Bp I FILM CLASSICS Salesman J. M. TYREESalesman Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant American films ever made, Salesman (1966-9) is a landmark in non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to Truman Capote's ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood. The film follows a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan. Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the ‘direct cinema’ movement, this ruefully comic and quietly devastating film was the first masterpiece of Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the trio who would go on to produce The Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970). Based on the premise that films drawn from ordinary life could compete with Hollywood extravaganzas, Salesman was critical in shaping ‘the documentary feature’. A novel cinema-going experience for its time, the film was independently produced, designed for theatrical release and presented without voiceover narration, interviews, or talking heads. Working with innovative handheld equipment, and experimenting with eclectic methods and a collaborative ethos, the Maysles brothers and Zwerin produced a carefully-orchestrated narrative drama fashioned from unexpected episodes. J.M. Tyree suggests that Salesman can be understood as a case study of non- fiction cinema, raising perennial questions about reality and performance. His analysis provides an historical and cultural context for the film, considering its place in world cinema and its critical representations of dearly-held national myths. The style of Salesman still makes other documentaries look static and immobile, while the film’s allegiances to everyday subjects and working people indelibly marked the cinema. Tyree’s insightful study also includes an exclusive exchange with Albert Maysles about the film. J. M. TYREE is a Writer-at-Large for Film Quarterly and the co-author (with Ben Walters) of the BFI Film Classic on The Big Lebowski. He has taught at Stanford University, spoken at the BFI's National Film Theatre, and contributed to Sight & Sound magazine. B F 90101 9"78184495 7387: ‘A BFI book published by Palgrave MacmillanBFI Film Classics The BFL Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its enre or national production and reception history, its place within a g cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author's personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our websit ewww: palgrave.com/bfi> Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.” Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema Times Higher Education Supplement “The series is a landmark in film criticism.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, f 1 Edward Buscombe 1 ' William P, Germano, ‘Th Alastair Phillips 1 nce and Dana Polan Y 1 Lalitha Gopalan, B, Ruby Rich, U ee Grieveson, Ur James,J. M. Tyree ished by Palgrave MacmillanConten Acknowledgments 6 Introduction 8 1 The Path to Salesman 16 2 Performers, Authors, Directors 31 3 Americana 56 Conclusion: Reality and its Discontents 80 Appendix: Albert Maysles on Salesman = An Exchange with J. M. Tyree 93 Notes 98 Credits. 99 References 100Acknowledgments This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Walter Kir to my editor, Rebecca Barden, as well as to the Book Board, the who worked as a printing salesman in Chicago. Deepest thanks external Readers, Sophia Contento, Philippa Hudson and the team at BEI Publishing and Palgrave Macmillan. Sincere gratitude goes to Albert Maysles, Laura Coxson and lan Markiewicz at Maysles Films for their generosity in responding to my queries. Gail Gradowski of Santa Clara University discovered a treasure trove of business periodicals and Philip Warman forwarded me valuable materials. I began this project while I was a Truman Capote-Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Stanford University’s Creative Writing programme, which provided critical support, Professor Joe McElhaney corresponded with me about key aspects of the film, sharing a wealth of insight. James Baker (aka ‘The Rabbit’) graciously shared his experiences as a salesman and his memories of the film during an informal conversation arranged by Boston Globe reporter Michael Rezendes; Mike also discovered key locations: related to the film and previously unknown Boston-related information about the film. Emily Mitchell and Ben Walters gave me notes and encouragement; Ben also shared critical insights on reality TV. Rob White's critical acumen towards my writing for Film Quarterly has been unstintingly generous. A number of people mad specific research contributions including Chris, Lois and Joanna Mitchell, Michael McGriff, Steven Levine, Shawn Spencer, Suzanne Rivecca, Stephanie Soileau, Stacey Swann, Jim Gavin, Justin St Germain, Abigail Ulman, Christina Gerhardt, Dan Riordan, Josie Walters-Johnston and Alfie Olson. The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University generously provided me with a workspace when it was most needed Salesman (1966-9) Salesman was filmed from late 1966 to early 1967, edited throughout 1967 and 1968, assembled in late 1968, then reviewed before and after its limited theatrical release in carly 1969, Both The Criterion Collection DVD release and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) give 1968 as the date for Salesnran, while the Masters of Cinema DVD release uses 1969. Scholars also differ. Jonathan B. Vogels’s Filmography in The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles joe McElhaney’s Filmography in Albert Maysles has 1969. The original “Screenplay” of the film published by the New American Library cites 1969, while A Maysles Scrapbook and the company’s website use 1968. A 35mm print at UC-Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive lists 1969. The tag ‘filmed in’ often used to describe documentaries is not helpful here because of the long editing process, which (as is not uncommon in non-fiction) may have continue beyond the initial media coverage. Thave used 1968 in this book, not only because it is the date preferred by the film-makers, but also because it was the year the film entered the public eye. Although the film’s theatrical run began with a New York ‘world premiere’ on 17 April 1969, Salesman’s public reception had already begun with Vincent Canby’s ‘And Now, the “Spontaneous” Film’, in the Netw’ York Times, published on 4 September 1968. The Mid-American Bible Company responded to the film in a letter dated 3 January 1969, indicating private s reenings or informal distribution. But these items may not be definitive, and the awkward designation $1966-9 would more accurately suggest the larger arc of production and reception for Salesman,Introduction An image of a lavish but vulgar-looking book inscribed with the words ‘Holy Bible’. Someone we won't know his name until the end of the scene ~ tells us that ‘the best seller in the world is the Bible’ Then the book opens and a hand flips its pages. An epic story begins - or is it just a sales pitch? ‘It’s the greatest piece of literature of all time, the voice continues, while the hand carefully pauses ata prearranged spot designed to show off the Bigle’s Presentation Page. A silky looking bookmark inscribed with a dove and a cross serves a dual function, helping the hand find the right page and appearing as a potential item of value in itself. A sense of wonderful puzzlement takes hold. Who is speaking, and to whom? And why? Did we miss the credits? Did we arrive late at the cinema? What kind of film is this? After a cut, we finally see what's happening as the camera pulls back: a Bible salesman, Paul Brennan, is working a housewife while the woman’s daughter, Christine, looks on. ‘It’s really tremendous, isn’t it?” Brennan prompts, flipping from the Three Kings to Mary and sus in the Temple in ten seconds flat. Another close-up of the Bible: it’s an intimidating, un-homey, beautifully bound behemoth, a regular brick, a thing to look at and not an artefact to love, larded with high-quality reproductions of Vatican photographs and Old Masters paintings. Brennan tries to sell the Bible by selling himself, asserting some nebulous value to his name being Paul - ‘Paul, you know?’ —as if he were fresh from the road to Damascus. But Paul does not seem cruel or bullying, he just looks harried, tired out, ar the end of his rether. We haven't scen the title of the film yee, bur if we remember it we might conjure up Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. Paul looks at little Christine wit genuine fondness; after a cut we see a close-up on Christine's face, then the camera zooms out to a position perched near Paul’s shoulder, from which we can see Paul’s left ear andthe back of his head and neck as his attention shifts back to his sale The camera, however, lingers longer on Christine’s face than Paul does, himself, Albert Maysles is catching up, but his own interest in the child lasts longer. His plane of atteation, his plan here, is not the same as Paul’s, “The Bible runs as little as $49.95,’ Paul drawls. The housewife thinks over the proposition of spending that sum (the cost still seems high now, never mind in the 1960s) on a book that is given away free in motels. This book is different, we'll discover, because it’s designed for Catholics. in a translation from the Vulgate; vague claims about the imprimatu- of the Church will be made. As to happen. As Brennan explains payment options, Christine yawns like es of unplanned, poignant and unforgettable things begin a theatre critic. When the Bible was open, she showed inter snow that it’s come down to money, she’s bored. Christine is our barometer for the shifting mood of the scene; her actions also reveal time clapsing. Her mother unconsciously wards off the salesman by nodding with her hr hand holding her chin, her index finger pointed up — another meaningful hand to consider, like Paul's on the Bible. Abruptly, the camera's point of view changes from nearly resting on Brennan’ shoulder toa spot where it might be a visiting friend. A different triangle ~ salesman-customer-camera — has been created, a more open angle with a more critical distance. Who is filming all this, and why? Whose side are they on? Why won't they say anything? Christine is sprawled across her mother’s lap while her mother strokes her hand. Another cut and Christine squirms restlessly while Paul tries to find a way in toa sale, No dice. Christine hops off her mother’s lap while Paul sputters brokenly, stroking the cover of the Bible with his awkward, arthritic-looking fingers: We place a tremendous— the Bible is still the best seller in the world, so...” ‘The camera finds Christine at the piano, While she plays a series of oddly disconnected yet somehow musical keys, her mother explains that she’s ‘swamped with medical bills’. No Bible now. Paul Brennan's shaken-looking, face appears in close-up beside a printed rendition of his name (and his nickname, “The Badger’), while Christine thumps out a depressing sequence of awkward descending piano notes. I's a drama conveyed by non-actors without any recourse to voiceover, and the sequence - one of the most remarkable in all of cinema = stands as a précis for Salesman. ‘In about ninety seconds,” notes scholar Jonathan B. Vogels (2005, p. 52), ‘the film has laid out its basic scenario.’ The score is provided by the piano improvisation of a child. ‘Only a Beethoven could match its near-perfect expression,’ Albert Maysles says.! Chris Marker suggested in A Grin without a Cat (1977) that ‘you never know what you might be filming’, A corollary for viewingnon-fiction films is that you never know exactly what you might be seeing. In the opening scene of Salesman, countless choices and decisions, some subtle (the wonde-ful lighting of the faces falls in just the right places), some more obvious (cuts and editing show time elapsing by focusing on Christine's gradual disillusionment with the visiting salesman), have conspired with unpredictable happenings. One way to watch would be to imagine everything thar might have been omitted from the film, not only the footage left out by editin, but also the footage never captured, What if the first thing we saw was Paul Brennan making a sale? What if Albert Maysles’s camer: had been focused on Brennan’s face during his sales pitch and missed Christine’s yawn? What if the camera had been placed in a static ion films of the day? What if we saw the film crew asking the housewife to sign a release? position on a tripod, as in so many other non-fic What if someone said something earth-shartering once the camera stopped rolling or ran out of film? What if the shors had been edited in another sequence? What if there had been a sticky voiceover saying, ‘Paul Brennan is a Bible salesman in trouble ...? What if the film-makers had chosen other salesmen to follow, or another subject altogether? These hypothetical films sprawl out on imaginary tangent lines from what Albert Maysles filmed, David Maysles recorded, Charlotte Zwerin edited, and the subjects of the film lived or performed. We could imagine trying to pick through the rushes and assemble something different - a humbling thought experiment. ‘It was just life’ When asked ro screen one film representative of his work, Albert Maysles chooses Sale sman, “because it’s a near-perfect representation of my philosophy’? It is the most pioneering of the three masterpieces of direct cinema produced by Maysles Films from 1968 to 1975. Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1975) are better known, but neither film would have been conceivable without Salesman. Salesman’s apparently seamless vision of unobtrusive realism is easily attacked, and the working methoes behind its seemingly transparent style defy categorisation, forcing interpreters of the film to read beyond the intentions of its film-makers. It’s one of the most dazzling, curious and puzzling films ever made: a precisely cut and set gem a unified work of fashioned out of a utopian dream of film-making; art created by three distinctive authors; a tightly controlled, meticulously edited and carefully orchestrated construction formed from outbursts of spontaneity, accident and serendipity; a film apparently lacking any stable point of view thar nevertheless manages to indict the entire ideology of market exchange in American culture a film that hides the presence of its own cinematic apparatus, yet winds up feeling personal and poetic rather than objective or cold. Documentaries had been screened theatrically before, of course, but the film’s appearance in cinemas in 1969 (after early coverage in 1968) repr in helping to shape the genre of the narrative non-fiction feature- yan was critical nted a novel kind of cinemagoing. Sal length film drama — perhaps a cinematic analogue to Truman Capote’s 1965 ‘non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood ~ specifically designed for theatrical release, independently produced and drawn from real events; around ninety minutes stripped of voiceover and other obvious intrusions. For Albert Maysles, ‘It can be considered to be the first documentary feature, not just feature length, but feature.” Over forty years later, the film still makes other documentaries look clumsy, overbearing, humourless and immobile, and, as a problematic outburst of ‘reality’ filmed on hand-held equipment, it presages several key preoccupations of the twenty-first century. scholars and film- Yet while it is acknowledged as a touchstone by makers — in the 1990s, the Libr ry of Congress selected it for preservation on a slate of the twenty-five most important American films ever made ~ Salesman remains curiously resistant to popular audiences. Many of its truths, especially concerning the things that lurk beneath the chipper veneer of business life in America, are unpalatable, factors thar helped keep Salesman off public television for decades; though one of its progr ammers wept while watching the film, he rejected it for broadcast (see Liz Stubbs’s 2002 interview withAlbert Maysles in Beattie, 2010, p. 134). Salesman undercuts dearly held national myths about winners and losers in American life, and how we can all get into the big money if we just try harder. Beyond its innovations, the film’s greatest power of endurance arguably resides. in its tone towards its subjects, bleading elements of Arthur Miller and Eugene ONeill with :dward Hopper to suggest the loneliness and desolation as well as the poignancy and rueful humour haunting the American highways, diners, morels, sales meetings and strange suburbs, Jean-Pierre Gorin (2012). in placing Salesman at no. 6 on his Top 10 list of world cinema classies, celebrated the film’s presentation of “the essence of labor, its afferent solitude, the pathos of success ... a valentine to a time in film (and society in general) when work defined character’. Martin Scorsese, who once worked as a lighting man for Albert Maysles, acknowledged Meysles’s ‘burning desire to grasp life in all its complexity — its beauty and its ugliness, its joy and its sorrow, all at once’ (Chaiken, Kasher and Maysles, 2007, p. 12). Scorsese also adapted a remark of Orson Welles about Vittorio De Sica for his own notes on the artistry of Albert Maysles more generally The camera disappe d, the screen disappeared, it was just life.’ Of course it wasn’t: if the camera disappears we see nothing, and what's more, film editing lies at the heart of the matter in Sales dismissed as pure hokum or salesmanship ~ prestidigitation called magic by other magicians — were it not for its yearning tone, its nan, Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. So this claim might be blatant impossibility, its status as wish fulfilment, Welles himself was intrigued by and also sceptical about the non-fiction film-making methods pioneered in the 1960s. He worked with Albert and David Maysles in 1963 to produce a short promotional account of ‘a new kind of fiction film that would be shor documentary style’, but inscribed fiction as inescapable in F for Fake (1973) and poked fun at documentary film-makers modelled on the Maysles brothers in his unfinished feature The Other Side of the Wind (Mcklhaney, 2009, pp. 1, 165-6). These and other hints about the theoretical quicksand of non- fiction film also suggest a site of vast pleasure. In his notes on Sale: definitely proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and nan, Gorin (2012, section 6) wishes to ‘celebrate the film as documentary’. Yet even if we replace dichotomies with distinctions, all the perennial, unsolvable questions about reality, performance, jon’ framing and fictionalisation remain encoded in non-f ‘disorderly discourses and intractable practices’, as scholar Patricia R. Zimmermann (1999, p. 64) calls them. As viewers of films claiming any special relationship with reality, we're always left in a position similar to the subjects of Jean Rouch’s and Edgar Morin’s film Chronicle of a Summer (filmed in 1960, released in 1961). When Rouch invited them toa screening of the film, they fell out over how natural or artificial the film seemed to them, debated whether the portrayals were sympathetic or true to life, and disagreed about who was acting and when. ‘We're in for trouble,’ notes Morin in the English subtitles — or, as. a more accurate translation has the same line (“Nous sommes dans le bain’), ‘We are in the know’ (or ‘We 8). Ir’s his last line in the film, are implicated’; Rouch, 2003, p. 3 and it remains a coda for future documentarians. Nearly fifty years later, Molly Dineen described similar paradoxes in her own films: m trying t ally is real.’ This is me they're other it happens. But asly that's also ecau that person, that person's heir behavior beca in the edit they'll be put in a context that ride rent. (Capturing Re fe Art of Documentary. dir1 The Path to Salesman Be there when it happens We might think of our obsession with ‘reality’ as something novel, but on 24 November 1963, millions of Americans had seen Lee Harvey Oswald murdered live on television, and several days later, they pored over the images from the Zapruder film in the pages of Life magazine. Key events had been filmed before, but not like this, During the 1960s, rechnology allowed new kinds of images to be broadcast with unprecedented speed: the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential TV debates; the 1962 Telstar satellite broadcasts of simultaneous television images from America and Europ the ‘living. room war’ in Vietnam; the moon landing. Very early on, between 1958 and 1961, film-makers understood that with the new lightweight equipment, like the lomm Auricon Cine-Voice, the Eclair Noiscless Portable Reflex, the Arriflex 16 M cameras and the Nagra pulse tape recorder, which dropped the weight of sound equipment from 90kg to around 9kg, the could record on the fly and also pick up synchronised sound and images with hand-held gear (Ellis and MeLane, 2005, p. 210; McElhaney, 2009, pp. 4-5). This meant the abandonment of unwieldy tripods and large crews, developments thar, in turn, allowed non-fiction film-makers to screen unstaged aspects of life on an unprecedented scale. Such were the dreams, at any rate, that lay behind Robert Drew’s 1960 film Primary, about the political campa ign in Wisconsin between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Drew, who had been a photojournalist, was primarily intei ested in new forms of reportage, and Time-Life Broadcast productions had hired him to try them out. He felt that ‘real life never got on to the film, never came through the television set’, and he hoped to “find a dramatic logic in which things really happened’. His plan entailed founding something no less grand than ‘a whole new basis for a whole new journalism’. It would be: eatre without actors, it would be mmary and Drew needed brilliantly innovative cameramen who understood how to capture this vision, which is better viewed as an impossible ideal, a characteristic national mood or a utopian speech act rather than an achievable goal. Practical problems also existed: synched sound was not yet perfected, for example. Drew went looking for ‘people who can sense an interesting situation ... find characters in it, sense what : when it happens, render it on film or is abour to happen, be thei tape with art and craft and insight as it happens’. He attracted cameramen who hadn't been classically trained as cinematographers in the creation of static images and who didn’t use multiple takes, during which little was left to chance. On Primary, Drew recruited three film-makers who would make groundbreaking contributions to English-language non-fiction cinema: Richard Leacock, D, A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles. Leacock went on to publish a provocative essay, entitled ‘For an Uncontrolled Cinema’, in the summer 1961 issue of Fila Culture, in Which he expressed what sounds like a shared wish to ‘record aspects what did happen in of what did actually happen ina real situation 78). M was responsible for photographing two of Primary along, hand-held, balletic, single rake following JFK through its most absolure sense’ (Leacock, 1970, p: ysles, for his part, *s best-known shots the hallways and stairs of a Polish Legion hall, and a lingering view of Jackie Kennedy's nervous fingers in a pair of white gloves behind her back as she gave a speech. The latter shot proved controversial se of edirorialising, but the footage because of its intrusiveness and se can be related to Albert Maysles’s enduring interest in discovering1 The Path to Salesman Be there when it happens We might think of our obsession with ‘reality’ as something novel, but on 24 November 1963, millions of Americans had seen Lee Harvey Oswald murdered live on television, and several days later they pored over the images from the Zapruder film in the pages of Life magazine. Key events had been filmed before, but not like this During the 1960s, technology allowed new kinds of images to be broadcast with unprecedented speed: the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential TV debates; the 1962 Telstar satellite broadcasts of simultaneous television images from America and Europes the ‘living: room war’ in Vietnam; the moon landing. Very early on, between 1958 and 1961, film-makers understood that with the new lightweight equipment, like the lomm Auricon Cine-Voice, the Felair Noiscless Portable Reflex, the Arriflex 16 M cameras and the Nagra pulse tape recorder, which dropped the weight of sound equipment from 90kg to round 9kg, they could record on the fly and also pick up synchronised sound and ima 's with hand-held gear (Ellis and MeLane, 2005, p. 210; McElhaney, 2009, pp. 4 ). This meant the abandonment of unwieldy tripods and large crews, developments thar, in turn, allowed non-fiction film-makers to screen unstaged aspects of life on an unprecedented scale Such were the dreams, at any rate, that lay behind Robert Drew's 1960 film Primary, about the political campaign in Wisconsin between John F, Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the Demoeratie Party presidential nomination. Drew, who had been a photojournalist, was primarily interested in new forms of reportage, and Time-Life Broadeast productions had hired him to try them out. He felt that ‘real life nev got on to the film, never came through the television set’, and he hoped to “find a dramatic logic in which things really happened, His plan entailed founding something no less grand . It would be: than ‘a whole new basis for a whole new journalism Drew needed brilliantly innovative cameramen who understood how to capture this vision, which is better viewed as an impossible ideal, a characteristic national mood or a utopian speech act rather than an achievable goal. Practical problems also existed: synched sound was not yet perfected, for example. Drew went looking for ‘people who can sense an interesting situation ... find characters in it, sense what is about to happen, be there when it happens, render it on film or tape with art and craft and insight as it happens’. He attracted cameramen who hadn't been classically trained as cinematographers in the creation of static images and who didn’t use multiple takes, during which little was left to chance. On Primary, Drew recruited three film-makers who would make groundbreaking contributions to English-language non-fiction cinema: Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles. Leacock went on to publish a provocative essay, entitled *For an Uncontrolled Cinema’, in the summer 1961 issue of Fil Culture, in which he expressed what sounds like a shared wish to ‘record aspects what did happen in of what did actually happen in a real situation its most absolute sense’ (Leacock, 1970, p. 78). Maysles, for his part, was responsible for photographing, two of Primary’s best-known shots: a long JFK through the hallways and stairs of a Polish Legion hall, and a ling of Jackie Kennedy's nervous fingers in a pair of white gloves behind hand-held, balletic, single take following ering view her back as she gave a specch. The latter shot proved controversial because of its intrusiveness and sense of editorialising, but the footage can be related to Albert Maysles’s enduring interest in di covering,hidden, unexpected and unplanned images of humanity behind the public facades of various kinds of performers, a crucial theme in Salesman, Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. Intimate film report In Moscow for the American National Exhibition in 1959, Albert Maysles had filmed ‘impressionistic’ elements of Russian life with Pennebaker and Shirley Clarke for Opening in Moscow, also assisting on Leacock’s film about Leonard Bernstein in the USSR.* Maysles had been to the Soviet Union before, in 1955, visiting Russian mental health hospitals, again in 1956, travelling from Eastern Europe via motor scooter, and in 1957, with his brother David on a BMW motorcycle ‘ ‘ Albert returned with lectures on life in the USSR, illustrated with photos, and with short films such as his first, Psychiatry in Russia (1955). While formally conventional — the film solves the 1950s problem of sight and sound with a standard voiceove = Psychiatry in Russia calls itself ‘a personal report’, lingering on images of working people, mental health professionals and patients. Maysles relates how Russians attribute their “comparative low incidence of mental disorders’ to “social equality”. A more lavish and propagandistic American production released in the same year as Psychiatry in Russia was Anthony Mann's Strate Air Command, sponsored by the US Air Force, directed in VistaVision, and called a ‘pictorial show of the beauty and organized power of the United States’ (Amberg, 1971, pp. 294-6). By contrast a pamphlet for Maysles’s second film, Russian C lose-Up (1957), described a ‘Completely Uncensored Movie Film and Lecture and presented him as a ‘Lecturer, author and photographer’ who had captured ‘swaddled infants, children with sand pails, school children in uniform, athletes, teachers, workers, housewives, psychiatrists, lawyers, ive cream vendors ...’ Posters promoting his ‘intimate film report’ in 1959 called him a *psychologist-cinephotographer’. The Maysles brothers were born in Dorchester, Massachusetts — Albert in 1926, David in 1932 ~ and raised in Brookline by Russian Jewish parents, living adjacent to the rough Boston Lrish neighbourhood of Jamaica Plain, territory that produced Salesman’s protagonist, Paul Brennan, David had a parallel but more traditional life in the movies, working as an assistant producer on the Marilyn Showgirl Monroe pictures Bus Stop (1956) and The Prince and th ) before joining Albert on the motorcycle tour behind the Iron Curtain that led to Russian Close-Up and the brothers’ first film unfinished). An image reveals the together, Youth in Poland (195 brothers in identical-looking jackers on their BMW in front of the Kremlin, David on the front wearing goggles and bracing strapped- down boxes of equipment, Albert on the back looking directly into the camera, In a 1998 profile by Brooke Comer, Albert described the motoreyele journey in terms of a closeness so in syneh that one brother could sleep while the other drove, a tender and poignant image that also makes for a tempting yet incomplete analogy for their film-making (Beattie, 2010, p. 112). In 1962, the brothers formed their own production company, Maysles Films, and shot Shoreman, about producer Joseph E. ica’s 1960 film Tivo Women. Levine’s promotional campaign for De § ss was fettered, Showman was created under trying conditions — ace 4 voiceover proved necessary and, like many early Maysles films, it remains in legal limbo, De Sica’s female lead, Sophia Loren, won the Academy Award for Best Actress. It was the sort of break that ‘just happened’ in the Maysles’s films time and again: the chance to follow the Beatles on their 1964 tour of America for What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA, the emotional collapse of Paul Brennan during Salesman, the live killing captured in Gimme Shelter and the bonding with their subjects in Grey Gardens. Luck was involved, but also an instinct for pursuing inherently compelling and unpredictable situations. In an April 1963 interview with Mark Shivas, the brothers key clements of the explained Showman, in the process delineating philosophy that would guide future films, Plus X film pushed’ to 1,000 ASA didn’t feel overly grainy; whenever possible, no attemptwould be made to elicit acting; the modus operandi would involve a »rous insistence on not directing or controlling the subjects: In the interview, the broth an ambitious film project: ave plan najor fil An initial idea for a feature involved working life on a whaling ship, recalling Moby-Dick (Junker, 1969, p. 108). Another early plan involved following a single pregnant woman. The ambitions of Maysles Films are clarified by their reference to the photo exhibition The Family of Man, curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 19. The Family of Man encompassed the globe, selecting over $00 photographs fi om a pool of nearly two million submissions, with photographers from over sixty countries, Yet this all-embracing vision was precisely what the Maysles abandoned in Salesman for a look through a keyhole into one very specific set of rooms ~ the gritty rooms of life on the road. The finished film could have been one submission to The Family of Man, but it also seemed to topple the conception that a total perspective was a practical or desirable goal. By 1963, British documentarian Derrick Knight had used elements of spontaneity and synched sound, in an admittedly fictionalised format, for A Time to Heal, his account of convalescent Welsh coal miners. Knight's film borrowed both the lightweight equipment and some of the early 1960s notions of North American documentarians (Russell, 2010, p. 45); it also maintained a traditional focus on ‘social documentary’ in British national cinema. While Maysles Films continued to follow celebrities for shorts and work-for-hire films throughout the mid-1960s, the brothers began to look elsewhere for subject matter. David Maysles elaborated in a 1966 interview with Jonas Mekas: ‘This story will have something the other films we did till now didn’t have = it will be because it isa good story, but not because it’s about a “famous person.” Itwill be a person and a story that nobody knows anything about’ (Beattie, 2010, p. 36). Reality, vérité, actuality, truth and all that The Maysles brothers screened Showman at a now-legendary 1963 Lyon conference organised by the French national broadcasting system Radiodiffusion-Télévision Frangaise. Roberto Rosellini complained that it was shapeless anti-art, while Louis Marcorelles declared it among the ‘great films’ he'd seen since the war, noting that the film-makers ‘create without theories, according to a glorious American tradition’ (McElhaney, 2009, p. 8; Beattie, 2010, p. 10). Also on hand in Lyon were many other pioneers, including Drew. I Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Leacoc acock, the Québécois Michel Brault, and the French film-makers and Rouch clashed in person at the conference, as Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane summarise in A New History of Documentary: Both of them were hoping to fir ite ipevficialicanventie daily living. Rouch souor ity. ( nd Rouch’s notion of cinéma vérité foregrounded the presence and process of the film-makers and even mixed fact with fiction, Chronicle of a Summer, the landmark collaboration of Morin and Rouch with Raoul Coutard, Roger Morillére and Brault, for example, features one scene in which their sound recordist and cameraman debate the politics of Algeria with the film’s subjects. The film shows its subjects commenting on a screening of the film itself, exemplifying the provisional truth-status of cinéma vérité as a form of ongoing research. ‘What interests me’, said Morin, “is not a documentary that shows appearances bur an active intervention to cut across appearances and extract from them their hidden or dormant truths’ (Rouch, 2003, pp. 252-3). Rouch’s restlessness mains satisfying — the ending of Chronicle of a Summer contains a meditation on the film’s failur “We wanted to make a film of love, bur it’s turned out an impersonal kind of film, of reaction from reaction, which isn’t necessarily sympathetic.’ The film’s avant-garde project of chipping away at artifice (‘this film, unlike normal cinema, reintroduces us to life’) exists in tension with certain acknowledged impossibilities. The term coined for the Maysles’s more observational mode of film-making, ‘direct cinema’, is often taken for a doomed belief in an objective vision beyond a ifice and intervention. In a 1964 profile by Maxine Haleff, Albert Maysles rejected Here, immediacy sounds like 1 obtainable goal; everything, would have looked the same had the camera not been present. Such impossible statements must be historicised as an allergic and overly artificial styles of film- reaction to what felt like phoney making, especially those in mid-1960s Hollywood. Dave Saunders (2007, p. 75) also has linked the idealism of direct cinema to the Transcendental tradition of American philosophy, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson's passage abou becoming ‘a transparent eyeball’ ina t moment of insight: “Iam nothing; I sce all’. Other statements Alb Maysles made to Haleff, however, sound more practical and complicated. In trying to describe ‘how active a role we take’, he likened the camera to a ‘non-directive therapist’ and a ‘real person listening’, explaining that ‘because the observation is one where the observer is really interested in what's going on, it makes hima kind of participant. So, in that sense, not all of it is just going in one direction — from the person who's being filmed out to everybody. There is a bounce-back ..." (Beattie, 2010, p. 15). Sometimes acknowledged, sometimes repressed, reflexivity always crops up, even if direct cinema’s practical methods were eclectic and its outlook remained Emersonian and overtly anti- theoretical. Ina 1965 interview, James Blue asked Albert Maysles, “Do you feel that in your films you get complete objectivity? Do you pretend to present “reality” per se?” The answer was critical: ‘Absolutely not. It would be deadness of some sort if we did thar. We are filming human beings’ (Beattie, 2010, p. 25). He always intuited that his camera shapes and moulds its subjects rather than simply reflecting them. In practice, Maysles Films in the 1960s and 1970s tended increasingly towards inclusiveness of modes. And in retrospect, Salesman, Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens seem more personal than objective, more the visions of fluttering moths than offlies on the wall. Taken togethe with reflexive str the films suggest in ‘asing ease te gies such as showing the camera, revealing the editing equipment and depicting inte! actions with subjects. As Albe ‘ ert puts it, * seame puts it, “I think it became more obvious to us as time went on that we include something of David and me to give comfort to the viewer The fact that many decisive choices made in Salesman and Gimme Shelter can be ascribed to the collaboration between David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin in editing alters how these films may be interpreted, in defiance of auteur theories orientated to single directors. For his part, David Maysles conceived of the assembly processiin.te f 4 . process in terms of what is ‘not cut in’ rather than what is ‘cut our’ “Obviously w : ¢ biased about what we do put in,’ he said. Again, that’s why [object to the word “truth” (Beattie, 2010, p. 62 : Clearly, tension existed between stripping away artificial constraints in filming and reinscribing selection during editing — as well as between the autonomous zones of cinematography and montage. Theoretically unstable bur ere ese ‘atively fecund, these practices were shot through with paradoxes and ev oe n inconsistencies that ailed three times to prevent the production of masterpieces, ‘Something that's better than Hollywood’ ie Salesman departed from the emphasis of Robert Drew Associates on well-known figures facing public crises, In its focus on working people and from the Maysles’s own celebrity-focused films of the mid-1960s: What's Happening!, Meet Marlon Brando (1966), With Love from . Truman (1966), MGM Press Junket (1966) and Dali's Fantasi Dream (1966). Several of these films contain hints of the : ic breakthrough to come, Meet Marlo Brando was the first Maysles film fully edited by Charlotte Zwerin. What's Happening! contains a vital sequence considered a precursor to Salesmur in its unexpected emphasis on ordinary live : if : While the Beatles played live on The Ed Sullivan Show at NBC studios in Midtown Manhattan, the Maysles brothers we brothers went out to a nearby apartment buildling and filmed a New York family watching the Fab Four on television, \ counterpoint to this scene occurs 11 Salesman when a Bible-buying, couple in Florida has a muzak version of the Beatles’ "Yesterday" playing as background music, the customers once again self scoring the film. This time the record is eerily warped. Wonderful footage of the Beatles goofing around with the sounds of their own voices on David Maysles’s instant-playback sound equipment and John Lennon's impressed account of synched sight and sound stand as reminders that, while non-fiction film-making techniques were already matters of fierce internal debate among documentarians, the public still had no clear conception of how new technologies were changing what could be seen and heard. With Love from Truman, a short film about Truman Capote, fed Salesman in the specific sense that Capote’s editor at Random House, Joe Fox, suggested that door-to-door salesmen might make a good subject for a film. Capote had recently invented a new literary form, the ‘non-fiction nove with I Cold Blood. With Love from Truman, along with Showman and What's Happening!, shows that direct cinema was keeping pace with the New Journalism in elevating elements of real life into the kind of art that writer Gay Talese later Would call “The Literature of Reality’. These belletrists also provide a historical context that further undermines the idea of direct cinema as clinically objective. Like Capote and Talese, w ho often used third- person narration rather than injecting themselves into their stories, the Maysles brothers limited their intrusions into their stories; also like Capote and Talese, they defined their art in opposition to the staid journalism of the day, deploying techniques drawn from fiction to increase intimacy and shorten the distance to their subjects. Other New Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson made themselves characters in their stories, bur all of these writers were after poetic and subjective effects. The implicit al raument was that there might not be anything else, especially since with its clumsy ‘Voice of journalism and traditional documentar Doom’ narration, could seem like a particularly out-of-touch, establishment fiction when it came to rapidly spiralling events.In Cold Bloo e a Id Blood hides its author Presence in ways that sometimes show through the seams of its third-person narrative, as when its subjects are said to be confessing to a ‘friend’, a ‘visitor’, an ‘acquaintance’ or a‘ F, Juaintance’ or a ‘journalist’. Roughly analogous moves exist in the editing of Sak sman at spots where it’s clear that the film-makers? presence has been (sometimes rather awkwardly) removed Concluding that these narrative strategies are evidence of an attempt to project a false omniscience appears even less plausible when the, Maysles made clear to Blue in 1965, the goal was a nev ria feature film, a novel fe : mastyticfced literature and the film of the era are seen in conversation, i m of drama, nota documentary defined in any traditional sense: : Although Gimmie Shelter and Grey Gardens would increasingly abandon the more Capote-like style of Salesman, that made a as always intended as novelistie more than journalistic. ‘Our work is close to fiction because it’s very subjective,’ David Maysles said to Robert Phillip Kolker in 1971, ‘it's a long way from new paper reporting of an event’ (Beattie, 2010, p. 5 Non-preconception and chance da sles’s excite b i Maysles’s excitement about finding a story through the film- ma ing process itself recalls Robert J. Flaherty’s overall method of non-preconception’ (see Mamber, 1974, p. 9). Flaherty’s philosophy of film-making as an act of ‘discovery’ and active collaboration )- with his subjects — pioneered in Nazook of the North (192. informed many later projects that were otherwise radically opposed. Another connective thread between more than a few film-makers of and the 1960s — one that can be traced across national boundari one that is of great value to reading Salesman - involved the deliberate cultivation of chance. Unexpected cinema, improvised cinema, or cinema that was ‘uncontrolled’ ~ in critic Stephen Mambe degrees, made a large impact. Chance and accidents could enter and words - or undirected in various ways and to various had entered into cinema before, of course, but now these became deliberately cultivated arenas that changed the conception of film sta direction. In 1965, for example, Albert Maysles would sug: film of radical spontaneity: ‘to meet somebody and begin filming them right away. Just to see what would happen’ (Junker, 1969, p. HLL). Mambi verité to the Italian neorealist Cesare Zavattini, who noted that r traced the concerns of direct cinema and cinéma “Lam interested in the drama of things we happen to encounter, not uc Godard those we plan’ (Mamber, 1974, p. 16). What Jean- called “the possibilities of a new cinema’ had been opened by watching Rouch’s films; in 1962, Godard touted Rouch in Cahiers du Cinéma as an exemplary figure in less-controlled cinema including elements of happenstance, spontaneity and improvisation where ‘the film is the search’, and in which, as Peter Wollen (2002, pp. 99, 100) summarises Godard’s position, ‘art could be consonant with chance’. Band of Outsiders (1964) contains a pun on this subject (albeit one encoded in cleverly reflexive meta-fiction) when Anna Karina turns directly to the camera and says: “Un plan? Pourquoi?” In French, plan can also denote a ‘shor’ ~ or the plane of a camera angle — and there's always an angle. The 1965 anthology film Paris vw par ... (Six in Paris) included Montparnasse et Levallois, a collaboration between Godard and Albert Maysles, and Rouch’s ‘real-time’ short, Gare dit nord. Taken together, the two films reflect a ‘French’ acknowledgment ofreflexivity and fictionalisation — verité as a loose and open style. Yet Maysles’s appearance suggests the could be more fruitful than doc concept of serendipity acts as extent to which collaboration rinal purity and how the critical a secret conduit between film-makers often considered in terms of schools of thought or n, Godard attempted the sort of dream Welles had proposed: actors working from a script, filmed by a master of hand-held camerawork in any way he pleased. The film’s plot was and chance: a wom: ational styles. also about randomness an posts letters to two lovers and then visits each after she fears she’s mixed up the envelopes. One of the lovers is an ‘action sculptor’ whose work is b. ased upon including serendipity ation of the sculpture’, The other assume he’s also a sculptor until Maysles, in a characteristically brill when ‘chance enters into the cre. lover is a garage mechanic: we ant decision, pans out to reveal that his own artistry is worked on automobiles, Godard’s titles called Montparnasse et Levalloi and presented Maysles as a co-creator, the kind of collaborative crediting decision that became a signature of M aysles Films as well, Maysles, the ‘greatest cameraman in Americ ‘a’, according to Godard, Was ‘a painter in his way of seeing’ (Vogels, 2005, p. 5; McElhane 2009, pp. 27-8). Godard’s remark remains resonant in d keynotes of Albert Maysles’s camerawork, dynamism which make even Rouch’s innov ative Gare cribing the and movement, du nord feel static by comparison. Calling Albert Maysles an action cinemate film-making action painter or his emphasis on hum apher or a action sculptor sounds farfetched given an figures. But regarding camera movement, the analogy feels durable, perhaps bringing to mind the brushstrokes of a Jackson Pollack - four-dimensional in their inclusion of “real time more than the stillness and immobility of tr When Godard and Cour: ‘aditional documentary, ‘ard turned the camera on the Rolling Stones in One + One (aka Sympathy for the Devil, 1968), they produced a deliberately awkward film that has aged less convineingly than Gimme Shelter, perhaps in part because it imposes too much order and control on its material, is “un action film” The multifarious moment r obvious hi sles Films rom the 3 lms differed yus way in which Mays! Another obvious wa ssmian’s devastating French productions involves politics. Salesntai 2am could hardly be he American Dream cc Serial and cultural resonance is pointed in in alled apolitical, vet the film’s complicated social prance isp ts utter lack of glamour, its absence of fervour, Its d its ac rs’ and its appi ficit of urgency ab s historical nsw its apparent defi gency about ans’ t. As Saunders p. rgues, the received opi hat As Saunders ( p. 2) argues, the received opinion t As Sa 2007, sari | lirect cinema more generally is ‘an uncommitted ds 0 ra politically purposcless vacuum’ ignores too much ven, politically purposcless va about thest sand th n Compared with One + O1 ut these films and thei rent npared with Oxe a o fact it remains a I sar depoliticised, but in Shelter might appear d t | : : aling the true chaos of a multifarious moment, “ fine the e1 he 1960s. I agic Altamont concert, said to define the end of t ne eles appears studied in its avoidance of the cade of civil unrest, riots, Gimme complicated text reve: Salesman, for its part, maelstrom of current events ~ the dec: tests, assassinations and war seem exist, or floats just ests, assassinations a ar seems not to exist, pI a i : ot in late dle the frame, For an American non-fiction film shor i sutside the fr eh + Salesman remains curiously devoid of referer eit social issues. 1966 and early 196 to Vietnam or ev political ‘time-stamps’ et to political ‘time Vietnam or ever ; ‘ This characteristic of the film is particularly notable given the directions that were being pursued sim ously orth America, nultaneously in N is direct re 6 the year inw ng 9 ar in which the shoot 7 In 1967 alone - the yea France and the UR. ‘h r Sales was completed and the marathon process of editing alesman wa ental illness -fiction films about mental ering non-fiction began — two pioneering s, Set state prison for red: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, set in ‘ state pt eed Xi Jarrendale, about an the ciel insane, and Allan King een bia ran I - for disturbed children. That rema :rimental group home fo na oe neiea ennebaker’s Dont Look Back; Chris Marke! P year also included P ote tH th Side of the Pentagon, concerning marches against the rman Wa 's 23rd Ps Branch, a Vietnam- ji Var; rakhage’s 23rd Psalm Bra , Vietnam War; Stan Bral aor e Benefit ofthe ence; Pete: hitchead’s Be ion on violence; Peter W en provoked meditat ; a Bi ubt, about Peter Brook’s political theatre productic oubt, a rk ti recor tery es ith a c » interview session w son, a record of a long Clarke’s Portrait of Jason,street hustler and perform and Godard’ ard’s turn rowari essayistic film-making with 2 or 3 Th vabont ton , 2 bings | Know about Her 1g on real working ‘al advocacy or social Salesmiant would find its s lesman would find its métier elsewhere, fo cusin, people inste: 1 of specific acts of polit commentary, Ye ary, Yet for Saunders (2007, p. 1), direct ci - 1), direct cinema evolved in ‘compelling dialogue with Amer a, abo, eric , about America, in an epoch beset and defined by upheav 2 Performers, Authors, Directors ckly, after the opening sequence in which we're introduced to Very qui Charles MeDevitt, “The the four salesmen — Bri nnan, “The Badge The Rabbit’, and Raymond Martos, “The Bull” Gipper’, James Baker, pped ina breeze-block motel room, and then an office during a meeting with their manager, Kennie Turner. Before five apsed, we're led to understand what this line of work is being made in the Bible business’ - and we see = we find ourselves tray minutes have is all about —*monKennie praising Martos as ‘a produc in front of the other men, who perhaps have not done so well that night and look a little chagrined. Kennie’s frankness, and the unconcealed depression of the salesmen during his talk in front of what looks like a national or regional sales meeting, is partly a product of a time before people could imagine themselves as reality TV stars or film celebrities. Because Salesman was such a novelty, few of the subjects, especially the housewives and Bible customers (but even those who were more accustomed to performing their routine on cue), understood how all this would look (on this era of ‘relative innocence’, see Vogels, 2005, p. 25). ‘It's fabulous business,’ Kennie tells his decidedly not-fervent listeners, ‘it's a good business. And all [can say to people who aren't makin’ the money: it’s their fault.’ Kennie’s men applaud him after he threatens their jobs; then the salesmen set off in their cars in the snow, having flipped through their stacks of index more or less promising ‘day leads’, ards containing Another round of selling commences somewhere along the Massachusetts turnpike (possibly the area near Spencer or Webster): another failure for Brennan, Buta lively encounter after a successful sale ensues between The Gipper, The Rabbit and two customers, a woman (who appears to be wearing pyjamas) and her aproned mother, who advise them on the independent American entrepreneurial spirit:About eleven minutes of the film have elapsed, and the meaning of Salesima sman as an American story has been established. Being a salesman is a way for ordinary = Americans to work their way free of office life and into independent prosperity, doing work that they ean believe in. The absurdity lies in the Mid-American Bible Company's melding of Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ; the poignancy lies in the dramatic irony of seeing this vision dim and fail for Paul, the apostle of salesmanship at the crus of the film. The possibility exists that these women have purchased the Bible simply to encourage the men in their chosen profession as salesmen. Play-acting The two women, like the salesmen during the pitches, like Kennie during his sales meeting and like his employees during their applause, are performing. The woman’s mother, in particular, enjoys meeting the camera directly with her eyes. One theory, developed by Pauline Kael, was that the Maysles brothers were simply con men and that their subjects were really actors. Reviewing Ginune Shelter asa scinéma-vérité sham’, Kael also ridiculed Salesman: “Would audiences r cill overtones in Salesman the act to the Arthur Miller-Eugene O”) same way if they understood how much of it was set up and that the principals were play acting?” The film-makers fired back ~ *No actors Were used in Salesman’, no events were ‘manufactured’ for the cinema.!" Both of the scholars who have made book-length critical studies of the Maysles's films, Jonathan B. Vogels and Joe MeEthaney; agree that Kael’s claims are confused. Kael wanted to develop a larger rhetorical question: ‘If events are created to be photographed, is the movie that records them a documentary, or doe it function in a twilight zone?’ Of course, this is not even wrong all films are framed, shot and edited in ways that involve countless choices, each one choking off the infinite possibilities of reality in a specific and permanent sense. Non-fiction film might well function in a twilight zone, bur isn’t that a precondition of its existence? Why is this bad? Within the tradition of cinéma vérité, Edgar Morin took up similar questions in his essay on Chronicle of a Summer when he referred ro ‘the changeover from real time to cinematographic time’, This was due to the impossibility of filming all the time, and to the ‘more treacherous’ problem of being foreed to ‘make a selection”during editing (Rouch, 2003, pp. ). More recently, the documentarian Errol Morris made somewhat similar claims in his 2011 book Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography: When you take a picture, you're cropping it by nature of picking one frame over another. The whole act of creating a photograph is an act of cropping reality’ (p. 165). We're always watching something actively selected and artfully arranged = the deception, if there is one, would involve the premise that anything else is possible. For sophisticated viewers, the existence of footage itself implies the camera’s presence — and, therefore, of the ‘cropping and framing of reality — regardless of whether film-makers put images ‘ame. In a 1964 review of What's Maurice Wiggin called the of themselves into the f Happening!, Maysles’s style ‘the self-effacing tec hnique that masquerades as nonexistent’, yet th alarm (cited by Haleff in B his wasn’t any major source of attic, 2010, p. 7 We see a collaborative artistic process emerging in Sales between the subjects and the film-makers, through a series of nan, ad-hoc, open-ended and unpredictable performances, and between the film- makers themselves, through a series of choices involving shooting, recording and editing This way of viewing Salesman makes the film more inviting, open and complex than if itis taken to be a simple reflection or representation of some supposedly pre-existing, uncomplicated ‘reality’ that just happened to be captured on film, The film-makers imposed a host of limitations on collaboration, less obviously in shooting and more blatantly in editing, that make the subjects’ points of view very different from the overall tone of the film, of course. It is equally useful to refuse to solve the problem of performance in Salesman by imposing any simple differentiation between acting and not acting, especially when the camera is recording the worki is life of a person who performs ‘a song and dance’ in living rooms, We know enough from watching Paul Brennan to comprehend that his act is w earing thin, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that we ever see him when he’s ‘nor performing’, or what this might mean, A more intriguing possibility exists, which is a i p, eur es like actors, film that reveals Americans working at playing their roles like but who are not allowed to confess (or even necessarily admit to themselves) that the act és an act. Salesmanship represents ne ; American problem par excellence, since it is by ne means serena the salesman himself knows if he’s “doing what you believe in life’. If he does know that he doesn’t believe anymore, this truth ms remain hidden, from others, from oneself - that’s more or less the core of Paul’s problem. The issue of Paul’s performance in Salesman recalls Edgar Morin’s comment, regarding the topic of acting in x Chronicle of a Summer, that ‘each person can only express. since through a mask, and the mask, as in Greck tragedy, both disges and reveals, becomes the speaker ... fin te film] each one was able vo be more real than in daily life, but at the same time more false? (Rouch, 2003, p. 263). This true falseness or false trueness isn't some trick or con by the film-makers, and it isn’t designed to alienate the Despite his radically dissimilar methods and ewer from the subje conewally ‘opposed point of view on the role of the camera, Morin reveals a humanism relevant to Salesman: “the viewer imi himself to be less alien to his fellow man, less icy and inhuman, less encrusted ina false life’ (Rouch, 2003, p. 232). e Informer ; ferirnaoee in non-fiction film could be viewed as a form of self- gas self-inscription on a film by its subjects. Roland Barthes, ire of the Text (1975, p. 66), described what he called a vocal and gestural imprint seripti in The Ple ‘writing aloud? or “carnal stereophony”. that he found active in cinema. So too do the perf fiction film become a sort of rext, When a Sufesonart book was published in 1969 by the New American Library, it presented a “i (it cannot be called a straight transcript) in which the images of the mother in her apron and the daughter in her pyjamas appeared toa national mass-market paperback readership, and in which their reenplay ‘mances in non- words appeared as a screenplay. The book also adds *S , Scene Settings’ by Paul Zimmerman, Zimmerman’s scene settingsreliable, contain information that is not readily apparent in the film, The Bible in the openi ig scene is *Fabrikoid (washable and outlasts leather 4 to 1)’; Brennan is “fifty-six years old + With a ‘pleasant, open face” (Maysles, Maysles and Zwerin, 1969, p. 12). The scene between the sale: men and this daughter-mother pair, in which American individualism is discussed with such sharpness, has this gloss from Zimmerman: ‘The mother, tough and skeptical, is wryly amused by the salesmen’s con-job’ (ibid., p. 25). Seen as ‘writers* (two of many) who contributed ‘dialogue’ to the film’s ‘script’, these women’s ideas resonate throughout the film. Especially the daughter's thoughts about getting ‘away from companies’ and “people over you’. Is this possible? Is it desirable? Why do Americans feel this specific need? What happens to people who determine to stick with this dream? Paul Brennan’s collaboration with the film-makers seems most accurately read as a spontaneous and ey hifting form of self- scripting, He’s not a professional actor, he’s not being directed, but he is forever performing a mixture of routines. gags, songs, jokes and near-monologues, Even his use of silence inscribes something telling, into the film, His timing is impeccable in the diner scene that follows the “get away from people over you" encounter, (The Rabbit suggests that Paul sometimes rehearsed his various routines in the mirror at the motels, an idea that haunts the final images of the film.!!) The diner scene comprises over a minute of awkward silences, cigarette smoking, whistling and a devastating thought begun by The Rabbit: ‘Now these people are funny. They make you laugh sometimes. They “re, you know ...” He puts his face in his hands, The Rabbit is too kindly or too fatigued to complete the sentence. Paul stares down at the table, stroking his chin, lost in unhappy thoughts, framed with a dramatically ironic image of Santa Claus, part of the diner’s Christmas display. Nobody wants to pursue The Rabbit's remark, Paul breaks the silence with his ‘dear me, dear me’, blows his nose and announces, “If you'll excuse me, gentlemen . Tgotta go.’ In that moment, he sounds a lot like Jack Lemmon, exe see Paulin his ear pursuing day lead First he supplies Meese ot ry this one. Maybe Mrs Rafferty is home. sheoretically we understand that the samera is xe holding it. Yet Brennan's the type Io might well alk: eis way to himself Then he breaks into son repeating an earlier scene ~*Wish'd I were a rich helpful exposition: Give it a try anyway? Th ; present and that somebody must be 2, repeating a line from ' Mm = but here embi t darkly with an improvised line not n’ — but he 01 git darkly with r ma taken from Fiddl R hen I w n n’ round this l U en Ty tb aker iddle 8 nic jumble of land.’ Whar follows is a confusing and grimly con in a outbursts that combine -ty of voices and styles: and his life, mixing together a variety of voices Se ss — were they made to elimin: re f Paul directly minate footage o 2 ere they made to eli veral cuts — were . Wi ow")? = » Albert and/or David Maysles (‘shut the window n : ia cha nth r s ki r thar this performance ng’ car radio mt na ar tha F anda ahas gone on somewhat longer than the episode we film, The logic of this sequi revers see in the finished rence Is confusing, but we can attempt to ngincer Paul’s train of thou; remarks by Albert Maysles ight here. From subsequent we know thar several of Brennan’s heroes were Jewish, but in this sequence he mangles his touchstone from a ‘shit land’ because of his lack of wealth. This thought brings him to an uncharitable mimicry of his Irish customers and to their own resistance His offensive Fiddler to sing that he’s in to travelling salesmen, and cross-gender put-on Irish brogue as poor Mrs Rafferty unsertles our understanding of Paul from Jamaica Plain, Boston, and emph who knows ‘I’m not home" as an Irish-American asises his dislocation as a man - As does his continuation into a botched but fascinating rendition of John Ford's 1935 The Informer. In that film, Victor MeLaglen plays Gypo Nolan, an ex-IRA member who, drunk, broke and pressed for money by his girlfriend, sells out a friend in the Irish rebellion to the British Army for £20 reward money. Brennan's remarks about the the Irish taking away from him are they do reveal the psychology of English not paying his bills and not to be found in Ford's film, but a salesman who has latched on to this movie as a representation of his own life. P; between the demands of his boss to k workin, aul feels crushed become ‘a producer’ and his lass Irish customers, the folks he’s selling, and selling, out, by placing $50 Bibles in their homes, Paul’s identitication with Gypo ~ Ford's poignant Judas, who betrays his own people, and who, when drunk, announces his presence by shouting his own name ~ is strong announcing his own arrival on a and then puns his way out of a very someone = himself? Albert Maysles? other neighbourhood *beauts’? ~ of the fact of his own existence (‘I'm here’). ‘Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person,’ Linda Loman remarks of her husband Willy in Act One of Arthur Miller's play Death of a Sale David Maysles are doing just thar, but Brenn Ford’s film twists the knif and bitter. He mocks himself by sales call with Gypo’s name bleak corner by tinfarmin Mrs Rafferty? one of the man. Albert and an’s own rendition of This passage in Salesman can be viewed saki f confession: Br feels his own Gypo-ness or Judas a kind of conte: : Brennan feels his own Gypo-ne J e ble sense, since also ‘inform re on the ke role ina double sense, since he’s also ‘informing’ here thical dubiousness of the whole Bible-selling scheme, informing I ust the wh ible-sell e, infec ie i ¢ Mid-Ame ble Com, d, int re private zone of he Mid-American Bible Company and, in the more private is car, informin; fe Ir st informing on at least infc his fellow salesmen, or a his car, informing on i self as a salesman. The allusion to The Informer also intorms on i asasa tl nerican Dream, since throughout that sypo is haunted by he American Dream, since throughout that film Gypo is f ef a am, offering £10 one-way fares from Ireland to Americ street posters Whar ifa guy’ eposited in ; wound up deposite sem er involved selling something that made him feel like a se he family did immigrate to Boston, and what if jina shit land where his employment options Cuts 7 Following his peculiar monologue in the ca vata e f : use In the: a 2s down the steps of the ho at home, and shuffles dow ro car, Paul fails to find anyone SA adifina hove silkil Maysles’s camerawork and Zwerin’s editing have subtly thet t \ ene, of P. "s appearance the theme, built up from the opening scene, of F aa s m r oe il sa sled through the street a on; here, a kid dragging a sled ¢ amidst childrens here, eta another packing and throwing a snowball, The Rabbit, me has hed yet ers he McDonald household. has notched yet another sale, at the McDona usehold a i ft 3 as teased The The sequence is interrupted just after Mr McDonald has tease Rabbit in his own put-on Irish accent, asking ftir mbes i ‘ren’. Ay Methane has noted through arf detective work segment of film represents the most obvious example 0 makers attempting, to excise themselves from the Pi irre rings the MeDonalds’ doorbell, whereupon The Ra Someone sand says, ‘It's like a railroad station q to unseen standing figur ‘ ° ne When the McDonalds’ caller, their “best pel Mee enters the room, an arm clad in a white shirt helps he enon sequence is not clear, but it’s probably the arm of N ea . per ‘I a thar of David Maysles. Zwerin’s two curs here sisi jo se - “ e 0 show Mrs Wadja being surprised by and introduced ae Glarmake y, 2009, pp. 48-9). Mrs Wadja drops hints kers (McEIhane, the film-makers () ) * ~ about not buying ‘another’ item from salesmen, and tmisrememiers the premise of a brutal joke we're about ‘the Scotchman and the Jew and the get a beating for somethin; we glimpse the Jad not to hear Irishman who were gonna ”. The scene becomes wobbly again when shadow of the room’ ceiling light fixture floating like a flying saucer, due to the effect of the sun-gun attached to Albert Maysles's camera for filming in low light. The Rabbit cracks his head on the light fixture when he stands up after making his sale, then he reconvenes with Brennan, who has gotten ‘no pitches’ in. We hop from The Rabbit to Brenn an, who drives through trees heavy with snow to frantic orchestral radio music as night falls. This ‘score’ lends irony and humour to what is really a miserable drive from his meeting point with ‘The Rabbit, possibly the earlier, or another roadside restaurant, to his sh, Yankee Drummer Inn and Motor House. Brennan discusses the disasters of the day with The Bull, who's watching the Emile Griffith middleweight championship fight on television. The their business well: diner se jared room at the Bull sums up After this, we see The Rabbit and The Gipper conferring in their own room, then we're back with The Bull and Paul, who runs female Irish routine that will be performed end of the film: another again poignantly at the ts his r is reward on the other er allows humour and laughs along, but tells him of mind for their The Bull shares Paul’ ¢ ; thar his negativism is putting him in a bad frame . : You'll be all rig ht for Chicago,’ upcoming sales meeting in Chicago. says. we 5 ching a train to the sales meeting, while p T ee Pau I t iE aul e is boss's ys f synch o rage n the moving his boss’s voice plays out of 5} We age of Paul in the hi ice pla B ears to hear ain car, In this interpolated piece of sound, Paul appears t Keane ss, he’s got nobody to blame but y, ‘Ifa guy's nota suc Kennie saying, “Ifa guy's ssa “utting drags us forward into the midst of the Chicag himself.” Inte ea i str rey, radically ales meeting and then back in time to Paul's train journey, amy rd ece SI ation. “ompressing the timeframe to a short piece of visual inform “The sales m al completion to the first part The sales meting, which forms a logis f the film, marks the spot salesmen will be told by the » spot where the salesmen wil y of the film, n he sp eh “designer and theologic; J consultant’ of $50 Bibles, Dr ae a Feltman, Vice President, Consolidated Book Publishers, that thes hat com i -tting of Bibles and the that comes from the selling of Bibles and the getting of Bibles and i e “ ness’. reading of Bibles is definitely identified with the Father's busine name n’s text is Luke 2:49: ‘Wist ye not Ina move beyond belief, Feltma is "iia that lam about my Father's business?" The team applauds.Another cut, and they're playin s poker while Kennie discusses their next move, a sales trip to Florida, Sound and sight In her DVD commentary on Salesman, Charlotte Zwer n noted thar she came under heavy criticism for the train sequence, which appears to stick Kennic’s voice into Paul's mind in a way that mixes up the chronology and wilfully imposes ‘thoughts’ on Brennan In fact, this entire section of Salesman, from Paul's dr ive to the motel to the start of the sales meeting at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, represents a tour de force of film editing with a few embedded mysteries that have never been entirely unravelled. The sequence also raises non-fiction’s most nettlesome questions, Bill Nichols, in his 1991 book Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, writes that documentaries ‘do not differ from fictions in their constructedness as texts, but in the representations they make" (p. 111), Editing is the fundamental site of ‘constructedness’ in a non-fiction film, and, as McElhaney notes (2009, p. 49), editing is ‘the most obvious clement of imposed structure and meaning’ in Salesman. The first puzzle in this sequence is relatively minor but telli and it occurs during Paul’s drive to the Yankee Drummer Inn afte hort ndous day. The orchestral track that accompanies his journey has been detached from the images we see on screen. It appears to be diegetic ~ the audio component of wharever was playing on the radio at the moment ~ but in fact the music is used asa soundtrack for a subtle montage. Shots of Paul driving through a road lined with snowy trees at dusk give way toa shot of a church at night taken from a car as it makes a left turn: the light in the sky has changed, but the music remains continuous. I's no longer diegetic, in other words In a neat sleight of hand, after a shot of the dashboard we appear to le P out of Paul’s car altogether. The next shot following this cut shows a car turning into the parking lor of a motel, at which point the camera finds and then zooms in on the Yankee Drummer sign, We presu pauses or jum continues without any breaks, pauses or j but we accept it without muc so common in fiction fe a signpd (In Gimme flowering in the sequence connecting Roling images of the band rushing away by helicopter. Zwerin hundre ney nut We might believe what we're seeing he the sali hard d room, on the nothing » same orchestral music » we're no longer with Paul, yet the same orch wil ps. This is impossible, h notice, perhaps because this move is ture films. The Yankee Drummer sign is also ature films. ‘ eri be using t signalling the editing techniques Zwerin will be using. -hniques would achieve their full pelter, these techniques wou the a Rolling Stones concert with ‘Nobody ever asks’, DVD commentary on Salesman, ‘how a suggested in he ety minutes.” s of film became ninety eu > are two vignettes of r er Inn after a 1 swapping stories at the Yankee Drummer Inn jesmer i ers Christmastime, Paul and The Bull in one ay’s work around ce The Gipper and The Rabbit in another. Bur if we keey ’ hi ul sl rooms look ure, we'll begin to notice that the two motel roor » furniture, we ; _ alike, The room shared by The Gipper and The Rabbit haswood panelling on the walls; the room shared by Paul and ‘The Bull features white breeze-block. Surely not the same buil ing or the same motel, Another more definite clue involves the boxing match itself. The Bull tells Paul he’s watching Emile Griffith’s middleweight championship bout, The images of the fight suggest the Griffith-Joey Archer middleweight championship fight at Madison Square Garden, on 23 January 1967. (Segments of the television broadcasts of the fight are available on YouTube, and the identity of the two fighters in Salesman can be surmised by their builds and their trunks.!) The January boxing match scene probably happened after the diner would have stowed its Christmas decorations, What's more, the film itself contains evide nee thar the boxing match scene took place in the same Florida motel room that marks Salesman’s very last sequence, and not in the Yankee Drummer at all. Thes design, mirror placement and television screen. The same personal ’ Wwo rooms contain identical wall art, drawers, sink effects, including a portrait of xomebody’s wife or loved one, ean be seen in the same spots underneath the television, During the boxing match scene, we ean see a bag of golf clubs resting in a corner behind the bed on which The Bull is reclining; not exactly what we'd expect to sce ina travelling salesman’s motel room in an an outside Boston in the dead of winter, It is difficult to resist theconelus 1 lusion that later footage of Florida in January has be 1 spliced N to appear as if it is continuous with Massachusetts around the holidays. arlier footage from Zwerin’s sleight of hand here is startling and brilliantly seductive; it also follows the pattern of bifurcating sight and sound set up by the preceding montage of Paul driving to the motel. Wes The Bull siting on the bed. Paul stands up, and his head goes out of the frame. We hear Pa 9 “ fe hear Paul say, “I don’t want to seem negative, but | can't see a g here t see anything here but delinquent accounts.’ The Bull puts his right ha « ce, i tal -_ up to his face, obscuring his mouth. We hear The Bull say tell ya + g, P: ‘ ii im 1 one thing, Paul. You're putting me ina very negative frame of mind for the sales meeting in Chicago.’ The camera : y " tracks over to Paul, who’s standing directly next to the image of the two k age of the two boxers. A cut brings us back down to The Bull, and once again Paul's head our of the frame, We hear Paul say, *You'll be all right for Chiceeo. ‘Ac no point inthis limited, final segment of their exchange dee actually sce the mouth of either man moving, Mamber (1974 ne z suggests that the line looks dubbed in for transitional purpos me we don't see the speaker". Another possibility is that short burst of sound was pulled (not dubbed) from other rushes, then usediney connector between Massachusetts and Chicago. However we re ‘ ; : ad or attempt to reconstruct these editing decisions, the Ci verin’s * , hey speak to Zwerin’s ‘murderous’ process of establishing narrative continuity in the film. The boxing match casts doubt on Zawerin’s claim that the editing process entirely eschewed ‘pulling events out of chronological order’ and ‘juggling’ things out of ‘the 8, 90). But this order the thing was filmed’ (Rosenthal, 1971, pp- passage only increases the view er’s feeling of remaining trapped ina gain. Here, Zwerin world destined to repeat its scenes over and over may have cobbled together footage from various places and times and edited it ro appear as a single ‘representative’ day of selling Stephen Mamber noticed this issue as a more general problem about Salesman in his 1974 notes on the film: “The need for plot development makes the ordering of scenes suspect, and we can legitimately wonder whether the order is actually nonchronological” (p. 167). One of the consequences of this editing decision is that the first instance of Paul’s monologue about pensions appears out of sequence in the film, juxtaposed nicely with The Rabbit's own remark about ‘getting away from pensions’. Of course, one gets the feeling that Paul's Irish routines were a continual, ongoing feature that could have been pulled from any number of motel rooms. ‘These men are trapped in an infernal road movie that, if the editing is reversed-engineered, contains a Mobius strip of time. Ar this weak point in the film, Zwverin finds ways to patch together a story using oddments of sight and sound, string and glue. ain establishing shots, and Al “As | began editing I found I needed ¢went back and got them for me,’ Zwerin explained later in an interview. “I think these shots included things like exteriors of the motel in Boston, and some stuff around the Florida motel’ (Rosenthal, 1971, p. 90). The establishing shot of the Yankee Drummer Inn, overlaid with music, is somewhat similar to the shot of Paul and The Bull overlaid with the sound of their discussion about Chicago. Juxtaposition of footage from a number of different timeframes and sources creates an illusion of seamless, sequential narrative. What we're seeing in this sequence shouldn't be confused with reality or with continuous time. McElhaney (2009, pp. 23, 24) ar that the film-making philosophy of tnon-intervention’ in direct cinema is paradoxical in that ‘the films themselves do not consistently unfold as directly transmuted reality’, and that the ‘ideals of transparency in direct cinema, then, have been impossible to achieve’, The film-makers never consistently claimed to be transmuting reality in any artless fashion ~ David Maysles tended to reject such a premise outright. The ideals of direct cinema might be viewed as the kind of fictions artists need to believe in ¢ der to proceed with their work, or they could be seen as ethical directives that the film-makers followed with exceptions and asterisks. Keith Beattie (2010, Pp. vii) suggests that ‘a strict adherence to an observational direct cinema is not the sole or exclusive characteristic of the films’; because of the film- makers’ need to ‘respond to specific situations and exigencies ... the brothers were willing to restyle and re-inflect — and even abandon = extant principles and unde: standings of direct cinema in their approach to film-making (thereby casting doubt on assumptions concerning direct cinema as a p ‘oscribed set of practices)". Salesman’s excision of its own cinematic apparatus is deliberate but inconsistent, Just once, hovel ng in a motel mirror above The Bull, do we glimpse Albert Maysles and his camera — an isolated but telling image that cannot be forgotten once it is noticed, Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens are even more practical and even less doctrinaire films when it comes to incorporating images of the film-makers and their equipment. As McElhaney (2009, p. 24) notes, in fact ‘the Maysles brothers often make themselves phy scaly present in their films, arguably more so than any other American ' direct-cinema practitioners’, The brothers continued seen this flexible approach to their film-making after Zwerin left her ae as litor, as in the celebrated shot of Edith Bouvier Beale theie film ed am turning the tables on the film-makers and taking photographs o Albert and David Maysles in Grey Gardens (a collaboration with co-directors/film editors Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke). A Maysles Film from 1985, Ozawa, co-directed by tows Froemke and Deborah Dickson, includes footage of the celebrated sking the film- Japanese classical music conductor Seiji Ozawa asking the equ which makers to stop recording at a sensitive point, a request with w bur which they add to the film, It was Zaverin who -utting in Salesman and to film her they compl srated the ideas to show inter generated the ideas nana ote own editing board in Gimme Shelter, reflexive strategies that re us we're watching a film.‘We’ Zwerin’s art erin’ artistic partnership with Maysles Films as a co-author and credited co-cre, es ed co-creator on Salesntant was always openly acknowledged Albert Maysles dislikes the term ‘directo: n i applied to any of his films saying ‘nobody really directs a film in our documenta vy" Zwerin self-described as a‘ y while erin selfdescribed as a ‘co-film-maker" in the opening lines of her DV. a er Vv D commentary, Editors did the back-breaking labour on non-fiction films ~ the shooting for Salesman took weeks but the edi cup rly tw rs ~ th ditors wer ting occu arly two y and many of these editors were women. Zimmermann (1999, pp. 64, 76) suggests that, viewed P ig imate weneral ene the i re general sense, these collaborations tended to be ignored or undervalued despite strong evidence to the contrary: the history of di by individ: With regard to Zwerin and Salesman, the film-makers’ approack co-crediting emphasises collaboration as the basis of authorship, although the fil’s branding as “The Maysles Brothers" Salesmagy” admittedly more auteurish, I's possible that the inherently collaborative relationship between the Maysles brothers chemsel ; ie -d for greater conceptual clarity than was common at the dine f there’s a signature feature of Maysles Films productions, it’s the number of names that appear: Grey Garde ited s has five credi " sha ited directors/co-tilm-makers. From the arly days in Moscow witk Porctak anes y y d ‘ow with baker and Shirley Clarke, to his co-film-making approach with artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Albert Maysles’s modus operandi has remained consistent. Ona later Maysles Films smetaction, he order of crediting shifted further: Lal.ee’s Kin The Legacy of Com (2001) first lists its producer (Susan Froemke) and then its Sho Deb ck i (Deborah Dickson) as directors along ‘with Albert Maysles’, In the late 1960s, the co-crediting approach of Maysles Films would have seemed innovative, even if it didn’t always imply gender equality: Zawerin eventually left Maysles Films because she wanted to produce her own work. The dimensions, latitude and limits of Zwerin’s authorship on Salesman can be surmised from the frank interview Alan Rosenthal conducted with her and published in his 1971 book The New Documentary in Action. The first rushes Zwerin saw ~ footage of Kennie’s pep talk to the salesmen and the road-selling around Boston — terrified” her because ‘nothing was happening’ and things appeared sundramatie and flat’ (Rosenthal, 1971, pp. 8 9), Separated from the filming, and viewing the rushes for quality, Zaverin initially ‘disliked’ Paul Brennan ‘a little bit’, but grew to understand him better after David and Albert explained their feelings about the men, their Boston backgrounds and especially Paul’s belief tin himself as a kind of independent free spirit’ pursuing sthe American dream of independence and wealth and working for oneself", Zwerin and David Maysles began structuring ‘a story about four people’, bur recognised they had ‘started off in the wrong direction’. Gradually realising that they were dealing with ‘a story about Paul’, Zwerin and David Maysles concentrated on the scenes that “had a lor to say about Paul’ and that ‘automatically eliminated a great deal of the other stuff, and the shots of the other salesmen’. Zwerin didn’t want to include the scene of Paul driving around and lost in Opa- Locka, Florida, but concluded that ‘David was right to press for its inclusion’, Zwerin’s use of the word ‘we’ remains consistent throughout the interview, especially when it comes to her descriptions of certain remarkable material left on the cutting-room floor: , and a sequence of Paul going We left out the w scene Al shot early on, to Boston by train but we Te!“We' made the de ade the decision - important in the film - to exclude any delving into private life. : Another ace , nother account of Z,werin’s collaborative authorship on Salesman involves the creation of the rough cut: ities, until fi fome Benmeeh bt 1 so did the overall t Reading this together with Zwerin’s ‘we’ and David Maysles’s ‘w avid Maysles’s ‘w sugge ing c iauests a shifting collaborative bundle that included Zwerin, Giffard [Hovde], Jarvis, David Maysles, ted in ee Albert Maysles and, interpreted in in ded sense, even the salesmen and housewives themselves, through the self-inscription of performance. Zwerin’s account ft first assem! evel mitwasa total sembly, however, uses a passive construction — “It was a total disaster’ — which nonethele ise? hich nonetheless implies her own exertion of power over the film’s final shape. Zwerin’s self. tens -deprecating analysis of the film a y hallmark of a perfectionist prestidigitator examinin . a the ner workings of her own magic tricks: Ir’ intriguing to note that Salesman was being assembled in the same year as Andrew Sarris’s book The American Cinema (1968), in which the critic expanded the auteur theory he'd been working on since 1962. Sarri coherence’ made ‘more likely when the director dominates the sought to explain film art as a ‘meaningful proceedings with skill and purpose’ (p. 30), Yet the meaning of film direction changes in non-fiction made without scripts, actors, rehearsals, sets, marked places for performers to stand, blocking or any prearranged tracks for the camera to follow, Does non-fiction, then, shift at least some of the conception of film art back to the domain of editing rather than directing alone, to montage and neaningful juxtaposition, film editing as film art? Is there a coherence’ in an artistic sensibility based upon a deliberate giving away of control? Probably so, but how do we describe it? Will we ever fully understand exactly who made cach decision in Salesman or . The claim of what exactly this might mean? Scholars differ he Vogels (2005, p. 50) that Charlotte Zwerin exerted ‘creative control” over the film isn’t exactly wrong, it’s simply incomplete. McElhane; sa certain inflection to the images’ that endures in / (2009, p. 3), by contrast, persuasively argues for r y r Ibert Maysles’s work across many different films, The game of auteurship certainly could be extended to David Maysles as well, especially on Salesman, since he was the only one of the three film-makers present at each stage, acting as a combination of producer/researcher/soundman. In fact, both Vogels and McElhaney are very well attuned to the fundamentally collaborative nature of Salesman — Vogels (2005, p. 50) calls the film a ‘combined vision’. The larger problem is the ‘one identified by Zimmermann, the ‘difficulty of theorizing collaborations’ in films where individual authorship is not the modus operandi. For Maysles Films, ‘collaboration was the functional basis of the brothers’ film-making practice” (Beattie, 2010, p. ix).3 Americana Suri cor During a poker game in which Paul defers to Kennie ; because he’ afraid to bet, the sal a jesmen discuss their next project, a trip to Flori : cla that could take them away from home for up to ten weeks. A seagi i ri ; gull floats across frame, and we're there, with Paul singing an rish lullaby’ as he drives past palm trees and oce 1 Beach ina et e. Hsach in a convertible, He acts even more performative than efore calling out the names of movie-themed hotels =*¢ : Humphrey Bogie’ - and pulling f ‘an views of Miami asablanca! faces as he searches for the Hu arches for the Fontainebleau, supposedly because he money in the interested in investing his mon sort, As he stops to stare at the Fontaineble reminded of how the film acts as ‘au, we're a troubled investigation into seekers of wealth who, in reality, have to double-bunk like salesmen-soldiers in the Congress Inn outside of town. (Like the Yankee Drummer motel, the Congress Inn has an inevitably symbolic flair.) ‘I'm living like a king,’ Paul explains to someone on the motel phone in the next scene, and then laughs and rolls his eyes at The Rabbit, who’s sitting on the tiny bed next to him, presumably waiting to use the phone. Glimpses of life ‘after hours’ emerge here ~ Paul’s phone call is followed by shots of the salesmen night-swimming at the pool. Even here, however, the film crew is listening in to Paul’s conversation, which, far from being intimate or revealing, mostly revolves around keeping a safe speed while driving, Ina sign of things to come, Paul tells his listener on the phone that the boys ‘pep him up’. In a decidedly less uplifting scene after the swimming session, Kennie holds a sort of seminar in Bible-selling by play-acting the part of the salesman, while the salesmen attempt toie Me generate obstacles to the sale by play-acting the nerate parts of varioi members of a family, Kennic ke membeneoaiil hard-sell approach = “Do you like it ays. “Then there’s no reason why you shouldn't h something we've seen tried by the 1 ave it —is nor salesmen, who brin, ng wel Er a lighter touch. Kennie’s comfort with hard-edged tactic. i unnerving ~r s— impressive and ninds the salesmen th ; : hat their success in by only one measure. ‘nbesness is Next. P: lext, Paul and The Bull encounter an Irish housekeeper cleaning their 7 their room, and a strange episode ensues in which P. on his mocki null bus brogue. They'r on his mocking brogue. Theyre stangers randomly crossing paths in an American scene straight out of Edward Hoppe : ina Florid a chance meeting a : . motel thousands of miles from either Boston or Ireland he cleaning lady’s Irish accent is re: Ss — he’s lady h accen ki real, while : ' le Paul’s is fake — he appalling slums ppallingly in his clumsy attempr to connect through a gallows joke i gallows joke about his imaginary relative on the ‘force’: We work all our lives, Paul seems to ask and for what, and for whom, and why? To get ae a nice headstone? This line of thinking is the worm in the bud both for Paul and for the film as a representation of dreamers in the New World. A viewer who pays very close attention ro the motel room ccognise that they've seen this place before, poster art during Paul's speech will r with irs characteristic white walls, wall-mounted television, and sink ourside the bathroom, As argued in the previous chapter, om this room was probably spliced into the Yankee 1 Chicago. footage Drummer Inn sequence leading up to the sales conference again: the sameness of all motel rooms, the reiterations Here wea of Paul’s ego-salvaging performances. All of it leading to the sense © that chronology has been jumbled and that we've entered a kind of American limbo in which Paul Brennan is caught or stuck. Next, Paul enters another kind of limbo in the form of Opa-Locka, a maze-like city in which no forward progress appears possible, The city’s Disney atmosphere derives from its strange downtown, modelled as a tourist experience after the 1,001 Nights, its city hall shaped like a mosque, its street names veering from A Baba Ave to Sesame St, Harem Ave and Kandahar St. In a remarkable s the frame when Paul tunes his car radio toa moment, chance ent station playing a muzak version of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ as he ost in this strange only-in-America environment, eventually and winding up back in front of the mosque-like city wanders | driving in circles hall. This is stuff you cannot make up.Later in the motel, when Paul comically vents his frustrations about Opa-Locka, The Bull expands the discussion to the “territory" in general, reminding him, ‘It's not the bum territory, it’s the bum in the territory.” But Paul's experiences of selling, from the ‘shit land” outside Boston to this sunnier but equally depr ing locale, suggest not only that ‘bum territory” exists, but also that in the landscapes We're seeing here, there’s nothing but ‘bum territory’, a world of flimsy motels, cheap diners, hostile or indifferent living rooms, and Florida towns that appear to be nothing more than collections of suburbs, canals, railroads, airports and g aveyards. ‘Merry Christmas!” shouts the television to the salesmen as they settle into their single beds. The Gipper rips the plug out of the wall just as a child's voice begins to sing “Silent Night’, cutting off the word “holy” before it can be uttered. In the following sequence, the salesmen and Kennie eat breakfast ourside by the pool, but Kennie ruins the meal by attacking his best ‘producer’, The Bull, slapping him on the back and cutting him down with the devastating comment ‘you eat like you're successful’, From here, Paul, back in his convertible, continues the theme of bad vibes about the Bible-selling business, pref cing his explanation of the group's nicknames with a witty travesty of the New Testament’s notion of discipleship: ‘Many are called but few are chosen.” Reintroducing the four men with Paul’s elaborations on their animal names might feel like a strange thing to do at this stage of the film, but intercutting his descriptions with sales calls illus nicknames: The Rabbit is impulsiv ates the and energetic; The Bull has stamina and power; The Gipper is a ‘straight man’, unemotional and able to take advantage ‘in any circumstances? an American winner, in other words. (The real George “The Gipper’ Gipp was a famous college football player whose heroies for the University of Notre Dame became a touchstone for Knute Rockne, the coach whose ‘win just one for The Gipper’ motivational speech would later be quoted by Ronald Reagan.) But Paul's reintroductions of the cast and the snippets from their sales calls reinforce the idea of time and lives nd to end ning in circles, Florida being a repetition of Boston, bour : income ‘ The Gipper a family in something less than a pot of gold. As Tie eve enti . vn payment on a Bible ~ leading “ mising a down payn with no cash into pro' 1 down. nn i one of the bleakest moments in the film, when Paul visits t ) yl er’s district anager — to collect the money, posing as The Gipper’s ie manage a i ehter. Then we see Paul - Zwerin jumps to Paul's undercutting laughter. Then we Pa The Badger, whose nickname needs no explanation ~ ae , : ; 2 yorman, an elderly woman « sells a Bible toa Mrs Chrissea Gorman, wares, He sells a Bi nan ase a who lives ‘all by myself” and who, we might imagine, wele i : ; i Si anion, an into her home for company, Then he visits a sanitav salesm, y- Then he vis ae worker and his wife, praising them for a ‘sense of humour most people lack’, a oe Has Pauls luck taken a turn for the better? It would seem i : cribes how his. in the latter sequence, while closing a sale, he describes h mother beat him; then he breaks down with a flat tyre after his slippery and mani e performance posing in sunglasses as The ery and manipulative performance posing nglasseGipper’s manager. In a motel room sales post-mortem, Paul reveals his negativity about his home town, Boston, s ngling out an old nightmare zone for selling in Dorchester — Gallivan Boulevard. Windows are shut against him and doors refuse to open more than a crack. One encounter goes so badly that his would-be customer, using a terrible and humiliating pun drawn from the man’s own line of work as a vacuum cleaner salesman, tells him that a man who can't ‘scoop ‘em up’ probably needs a ‘new bag’. Another customer — Mrs. O'Connor, who, much to Paul’s confusion, isn’t Irish but Polish ~ gets a grumpy and nearly hostile hard sell from Paul, and responds with awkward, angry silence, telling him, “Not ar this particular time.’ Paul continues to badger her, at one point making despairing direct eye contact with the camera, and finally leaving in a huff after his failure to break her down, Still another sales call, this time with The Rabbit, results in a collision with a housewife who tells them that “I don’t have the time, and I don’t have any money.” Afterwar s, Paul snaps; the birdsong and trees surrounding, his convertible have turned into a personal hell. ‘This is worse than New England," he fumes. ‘It’s gotta be changed around,’ Paul hectors on. From now on, he says, ‘I'm workin’ the way [wanna work, and when, the way I wanna go out.’ ‘Relax,’ The Rabbit says. ‘I might as well be shooting myself in the sun,’ Paul says. he Rabbit refuses Paul’s invitation ro join him in his outburst, telling him ‘good luck’ in a polite tone as his colleague storms off. At another diner, Paul sorts through his sales leads, then stares off into the distance, looking totally defeated. Paul's increasingly bad feedback loop is counterpointed by a ‘The husband of the couple pl suc sful sale by The Bull. ys him a strangely warped and oddly poignant orchestral recording of the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ as he fills out his sales slip. The wife follows him out to his car in her hair curlers, and, in another Hopperesque moment, the camera lingers on an image of the empty carport and lonely aluminium porch screen door, The Bull returns to the motel and mocks Paul's new haircut, while Paul holds up his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate a day of zero sales. ‘L ean’t get any action out there, he says. ‘I'm nor thinking negatively but ... ‘na revealing moment, Paul relates the story of atrempring to sell a Catholic encyelopedia to a single mother: Although we've seen him harry and wheedle prospective buyers, what's bothering him now is that he’s selling a product that his struggling customers can’t afford. He cares about some of the people he’s encountering day after day: ‘Four kids. Hit her with the bue You know, it’s ridiculous, No husband. I don’t know where the hell a week. Too much money. her husband went.’ The Bull sorts through his receipts. He's tried his. hest to advise Paul, but now he’s at a loss for words. ‘I may be wrong Paul says. Then Paul falls silent, watching The but I can’t see it here, Bull counting his sales. Bibles, cookware, safety razors, insurance , During the montage-like sequence explaining their animal nicknames, a housewife ina pakamac explains to one of the / salesmen that she’s ‘lucky to be eating right now’. Apart from Paul’s wistful look at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach and the sales meeting at the luxury hotel in Chicago, the film shows comparatively little wealth to which we can compare the relative levels of comfort or poverty in which both the Bible salesmen and their customers live. We don’t see anything of the salesmen’s home lives or hear about their annual incomes. At the Chicago sales meeting, a man who claims he’s going to make $50,000 in the coming year sounds a little deludeds by comparison, typical annual earnings for a Mary Kay cosmetics representative ranged from $18,000 to $25,000 (Pluenneke, 1970, p. 19). We see that the salesmen share rooms with little or no privacy, and we meet housewives who don’t have $5 on hand. “We're all up to here,’ Paul nnot tells the vacuum cleaner salesman and his wife, who just ¢ afford that dollar a week and who probably ‘gave their name at the church’ out of pure politeness.This sense of financial desperation seems to suggest that something has gone rotten in ‘The Great Society" proclaimed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, The America of Salesman is more like the one described by Joan Didion (2006 [1967], p. 67) in ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’: vas not holding. It ptcy notices and mnouncements and con eports of casual ki and andals who mi Salesman is not a film about poverty in a prosperous society, or about what the social thinker Michael Harrington termed ‘The Other America’. Despite a mid-1960s boom, around sixteen million people in America were ‘one illness, one accident, one recession away from being poor again’ (Harrington, 1971, p. xiii). These salesmen are cating (one is even eating as if he were a success), but the idea of ‘living like a king’ is a bad joke to them. Like Roger Miller's ‘King of the Road’, each is a ‘man of means by no means’. What was door-to-door selling like in the 1960s? By 1962, “direct selling’ (an industry term that resonates oddly with ‘direct cinema’) was a $2.5 billion industry, about 2 per cent of US retail volume, growing to around $3-S billion by the early 1970s (Pluenneke, 1970, p. 11; Osk, 1966, p. 34; ‘Marketing: Knock Knock’, p. 28).!" Direct selling was begun by Nutrilite in 1941 and popularised by Amway from 1959, marketing goods and services directly to consumers in homes and workplac the business were the Fuller Brush Co., Electrolux vacuum cleaners (perhaps Paul's failed sale who ‘scoops em up’ worked for Four big names in von Products cosmetic ‘Jectrolux) and Rexall Drug’s Tupperware. Direct selling had ‘made’ products like safety razors and pressure cookers, both of which were defanged of dangerous reputations by in-house demonstrations (*Marketing: Knock-Knock’, 1963, p. 28). Were Bibles really any different? According to a 1966 article, Bible sales were ‘enjoying a boom that has caused the corporate . yer since “everyone is cup of its major publishers to runneth over selling virtually the same book, competition is a matter of typography, binding and paper’ (Thackray, 1966, pp. 39-40). Around 8.5 million Bibles were sold in the US in 1963, ona steadily rising rate increasing about 10 per cent each year = perhaps as much as 5 per cent of the annual receipts for the publishing industry as a whole, The Southwestern Company, a direct sales Bible distributor based in Nashville, Tennessee, was doing $20 million in sales by 1972 = its sales force, known for their “Southwestern mystique’, worked up to cighty hours per week -tors, without the (excluding Sundays) as independent cont benefits of social security deductions or workers’ compensation (Hyde, 1985, pp. 140, 158, 159). The publisher of the Bible depicted in Salesman competed with some 5,000 religious bookstores nationwide, as well as mail-order outfits and department stores. ‘If there is anything to be ashamed of in the Bible business,’ one publisher noted, s and the n ‘o-door selling, where prices are outrageo tis d joy is to tell women (who are considered more ‘ar $25 to $30 is certified or nus’ One favorite obnox vulnerable than men) that the Bil ffered ied by the local cl ish, Actually, anyone can secure a Te arch or ps ni le Society, whic h even gives aw Bible for $1 from the American Bit hou: fay, 1966, p. 40) nds every year. (Thack ‘The $50 Bibles in Salesman, then, must have been scandalously overpriced even among door-to-door merchants, Mid-American’s a niche marker was particularly strategy of targeting Catholies a ingenious, since Protestant or Anglican translations could be compared unfavourably, Paul repeats his advice to one paying couple that they should have their Bible blessed in order to get ‘the full out of the deal. bene!‘True to life’ “What is a salesman? asks an article entitled “Have You Been Sold a Bill of Goods ... About Selling?’ which appeared in a 24-page insert from the Sales Executives Club of New York in the 19 November 1967 issue of the New York Times. ‘Fr ankly, a great many people who have had only casual contact with selling and marketing would say something pretty critical. They would be critical be ase they have bought a picture that isn’t true to life,” The idea is that selling needs selling, or that the business has been the vietim of bad PR such as comments like these: Du up. You're out there all on your owr The text is accompanied by an illustration of an old-fashioned travelling huckster plying his trade in front of a wagon, precisely the same cliché recalled by Paul when he describes the wagons with their frayed fringes on top. The countervailing notion of the circular, that selling represents *freedom’ and the chance to ‘run your own life’, is the same one offered by the Bible customer who encourages the men to "get away from companies’ and to “get away from people over you’, A recruiting ad in the circular for Lever Brothers salesmen makes a similar point: How far will I go? It's ur to me, I've got my personal car. (And notice no company insignia on 1's typical of Lever But nobo in the morning. Nobody dictates my day. All this can be read more negatively, of course. That ‘personal’ car doesn’t belong to this salesman any more than the sleck convertible driven around Opa-Locka by Paul Brennan. ‘Nobody tells me when to quit’ might mean working hours without limit. Here was a line of work that according to Sales Management magazine often had ‘no paid vacations, health insurance, sick leaves, or severance pay” (Osk, 1966, p. 34). ‘Not exactly’ having a boss could be a vague Way of outsourcing managerial decision-making to workers while encouraging the internalisation of tyrannical expectations. Salesman, for its own part, avoids overt commentary about any of these issues, focusing instead on illuminating the lives of a group of men, The film-makers’ compassion for the salesmen is so intense that even Kennie, the hard-headed manager, was eager to appear with Albert Maysles at a Chicago screening of Salesman many years later. Yer the film does leave its viewers feeling that selling is a ‘rut’ that eads no place’ in which ‘you're out there all on your own’. Reception On 15 February 1969, Sales Management magazine produced an early anonymous review of Salesman — published before the film's theatrical run in New York cinemas - suggesting that Maysles Films may have hoped to distribute the film ro business groups (‘Direct Selling’, 1969, pp. 41-2). Like the paperback book containing the ‘sereenplay” for the film, the review describes the men selling Bibles with ‘washable’ covers designed to outlast leather (an often-mentioned titbit absent from the DVD releases of the film). Sales Management charged that Sale Miller are duly mentioned) and ‘out of date’ in comparison with the sman’s salesmen were rather literary (Eugene O'Neill and Arthur ‘most versatile man in modern society” who “bears little resemblance to the shoddy image of years past’. ‘The magazine’s own review, while overtly negative, is restrained in comparison with the one published by Variety, which Sales Salesman Management reprinted the next month, ‘Show Biz Bible BOMBS’ ridiculed the film for what it called a ‘superior,condescending air’, designed for ‘liberal intellectuals’ to sneer at the common man (Lyro, 1969, p. 41). Perhaps what Sal magazine said about Salesman is less important than its anxious 's Management interest in the film. Clearly it viewed it as a threat to the kind of public image the New York Times insert promulgated, and its review of Salesman ri apitulates the insert’s attack on the public perception of salesmen, Hargrove Turner (presumably related to Kennie Turner), the President of the Mid-American Bible Company, responded 1969: “Congratulations on an unusually good presentation with deep circumspectly to the film ina letter dated 3 January understanding of the good and bad in salesmanship’ (Chaiken, Kasher and Maysles, 2007, p. 191). Salesman’s reception reached a key turning point in a pair of notices by Vincent Canby in the New York Times, the first published on 4 September 1968, the second on 18 April 1969, after the first theatrical screening of Salesman on 17 April at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City, an event attended by the salesmen.'* The two canby articles, in addition to Turner's letter from Mid-American, suggest why the release date of Salesman is often muddled (1968 or 1969); the paper of record, the tra Time (‘Arresting de press, 7 March), Life (‘A Singular Dramatic Success’, 14 March) and several other leading magazines had alr 16 ady covered the film before its ‘world premiere’. Canby (1968, p. 40) noted originally planned release date for Salesman was autumn 1968. His coverage started out matter of fact, reporting the outlines of the 1 his first article on the film that the film that have become familiar: ‘lightweight, portable equipment’ had made the exploration of a ‘secret cinema’ possible in which real life could be presented as never before. Salesman would ‘broaden the genre’, because ‘until now, documentary films have more or less been limited to exploration of social issues of the celebration of noted personalitie The film-makers, like their salesmen, were out on their sown hook’, in the sense that they had invested $100,000 of their own money. ‘Purist movie critics’ would not like the film, because it was designed nor as journalism but asa cinematic equivalent to Truman Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’ I71 Cold Blood. The film was about the American Dream and its discontents, above all the illusion of freedom. ‘The most important development in films today’, C ‘anby quoted Albert Maysles as saying, ‘is the ability to extend the private individual’s world into public art.’ Canby’s second article on Salesman was a glowing review of a “fine, pure picture’, imbued with the Maysles’s trademark ‘compassion’, and offering ‘an image of America as a worn-out Disneyland that is unforgettable’ (Canby, 1969, p. 32). Yankee Drummers In his 22 March 1969 review, Hollis Alpert praised Salesman in the Saturday Review asa film that ‘distills some unsettling truths about American life’ (p. 75). Calling the film ‘a chilling American horror story’, as well as ‘one of the most important American films ever ction (‘It may hurt made’, Alpert limned both the ideal audience rea while you watch and hear, but you're better off knowing’) as well as the central achievement of the film’s tone (‘It’s funny and it’s terrible’). Ina country whose business is business, the salesman cannot appear as anything other than an emblematic figure. This film's promotional campaign was allegorical from the start, with the iconography of its theatrical trailer featuring a haloed Jesus schlepping sample cases. ‘The image of the salesman is freighted with cultural baggage as ording to Timothy B. Spears an icon or representative Americans a (1995, p. xiv), he retains remarkable consistency over time in part because he is the figure who generates nostalgia for small-town ways and pre-modern methods while simultaneously acting as a *bridge’ to modern commercial culture and the rise of sophisticated advertising, American tradition, tricks, Salesmen are deeply embedded in the from Henry James's account of them as ‘touchingly, tragically to H. L. Mencken's derision doomed’ in The American Scene (1907 for ‘shoe-drummers and shop-girls’ and Norman Rockwell's images t of salesmen on magazine covers for The Saturday Evening Pc(Spears, 1995, pp. 3, 5). Travelling salesmen also play significant carrie, 1900), Sinclair Lewis (Eliner Gantry, 1927), Eudora Welty (‘Death of a Traveling Salesman’, 1936) and Flannery O°Connor (“Good Country People’, 1955). roles in American fiction by Theodore Dreiser (Sister More obvious touchstones for Salesman, Eugene O'Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1939) and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), had been adapted for television in the 1960s, Iceman in 1960, Death of a Salesman in 1966. David Maysles in particular was an O'Neill aficionado, He told Canby (1968, p. 40) that Salesman was ‘our [cena Cometh’, with a planned follow-up film about the Maysles family referred to as their Long Day's Journey into Night. This companion film, now known as Mother (1968), remained unfinished = the stills from it collected in A Maysles Scrapbook seem far happier than O*Neill’s play, with portraits of the artists’ mother giving a haircut and pointing at a bulletin board of photos from Salesman (Chaiken, Kasher and Maysles, 2007, p. 198). But the stories of O'Neill and Miller, along with the 1960 filmed adaptation of Elmer Gantry starting Burt Lancaster, are remarkable for their sustained journeys into territory of honesty or negativity about national myths. In O'Neill’s play, the travelling salesman, Hickey, gradually reveals himself ro be a murderer, and in Miller's play, the archetypal Willy Loman winds up as a suicide, For a non-fiction film to have literary antecedents adds an extra dimension to the undecidable tension regarding performance in Salesman, further eroding the concept of the film as a transparent Window on an unfiltered reality from which the camera might as well have vanished. This is nor to say that the film-makers wanted bad things to happen to Paul, or that they shaped the action to fit any pre-selected fate drawn from literatut . or that Paul pre-planned his breakdown. Had Paul missed Elmer Gantry, with Lancaster's portrayal of a ‘drummer’ turned revivalist religious huckster, a film in which Christianity is variously called an ‘enterprise’, a “going concern’ and ‘the oldest badger game in the world’, one in direct “competition with the entertainment business’? Lancaster's character described his life ina land of great opportunity’ as one featuring filthy, dreary hotel rooms, always chasing trains, always telling di stories ... that kind of fellow is no success at all’, Had he pre-empted Paul ina way with his devastating ‘I'm a salesman” speech? “I was so lonely and miserable, Gantry preaches. “I might as well have been in Hell. | was in Hell. I knew all the salesman’s tricks. Why wasn’t 1 rich? Why wasn’t I successful?" Did Paul's loss of faith in selling relate to a self-conception shaped by literary or cinematic texts in some extremely complex way? Paul was later to write to the Maysles brothers quoting Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’, and emarking, ‘This is one part I will always be proud of. Lead on MacBeth & tell Arthur Miller am rea dy? (Junker, 1969, p. 121). Pipe dreams ‘The gravitational pull exerted by O'Neill on Salesman can be seen in both the choice of salesmen as subject matter and in the tragicomic tone shared by the play and the film, Whether it’s Harry Hope’s “cheap ginmill of the five-cent whiskey, last-resort variety’, as depicted in The leeman Cometh, or the motels revealed by Salesman, these are sad rooms filled with melancholy jokes (O"Neill, 1979 [1939], p. ). We never see the salesmen take a drink, but they often look like they could use one. These are stories about how ‘the lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us’, as Larry Slade puts it in [eeman (ibid., p. $29). In Salesman, we see the man at the Chicago conference who stands up to assert that ‘I think [can do it’, who sets a personal goal of earning $50,000 avelling salesman who dominates Iceman, Hickey, a year, The t presents a different point of view, at first. Pipe dreams are n from finding now. I'm like a new ave the with yourself,By the end of the play, we learn to read this speech as itself a pipe dream and a sales pitch. Nothing so baroquely dramatic happens in Salesman, of cou et the film’s gradual revelation of Paul’s ey character doe: culminate in scenes during which he stops kidding himself about ‘tomorrows’. For his part, Arthur Miller took a personal interest in the fate of the film by praising it directly and quotably: ‘Salesman is an ; adventure into the American dream where hope is a sale and a sale is confirmation of existence itself. It seems to me to penetrate deeply the men who make the wheels go round in a form of cinema that has never been used in quite this way.” Miller’s own play signals its allegorical intentions early on, calling the set ‘the Salesman’s house” rather than ‘Willy Loman’s house , and emphasising this point when Loman first enters the stage: “From the right, Willy Loman, the Salesman, enters, carrying two large sample cases’ (Miller, 1995 [1949], pp. 91, 92). It’s odd and interesting to note that Death of a Salesman begins with Willy Loman having just returned to the Northeast from Florida, as if prefiguring the destinations of Paul and his colleagues. Loman is also his company’s ‘New England man’, although we never find out what he’s selling to his buyers or see him attempting to make a sale (ibid., p. 94). Like Paul, Willy has fanciful notions about Alaska as a better territory for his business ventures, Or is Paul signalling his knowledge of Miller’s play by referring to Alaska? Death of a Salesman shares with The Iceman Cometh repeated questioning over the actual value of honesty. Willy’s son Biff seeks throughout the play to break through the nostalgic deceptions in which his entire family lives, offering ‘facts’ as an antidote toa home environment in which ‘we never told the truth for ten minutes’ (ibid., p. 211). As the play nears its end, Biff pleads with his father in a way that recalls but also inverts Icema Will you let me go, for Christ's sake? Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?’ (ibid., p. 213). Critics liked to refer to the salesmen of the film as real-life Willy Lomans. That connection was. inevitable given the film’s title, but maybe Paul has Biff or Happy Loman in him as well as Willy. Paul’s later letter to the Maysles. brothers doesn’t make clear exactly what he means by ‘tell Arthur Miller am ready’, but he sounds ready to sell himself again. Paul may view himself as a failure by the end of the film, but it’s important to remember thar he’s failed not at life but only at work — the talent he lacks or loses is that of successfully hawking Bibles. ‘I know I’m not home’ Another factor that makes Salesman very different from both The Iceman Cometh and Death of a Salesman is its focus on selling itself as a dramatic act rather than simply an allegorical profession recalling certain archetypes. The lack of emphasis on family life in Salesman appears as a radical film-making choice, one made even more stark by comparison with Death of a Salesman, which focuses almost exclusively on relationships among family members and unfolds largely in Willy Loman’s home. We don’t see any of the salesmen at home. Footage taken of the wedding of Paul’s daughter was cither excluded from the film for aesthetic reasons, according to Charlotte Zwerin, or intended only asa gift to Paul and his family, according to Albert Maysles, and thus was never destined to be part of the film at all. We only encounter the men on the road, away from family and friends, apparently devoid of contacts or associates besides Kenni Their children aren't topics of discussion, except at the Chicago sales meeting, where a man stands up to exclaim that his wife has talked him into having more kids, a bigger house and ‘all this kind of rot’, Of wives or girlfriends, we see only Kennie’s and hear only Paul’s phone call from Florida with a woman who tells him very little except that Boston is cold and that he mustn't drive too fast. It’s not a heartening conversation — granted that any sense of intimacy is impossible because we're listening in along with the othersalesmen — bur its odd flatness and lack of feeling recalls Vogels’s (2005, p. 73) central insight about Salesman, which is that while the film seeks ‘authenticity’, it depicts the ‘inevitable breakdowns of modern communication’ and “the limits of language’, the situations shown in the film involving people talking at cross-purposes or just generally failing to connect. A non-mercantile conception of exchange seems to have vanished and been replaced by an internalised form of corporate tyranny ~ this film reveals the wholesale replacement of the self with an entrepreneur, a kind of ideological self-colonisation. Images of children are subtly woven into the fabric of Salesman, building up into a leitmotif and nearly bookending the film, We hear kids shouting in backyards and catch glimpses of them dragging sleds and throwing snowballs in the Massachusetts footage. ‘These images of children, especially in the film’s opening and penultimate scenes, accompany failed sales, but also offer a redemptive view of Paul as an avuncular type who has the potential to connect with kids, They further underline the feeling that Paul is far from home and not thriving in an environment without family ties. ‘I know I'm not home,’ Paul notes in one of his mini-monologues in his car, As the film begins, we feel that Paul is trying to sell a Bible both to a housewife and to her daughter, Christine, who provides her own commentary on the visitor with her piano playing. As the film closes, Paul is once again interacting with a child in ng room of a potential customer, but this time he does much better with the kid, though far worse with the sale, Paul and The the liv Gipper are working as a team = we find out later that The Gipper is trying to help Paul out of his selling rut and ‘spark him up a little’. Paul begins the scene smoulde ng with depression and anger, but his demeanour quickly changes when the customers’ pyjama-clad child approaches him. The pair begin to play with a toy car, seemingly oblivious to the attempted selling going on in the room, The child is thrilled by Paul’s antics as he goofs around with the toy car and pulls: faces in a kind of universal hide-and-seek or peek-a-boo game. Paul and the child beam at each other guilelessly while The Gipper’s sales pitch drones on in the background: what we're seeing makes what we're hearing seem even more dubious. Then Paul gives the child a gentle rouch on the belly to indicate that he’s going to return the toy car, Ina brilliant decision, the camera follows the child ba to his family on the couch, sitting down after giving a last friendly look back at Paul. Paul and the child never exchange a word ~ their interaction is completely silent, designed not to disturb the ‘more important’ proceedings. It’s one of few moments of genuine contact we see in the film. ‘The moment is made all the more remarkable by what happens next. After a characteri: brushing her doll’s hair, Paul asks if he might “inte tie shot in which the child’s sister is glimpsed ject to say one thing’, Then he loses his temper and blows the sale, showing a shrill and desperately badgering person re going ta grow up. And this is the hing, too. The Bible he heritage mething that doesn't er ‘The family have been silenced, stunned by this feat of angry gibberish that seems to imply that the customers can be browbeaten into accepting the product because of its supposed value in child-rearing. Paul sinks back into his seat, as if he’s a bit shocked by his own outburst. After the mother of the family rejects the pitch, Paul stands,unable to look up from the floor, shoulders hunched, as The Gipper humiliates him: Ar the word ‘negative’, the child Paul had been playing with trips s if annotating the scene. lightly by The Gipper as he pontificates, Paul responds with comic humility: Sometimes it isn’t a spark, you need an explosion.” The laughter that follows is categorically different than the smile he shared with the kid in the pyjamas.Conclusion: Reality and its Discontents We're back in that eternal motel room, watching Paul pack up his things while The Bull washes at the sink. Eudora Welty’s description of ‘the worn loneliness thar the furniture of that room seemed built of from ‘Death of a Traveling Salesman’ might spring to mind. Departure feels imminent, and we begin to expect a summing-up. After a shot of The Gipper in a grey-looking tie, his head resting on a folded hand, Paul says, *Yeah, join the force and get a pension. No siree, boss.’ The camera cuts to a patient but frustrated-looking Rabbit in a suit with a bow tie, Only Paul continues to speak: we imagine the other salesmen are watching this final performance by The Badger but we cannot be certain whether the reaction shots of The Bull, The Gipper and The Rabbit are continuous or whether they've been assembled after the fact in the editing room. One hint suggesting the latter is that The Gipper appears to be wearing two different ties, one with a paisley pattern, in his reaction shots; McElhaney (2009, p. 49) suggests that ‘manipulation is evident’ here. Paul says: ‘Mary, she works for the telephone. She’s got a lot of hard-working people, hard-working stocks. They're hard-workin He closes his eyes, sinking into his bad thoughts, almost unable to continue speaking, He shakes his head back and forth as if he’s on the verge of breaking down. All the laughter in Paul's performance has dried up. Now it seems like a commentary on hard-working people everywhere who are unable to get ahead. ‘Charlie's been working inthe police force now,’ Paul suddenly pipes up, while Charlie Gipper's face looks deeply concerned. “The boy,’ Paul continues with his routine, ‘he retires, he gets a pension, He’s all set for life.” It's the last “He e The Gipper, the successful salesman nicknamed after the all-American college football player, in a shot that examines him from above as he looks down into his cigarette and his matchbook. Paul walks to the door of the motel room. Then he’s looking out of the door, at the day outside His mouth moves as though he w t full line of the film before the credits. He tries to carry on ; : Paul says, but stops himself before he chokes up. We s about to speak, but he doesn’t say anything more. The shot is odd. The door separating the camera from Paul moves very slightly. Has Paul touched the door? Is it the invisible hand or foot of Albert Maysles, looking fora slightly better frame for the shot? Maybe it’s just the wind. We zoom in slightly on Paul, and then it’s _ over. Reality isn’t what it used to be In Mean Streets (1973), Martin Scorsese’s approach to introducing cach of his characters one by one in an extended opening sequence feels indebted to Salesman (McElhaney, 2009 p. 51). (Scorsese, who once worked for Albert Maysles, also has revisited the subjects of Pennebaker and Mays! ysles Films, respectively, in his own pictures about Bob Dylan [No Direction Home, 2005] and the Rolling Stones [Shine a Light, 2008]). Peter Biskind (1998, p. 21) describes how New Hollywood directors like Scorsese would have viewed document: mentary film as a counterforce to a then-moribund studio system: In America, real innovation was coming no uch directors BA li from the pra of cinéma verité like Richar Pennebaker, and the Maysles had developed eight equipment that ena’ a whole generat reality D cap springing from the fe was rapidly bec ng mor rile brow of even the most inven A countercultural mythology emerges about the power of ‘reality’ to act as an antidote to the way in which ‘they keep it all hid’, as Dylan puts it in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ at the beginning of Dont Look Back. This mythology involves a generational alliance in which direct cinema purports to tell its viewers what is happening, as opposed to the pre-packaged nonsense peddled by mid-1960s. Hollywood movies or establishment mass media. (In Pennebaker's film, the latter group is represented by an aggressive reporter from Time duly excoriated by Dylan.) Contemporary viewers might have seen the Bible salesmen or their boss as incarnations of Dylan’s Mr ‘something's happening here but you don't know what itis’ Jon The differing tones of two other popular songs from the era, The Byrds’ faux-naive ‘What's Happening?!?!" (1966) and Marvin Gaye politically aware ‘What's Going On’ (1971), suggest a shifting cultural preoccupation, Reality ~ whatever that might be ~ is always an unwieldy concept liable to historical mutation, but its vogue in the 1960s existed in tandem with the sense that current events: had outstripped traditional journalism’s ability to cope. Joan Didion’s 1968 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem framed her observations of the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury drug culture with the idea that ‘the world as | had understood it no longer existed” (p. 5). Another product ‘of 1968, Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, viewed unfolding shistory as a novel’, Mailer appeared as a jailed anti-war protester in Marker’s 1967 film The Sixth Side of the Pentagon and as an actor playing a fictionalised version of himself in his 1968 footage for Maidstone, in which he let Pennebaker film him in a real unscripted fight with real blood. Mailer called Maidstone ‘an attack on the nature of reality’, an idea which A. O. Scott (2007, p. 2) suggests as ‘a slogan that could fit much of the art of the time’. Taken to absurdity, something like this notion informed the ‘acid film’ shot by Ken Babbs for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters on their 1964 cross-country triponThe Bus, which, according to Tom Wolfe (2008 [1968], pp. 89, 136), was ‘taken under conditions of rotal spontaneity barreling through the heartlands of America, recording all now, in the moment’. Wolfe expected his readers to be familiar with the term ‘cinéma vérité’, The dream, delusion or utopian speech act of advocating for a more unmediated life, or for making spontaneous art in deeper touch with reality, was variously understood as promising, seductive, dangerous, ridiculous, radical or flaky, More disruptive and sceptical takes were bound to emerge. In Peter Whitehead’s 1965 film Wholly Communion, the poets of the counterculture are portrayed in a light somewhere between sublimely stoned and stumbling drunk, with the film-maker emphasising the near-implosion of Allen Ginsberg on stage.'* A sense of infinite regression between being and acting becomes the central issue in William C aves’s Syntbiopsychotaxiplasm [Take One], shot in 1968, a hall of mirrors film about a film production in which no clear separation between fiction and non- fiction can be obtained. Haskell Wexler, an uncredited cameraman for a brief stint on Salesman, took a related approach in his 1969 film Meditun Cool, which incorporated real footage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.!” Wexler is hit | gas during a protest march (le: tear ding to the film’s famous line, ‘Look out, Haskell, it’s real!"), and Meditun Cool winds down by melding its own frame with that of a movie camera. See, nothing is “real”,” Wexler explained to Roger Ebert. ‘When you take a camera down to Michigan Ave, and point it at what's happening, you're still not lit showing “reality.” You're showing that highly seductive area that’s in front of your camera’ (Ebert, 1969, para. 18). A character in Jim McBride's 1967 film David Holzman’s Diary, a mockumentary complete with a camera-obsessed film- maker-protagonist, puts a very similar cas As soon as you start filming something, whatever happens in front of the camera is not reality anymore.’ McBride and his cameraman, Michael Wadley (aka Michael Wadleigh, director of Woodstock, 1970), wanted to investigate the problems of direct cinema: Like Meditun Cook Symbiopsychotaxiplasm [Take One], Godard’s 2 of 3 Things | Know about Her and Clarke's Portrait of Jason, David Holzman's Diary foregrounds the fabricated nature of film, rejecting the radical power of illusionism implicit in the new technologies. Reality’ and its discontents played a major role even when the word was viewed with hostility or suspicion. McBride and Wadleigh also made the shorter My Girlfriend’s Wedding (1969), taking a more straightforward approach, but even here the picture begins with a mirror held up to reveal the film crew, Among documentarians, the lephant pioneering British film-maker John Krish ~ director of The Will Never Forget (1953), which paid homage to the working-class culture of London’s trams, Return to Life (1960), about postwar refugees, and I Think They Call Him John (1964), concerning aday in the life of an elderly man ~ rejected the idea of unstaged cinema asan illusion, telling Patrick Russell ina 2011 interview, “There's no truth in film ... it is a confection, it is organised deliberately to deceive, to give ave never thought that I was dealing the impression of the truth ... 1 in the truth.”! ‘Though their thinking lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Maysles brothers had never accepted the idea thar they were shion, seeing filming ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ in any purportedly objective their films as more poetic, and increasingly opening themselves to ~a process accelerated by Zweri reflexive elements of film-makin; authorship, particularly on Gintme Shelter. This drift left formal decisions loose, practical and collaborative. It also led to self contradictions ~ ones that fed rather than diminished the power of their films.Modes of endurance The observational mode of direct cinema fell out of fashion for many reasons, including the production problems and costs of gigantic shooting ratios as well as the philosophical questions brought into focus by documentarians like Greaves and Krish. The end of the 1960s zeitgeist may have been another factor. ‘The idea of stripping away various systems or artificial constraints in pursuit of a ‘really real’ authenticity never seemed as cool. During the 1970s and beyond, documentary critics and film-makers bristled at what they perceived as the complacency = formal and political - of direct cinema. Techniques that may have seemed defamiliarising at one time, such as “restless, handheld cameras and blurred grainy visuals’, according to critic Jeanne Hall (1991, p. 44), “no longer seemed tied to the real s Hall notes, drawing on the neoformalist film theory of Kristin Thompson, styles that begin their lifecycle as radical wind up serving as new conventions, and then quickly seem conventional or stifling, just another set of tricks, For its techniques and processes to be viewed as ‘an effect’ seems like a fatal blow to the stated purpose of direct cinema, but Hall rehabilitates documentary realism as a style, while Saunders reconnects these films with the era’s turmoil, The film-makers themselves expressed degrees of wariness about claims of truth, objectivity and transparency, at times expressing a utopian outlook very much of their era, and at other times presaging many of the arguments that would be made against them later. Yet the slowness and deliberateness of direct cinema - the loving attention and empathy it lavishes on its subjects — has remained relevant to documentary films that focus on character, Jeff Malmberg, whose 2010 film Marwencol explored the artist Mark Hogancamp, points to Salesman and Grey Gardens as key influences (Schnack, 2011, para. 11). Ben Steinbauer’s 2009 film Winnebago } Man, about the disastrous figure at the centre of a promotional video shoot selling motorhomes, traces its lineage to Salesman; Steinbauer introduced a screening of Salesman in 201122 A very different sort of film, the music documentary Danielson: A Family Movie (2006), quotes Salesman directly. Its subjects, the band Danielson, watch the film, a viewing experience that inspires musician Daniel Smith to try out a door-to-door art performance Salesman, not dressed as a Bible salesman. These films connect with primarily through specific film-making practices, but through an abiding interest in ordinary life and, above all, a certain enduring tone towards oddball American dreamers, outliers or outsiders with insistent voices. Some of Salesman’s qualities might also be felt in two first-century documentaries about work: acclaimed twenty: Sweetgrass (2009), a study of Montana sheep farmers by Iisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and Last Train Home (also 2009), Lixin Fan’s film about migrant industrial workers in China. ss ‘a triumph of the James Naremore (2010, p. 46) called Stveetgra “direct,” “observational,” or “anthropological” form associated with the Maysles brothers, Frederick Wiseman, and Jean Rouch’, Bill Nichols (1991, pp. xiv-xv) argues for the importance of studying how the gaze is structured in a film claiming the status of non-fiction: ificant e - oF feigned abse carries e film aker's presen f the ace (the placer mplications. The or on of cinemati mmaker, the came mity to subjects, the exclusion or inclusior principal means by which ethical issues contextual informat e principal ins b b cretely manifest n docume filmmaking, Historical place becomes ethical spa That ‘feigned absence’ of its film-makers is often considered the major weakness of direct cinema, although Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens would abandon Salesman’s attempt to disguise the camera, and Salesman itself provides glimpses of reflexivity. Yer the “organization of cinematie space’ in the film does not feel sterile or exploitative as a result. The way the camera moves around its subjects only appears to be invisible, when in fact its ballet tends tointerweave people with one another as well as with the camera and the spaces being inhabited. Salesman answered the call of the 1960s for a fecling of authenticity in art — and for films that ‘affectionately acknowledge that which exists’, as theorist Siegfried Kracauer put it in 1960 (p. 204). The Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin haunt the negative spaces of their film like loving ghosts, restless in their quest for contact and for provisional access to unrepeatable moments and human intimacies that suggest why people are worth knowing, why ‘attention must be paid’ to marginalised voices. ‘One can look at Sales man and weep when what rules as these days comes to mind’, Jean-Pierre Gorin (2012, “documentary para. 6) suggests, ‘one can — maybe naively — take the film as a perfect illustration of what the genre still might produce’. While many documentarians have discarded the immersion techniques that led to Salesman’s production - talking heads, fictional reconstructions and film-makers who star in their own films have become ubiquitous — the film’s more basic tenets keep reappearing in unexpected places. Salesman also might be seen as presaging a popular subgenre of reality TV that follows intriguing characters at rotten or vexing jobs. These shows rely on conventions established in the 1960s. Zoé Druick (2010, p. 4) suggests the ‘actuality dramas’ of Canadian film-maker Allan King, especially A Married Couple (1969), a precursors for reality television shows like Big Brother that blur lines between private and public space ‘while highlighting the performative aspect of private life’. The rise of hand-held equipment is another point of contact between Sal eman’s moment and the twenty-first century. Video-equipped mobile phones, palm-of-the-hand video recorders and online video-sharing are alll features of a ‘post-cinema’ landscape that might be seen to resonate with the technological innovations of the 1960s, Digital culture in particular seems to share that era’s concerns about how to circumvent the typical patterns of film production and distribution, how to escape the tripod and record hidden or heretofore invisible events, how to get quality sound in spontaneous environments, and how (or whether) to include reflexive or staged elements. Serendipities Salesman abandoned old certainties and assayed the untried, seizir ‘on new technologies and emerging from intense critical debate about the nature of non-fiction, Despite radically different approaches and styles, many innovative films from the era share a common interest In ‘ance, and in more improvisational modes by whieh the film- makers could not predict exactly what would happen when their : corde +2009 cameras began to record, (In a witty fit of pique recorded in the 2009 documentary Henri-Georges Clonzot’s Inferno, Clouzot see med to respond to this spirit of the age by bemoaning it: ‘T improvise on papery he said.) Accidents and happenstance remain durable elements in films whose working methods were wildly divergent and whose agendas often existed in open conflict at the time they were made, Extrapolating from Peter Wollen’s notes on Rouch (and from the rly collaboration of Albert Maysles and Godard), chance and serendipity can be seen to create conduits between the overgrown and abandoned trenches of direct cinema and cinéma vérité. As critical concepts, they offer more flexible and open-ended ways to read non: Albert Maysles in fiction film. Would you say’, Sharon Zuber asked 4 a 2002 interview, ‘that documentary filmmaking like writing, is a process of discovery?” Maysles replied: “That's the word, Serendipitous” is another way of putting it, Or, connected with and “serendipity”, is the idea of uncontrolled” (Beattie, 2010, p. 155). In the Bible the choice of living rooms as a very tightly controlled arena ~ in terms clling scenes of Salesman, we might see of sound and lighting, for example, never mind the somewhat predictable pitches of the salesmen themselves ~ into which elements oof more spontaneous performance and unknowable outcomes could be mixed. Whatever illusionism and sleights of hand are inevitably involved in any film, and however dubious the definition of “reality”on offer, something distinctive occurs when unpredictable things begin happening, something wonderfully peculiar to non-fiction film. Is this a mystery or a muddle? In the first film copyrighted in the United States, the Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894), did Thomas Edison's lab really capture a sneeze on film, or just moving images of Edison employee Fred Ott performing ‘comic sneezing’??’ We're rightly sceptical of such claims from the very beginning of film history Ithough there’s another form of pleasure in the artful puree of fact and fiction, Did subsequent technological innovation merely compound the problem of illusionism? Is non- fiction possible? Certain unrepeatable and unscripted ~ though far from unmediated - moments in film contain a power to haunt like little else. To name only a few examples: the instance when the power is accidentally cut to Bob Dylan’s guitar in Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back; the astonishing monologue of the old woman about cats and ungrateful children in Morris's Gates of Heaven (1978); the split- second of eye contact with the film-maker in Marker’s Sans soleil (1983); the accidental hourglass plot of Steve James's Hoop Dreams (1994); the ge Home; the discovery that a murder site lies beneath the conerete driveway of a suburban mansion in Werner Herzog’s Into the Aby (2011). In Salesman, sometimes Paul makes a sale and sometimes he doesn’t. Do we maintain some vestige of the childlike faith that the film might change if we watch it enough times? Or does this viewing experience boil down to the simple relish, active in film from the feline motion studies of Muybridge to the LOLcats of YouTube, of bear erational outburst of the daughter in Last Train 1g witness to remarkable images that presented themselves only once ona particular day? Surely this is not the same thing as pretending that we have any objective or omniscient way to capture r ality in fact, it might well reveal the opposite. Ina later documentary, Sally Gross — The Pleasure of Stillne (2007, co-directed by Kristen Nutile), Albert Maysles recorded the dancer's double insistence on spontaneity and performance. “Whatever happens happens,’ Gross explains to her Wednesday-night movement class. She describes her own creative process 1n terms that recall the ideals of direct cinema: ‘I don’t go in there and “make a movement”. | move around and | improvise ... the possibilities ar endless. In fact, the film reveals a complex interweaving of sther (1989), nancy into the serendipity and rehearsal. In one work, Letter to F Gross and Jamie Di Mare incorporated Di Mare’s pre sross had been part of the Judson Dance Theater postmodern principles had been performance. movement in New York, wher developed from 1962 to 1964 using what the film calls ‘plain movement’ and ‘everyday tasks". (The Judson movement, in turn, had been influenced by John Cage’s introduction of accident and chance into musical compositions.) During those same years, Albert and David Maysles wagered on filming chance elements of everyday life by knocking on the door of an apartment in which a New York family was watching the Beatles perform on live television. ‘They had already conceived ‘plans for a major film to be made specifically for the motion picture theatre’ (Beattie, 2010, p. 6), although they had not yet found their salesmen. ‘Albert Maysles has returned to the idea of chance encounters With ordinary people as the basis for a utopian-sounding film. In Transit, an accumulative project Maysles has been working on for many years, involves mecting people on trains and filming them talking about their lives (see Zuber, 2002, pp. 147-8). adically different visions, It’s intriguing to note that, despite their Marker found himself in a somewhat similar place for his 2011 exhibition Passengers, depicting riders on Paris Métro trains: Marker’s project somewhat resembles the hidden-camera portraits of subway riders taken by Walker Evans in Many Are Called, and his own images of people sleeping on Japanese f ries and trains in yleil. By contrast, clips from In Transit show Maysles’s own Sans arresting trademarks of movement and gesture, the recordings of spontaneous meetings and the shock of human contact that he has photographed like no one else. If his film turns out to hark back ro the classics of 1960s non-fiction film, the project would be yetanother chance to revisit Albert Maysles’s cinematography of serendipity, His descriptions of In Transit recall the collisions of strangers in Salesman or his old plan from 1965 ‘to meet somebody and begin filming them right away would happen.” ust to see what i Appendix: Albert Maysles on Salesman — An Exchange with J. M. Tyree J.M. Tyree: When you are asked to screen a single film representing your work, you still choose Salesman, right? Why? Albert Maysles: =< 2 it’s a near ion of my philosophy of direct the subjects - th men and », unlike other documentary film-makers we didn’t w, refusing t ke the easier jming style also avoids fast cuttin z the film together irse of being hard ustomers, matise. Also, in the making ¢ jes a red to be the first feature, More th: other films, teachers of documentary choose Salesman to teach their st JMT: There's a moment in one of your 5 Films about Christo and Jeanne-Claude when the artists ask you about your brother. You talk about a motorcycle journey you and David took through Eastern Europe during the 1950s, and, if secall correctly, you describe how one person could fall asleep while the other drove the motorcycle. I's a wonderful image, and also a tempting one in thinking about your artistic relationship - the idea of being that attuned to another person. How would you describe your working relationship when filming Salesman? ‘AM: We did have a very successful and loving relationship, butt to get along with people from our parents, who taught those I helped that we had complementary roles that never led to a co ion betwe 1s. My brother contributed in various ways. and equally importantly. In fact he was very helpful in coming up with the idea for Salesman, When we finished the film on agit with Joe Fox, C s editor at Random ‘oth non-fict a good subje David did the ved meJMT: Do you recall the kinds of conversations that happened when you and David ‘were on your own, away from filming the salesmen? Were you and David in the next room at the motel, talking about what you were attempting artistically with your film, after watching these guys trying to sell Bibles, on the road, door to door, day after day? Or was it total immersion, day and night? there was no script and no attempt to contr t at the end of each day we could ¢ y e for that day JMT: You and your brother grew up Jewish in Dorchester and Brookline, while Paul Brennan, who is ambivalent about his Irish heritage, came from Jamaica Plain, the next neighbourhood over but very different in character. What is it about the psychological territory and ‘turf’ of Boston and its environs, in that era, that remains important for later viewers to understand when watching the film? the Irish, whethe ati ing whatever it was of rel ime when there vas much anti-Semitism on the ookline. This wa Jamaica in, Dorchester or opportunity to cross the line from prejudice to fr ddship by getting to better inderstand and empathise with our subjects, all of whom were Irish. The transition tom fists to handshak JMT: I've read that you and David filmed the wedding of Paul Brennan's daughter but decided against including it. Was that decision due to time constraints, or because it could have changed the tone of the film dramatically, or for some other reason? Were there a lot of gems that couldn’t find a place in the film? Any examples spring to mind? AM: As | recall, our only intention in filming the wedding 26 a gift to the family he salesmen doing their pitch their child in th es not in the film parents kept interrupting, call child what he was doing the JMT: I'm very curious about the encounters you and David had back in 1963 when you went to Lyon and screened Showman. It was a breakthrough and many leading directors were there debating the nature of non-fiction film-making, You've said that you and David met Jean Rouch and that you thought he was ‘way off base’ Did meeting the vérité crowd or hearing any of these discussions help you and David solidify your self-confidence in your own film-making style? AM: Showman indeed was a breakthroug television or put onto DVD for cc +h; unfortunately it hasn't ye! tion, Hi hich came the label ‘cinéma en she the film son nercial exple Jean Rouch but his first film from ¢' wasn't quite pure enough observationally, in that he ser up the scene, the roundtable, and asked juestions, David and | did reiterate our plea for the purest form of cinéma vérité or direct cinema ‘h time reinforcing our own determination to follow this path of trict observation and non-interferent ‘ i y ta discover Alfred Hitchco quotation, “In fiction films the di din documentary f is the director’ What be ipanion JMT: There's a stunning moment in your 1964 film about the Beatles (included as an extra on the Apple DVD release) that seems to gesture forward to Salesman. 1 CO You're visiting an ordinary family in Midtown New York, and they're watching the Beatles perform on TV, in the network studio just a few blocks away. They don’t seem like people who would go see a rock concert. It's this very touching moment of real family life that peels away from the celebrity surfaces and focuses on working people. And this is one of the breakthroughs of Salesman, would you agree, its emphasis on ordinary life? agree, the were with the Be The Ea Sullivan Show, t as much as we might w with the union in order {extra expense and ming the show. All the street, entering a tenement building and p nt, then knacking on the door the better by filmi h the Beatles er rdinary life such a natural JMT: It's remarkable how many children can be glimpsed in the early scenes of Salesman. Paul's emotional narrative is bookended by the child at the piano in the opening scene and the child Paul entertains with a toy car near the ending. Paul fails in many ways, but there's a moment of redemption when he forgets the selling and becomes an avuncular figure. We see other children in the Boston-area scenes. I feel that the kids in the film are saying something important, even when we only see brief images of them AM: | agree that the kid ay ‘ant, especially that opening scene where the child gets off the mother's lap. outa tune so reflective of Paul's anxieties that only a Seetho arpe JMT: Truman Capote, Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill were literary influences on Salesman. Would it be exaggerating to suggest that you and David were influenced as much by literature as by other films? Were you thinking about Cassavetes? Or things like the Antonioni short documentary about street sweepers, N.U., made in the late 1940s? I know you worked with Godard and that he loved your camerawork, but what about his films? Did the photos of Robert Frank ever come up in conversations about your plans? I'm trying to get a sense of what was ‘in the air’ for you and David at the time. AM: [ already mentioned how Capote led us to create the non-fiction feature, as he id the non-fiction novel, Otherwise, [don't know of yor film influ are im >and knock es to the pia n could match its 1 ect expression ces, Ne were not particularly moviegoers. David was a big fan of Fugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller is quoted as liking Salesman, and I hadn't yet seen a Cassavetes film, Our more entval influence came from my working on Prima putting into practice the how Im rinciples of direct cinema, Also, learn’ camera to enabl direct cinema g JMT: Edward Hopper springs to mind as a precursor for the images of beautiful desolation and poignant loneliness that pervade the film. I'm thinking of the scene of the salesmen at the diner sitting in near-silence. To me it’s powerfully sign my onilar to Hopper’s Nighthawks and aligned with Hopper's world. But also the views of landscapes - the trees filled with snow, the streets of Florida. I know art isn't so programmatic in its influences but I would like to know if Hopper is important to you AM: I's interesting to know our shed u ith a discipline JMT: Did the New Journalism come up in your discussions about making the film? Were you and David thinking about Gay Talese's immersive writing for Esquire during the mid-1960s or Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels? Obviously there could have been ‘negative influences’ from New Journalism, too, in the sense of, ‘No, let's not do it that way’ The decision to remove yourselves from the narrative seems more aligned with Capote’s MO than with the type of New Journalism where the author is front and centre, Were you rejecting this style deliberately in favour of classical restraint, or did you not view it that way at all? AM: It's interesting intent we made a film, ng the truth m ape. Its originality of method “m quoting Capote: ‘Salesman is ts human poignance and toug humour walk you righ re. JMT; There are glimpses of the film crew in Salesman. We see your camera just once, reflected in a mirror, with the sun-gun attached. In Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens there are more opportunities for showing the mechanisms of film-making Was there a change in thinking about that over the years? Or was it more a case of, allowing the style to evolve with the subject in each film? AM: [ think i nething of David and me to give comfort to the viewer he wall’, but rather the t me more obvious to us as time went on that we include a not a ‘fly on st establishing us giving a glimpse of us, or a presence JMT: Do you remember the boxing match motel scene being filmed in Florida? It’s Florida footage, | think, presented out of chronological sequence by editing. I'm basing this claim on looking closely at the furniture in that motel room and comparing it with the final scene - the wall art, the white breeze-block walls, the ‘TV and the photo of the wife or girlfriend below the TV, they're all identical. Am I wrong about this? Any light you can shed on that sequence would be helpful. AM: Sorry, my memory fails to shed more light on that question JMT: Your decision to credit Charlotte Zwerin as a director and co-film-maker seems both accurate and forward-thinking. The crediting decision foregrounds the collaborative nature of your artistic process as well as signalling the value of the film editor in finding the narrative in the rushes of a non-fiction film. How did you arrive at that crediting decision? After all, editors and scriptwriters aren't considered directors in fiction features .. AM: Actually, term film. dy really directs a film in our documentary. | would rather use the s we actually did on the 1¢ above-mentioned ctor’. Charlotte was and list all three of us as film-makers, film Salesman erts our autho hip. As stated i ,‘in non-fiction film God is the d ilm-maker credit, not director. In 1! all three of us a director's credit for Gimm JMT: There's an interview with Charlotte Zwerin. where she talks about the ‘murderous’ editing process for Salesman. Those of us born later may not even be able to imagine the technical challenges of editing this kind of film. She describes a rough cut or rough assembly of the film that didn’t pan out. Do you remember that rough cut? Would it have been printed separately? What exactly was wrong with it? Did it have a different structure? A different ending? AM: Sorry: Du JMT: In her DVD commentary on Salesman, Charlotte Zwerin says that Salesman was a groundbreaking film and yet one that was never really followed up. Would you agree? Certainly most mainstream documentary films made now use talking-head interviews and reconstruct the drama after the fact. There's a kind of standardised approach. In non-fiction films that do directly record drama, the film-maker's presence as a ‘character’ is usually obvious, sometimes annoyingly 50, Among more recent films, Steve James's Hoop Dreams and perhaps Chris Smith's ‘American Movie come closer to the ideals of Salesman, would you agree? If not, are there others that do? AM: ideals as in the makin t's true that not enough documentary fi followed the pures: akers hat Salesman, Fellow film-makers Leacock and Per aks ‘ollow our same standards JMT: ‘immersion in reality’ (or the illusion of it) has now become a dominant form of entertainment, in films and on television. And yet, beyond its reliance on technical breakthroughs, the rise of reality TV can only be viewed as a betrayal of the kind of films you make. Why do you suppose ‘reality’ has taken centre stage right now? so-called reality TV, the makers think they can have it both wa it that appearance, but at 1 ough semblance of reality t betraying true reality by exercising full control, even using scripts in the film making. Viewers like hey're getting the real thing, and even the New York Times has been fool s approach. Early on, whe! y shows were firs ning into being, the New York Times would put quotes around the ‘reality’ of sion. Later on they dropped the quot as if to conc films wereNotes Credits 1 From email to the aut! ‘ 14 Gail Gradowski o' 4 Salesman Film-makers casT October 2010. For the full exchange University unearthed many of r 368 albert Maysl Paul Brennan ee the i ‘ces on the busines 5 The Bible Salesn i Maysle The Badg 21 (2008) 2,30) félate ; any 1968 tte Zwe Charles McDevitt 3 2 annual direct sles Films, Inc Photography “The Gig 4 Dre stations taken from D ipt lion, wi tion ert Maysh James Baker 1 mary (Robert Dre 30 companies and aroun 1 es Films. Ine Sound The Rabbit collection, De na F 5 eople involved. ot wid Maysh Raymond Martos sroup, 2003) 15 See the pamp mpanying the lm. aysle Editing Supervisor all 5 ag fr it Masters of na DVD release 0} ther David Maysle Kennie Turner 1 Joo1e Salesman (Eureka Entertainment, 2007), rlot Editor ws te0F esearc rarlotte Zwer inema/thethaw hal 160 ‘ fe, see my developed by Contributing Kasher and Maysles (2007). pp. 18- te “Salesmar / ) aysles Film Editor tern nd whi 6 Biographical ed om 17 Miller was quoted on the cover of Ellen Giffard ) the Chronology 01 screenplay’ published in 1969 by th Assistant Editor p nerican Librar Barbara J ses the whaling Sound Mixer ter I rise mes y’ worked . fil Maysl : ing her and stay : Is that Wexler and came 20 Interview with Jim h Vv 10 e he New tra on jolzmay 1d 1 sponse are t 2 jew with John Krish on the BF \ available at:

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