they embark on problematic public-art projects. On June 10, the Maysleses return with two cinéma-vérité biographies: " With Love from Truman " (1966), which profiles writer Truman Capote, and Showman (1963), which is about once-renowned Boston movie mogul Joseph E. Levine.

Christo in Paris, which they directed with Deborah Dickson and Susan Frömke, was unavailable for viewing. It concerns, according to the Brattle brochure, " Christo’s first large urban project (the wrapping of the Pont Neuf, Paris’s oldest bridge) but also his relationship with his partner, Jeanne-Claude. " Do they squabble by the Seine? I wonder. They were born on the same day in 1935, and they are usually the most synchronized of couples, as is evident in Running Fence. Arriving in rural California, Christo and Jeanne-Claude try to persuade locals to allow them to put up a 24-mile, 18-foot-high fence of white nylon fabric supported by cables and steel poles. The fence, starting in Sonoma County, would run through private properties, then along a hill above a state highway, and then, going into Marin County, dip to the beach and into the Pacific.

The Maysleses are at the town meetings where permissions must be secured. That’s a part of every Christo project: the fostering of public debate. Invariably, some people extend their æsthetic appreciation while others balk at his grandiose out-of-museum constructions. " That’s not art, " one irate Californian snorts, " a piece of rag for 50 miles. I bet he can’t even paint a picture! " A waitress on her shift is more sympathetic, describing the curtain as " Nifty . . . Nature-pretty. "

I agree with the waitress. When Christo’s glorious curtain is finally up, it’s like God’s laundry out to dry.

The 29-minute black-and-white short " With Love for Truman " features an upbeat Capote riding high on the success of In Cold Blood, his true-life saga of brutal murders in Kansas. The Maysleses film a softball interview with Capote by a Newsweek reporter. The author brags about inventing for his book a new form of " non-fiction novel. " Deftly mixing a bloody mary, he muses, " I think style applies to everything. Music, literature, art, good oysters. Style is oneself. It’s something you can’t learn. It’s simply there, like the color of your eyes. "

Showman, a 53-minute black-and-white documentary, pioneered in being nothing more than an extended sketch of its subject (there’s little narrative thrust) and in being open-ended about how its subject should be regarded. Is Joseph E. Levine a barbarian, a philistine, a jerk? Or is he a shrewd, all-American entrepreneur? The audience decides.

Levine was a poor Jewish boy from Boston’s West End who made it huge in New England film exhibition, then became an international legend for buying a cheap Italian spectacle, the 1958 Steve Reeves–starring Le fatiche di Ercole/Hercules, and releasing it in the USA. It made millions. Levine is also the model for Jack Palance’s bullying, sex-crazy, anti-intellectual producer in Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Le mépris/Contempt (1963). In Showman, we watch the overweight, crude Levine run his New York–based independent film company, Embassy Pictures (a prefiguring of Harvey Weinstein at Miramax?). We watch him try to figure out how to package the art movies he has purchased, such as Vittorio De Sica’s La Ciociara/Two Women (for which Sophia Loren won an Oscar) into commercial " products. "

The Boston part: Levine comes home to a rousing testimonial dinner of people from the old neighborhood, a fascinating The Last Hurrah kind of scene. To his credit, he’s not impressed with the flattery and sycophancy. Many of the gathered had snubbed him when he was less famous. And he refuses to get nostalgic about his Beantown childhood. He loathed it, and his poverty. How much dandier is the Maysles show, when millionaire Levine hangs out with Sophia Loren at Cannes.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com