Salesman 9781838713515, 9781844573875

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Acknowledgments This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Walter King, who worked as a printing salesman in Chicago. Deepest thanks to my editor, Rebecca Barden, as well as to the Book Board, the external Readers, Sophia Contento, Philippa Hudson and the team at BFI Publishing and Palgrave Macmillan. Sincere gratitude goes to Albert Maysles, Laura Coxson and Ian 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 made 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.

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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 early 1969. Both The Criterion Collection DVD release and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) give 1968 as the date for Salesman, 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 specifies 1968; 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 continued beyond the initial media coverage. I have 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 New 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 screenings 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.

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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 at a prearranged spot designed to show off the Bible’s Presentation Page. A silkylooking 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 Jesus 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, at the end of his tether. We haven’t seen the title of the film yet, but if we remember it we might conjure up Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. Paul looks at little Christine with 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

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The book opens …

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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 attention, 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 imprimatur of the Church will be made. A series of unplanned, poignant and unforgettable things begin to happen. As Brennan explains payment options, Christine yawns like a theatre critic. When the Bible was open, she showed interest; now 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 elapsing. Her mother unconsciously wards off the salesman by nodding with her right 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’s shoulder to a 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 to a 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

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thumps out a depressing sequence of awkward descending piano notes. It’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.1 * * * Chris Marker suggested in A Grin without a Cat (1977) that ‘you never know what you might be filming’. A corollary for viewing Vantage points

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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 wonderful 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 that might have been omitted from the film, not only the footage left out by editing, but also the footage never captured. What if the first thing we saw was Paul Brennan making a sale? What if Albert Maysles’s camera 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 position on a tripod, as in so many other non-fiction films of the day? What if we saw the film crew asking the housewife to sign a release? What if someone said something earth-shattering once the camera stopped rolling or ran out of film? What if the shots 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 to screen one film representative of his work, Albert Maysles chooses Salesman, ‘because it’s a near-perfect representation of my philosophy’.2 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 methods behind its seemingly transparent

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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 fashioned out of a utopian dream of film-making; a unified work of 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 that 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) represented a novel kind of cinemagoing. Salesman was critical in helping to shape the genre of the narrative non-fiction featurelength 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.’3 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. Yet while it is acknowledged as a touchstone by scholars and filmmakers – in the 1990s, the Library 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 that helped keep Salesman off public television for decades; though one of its programmers wept while watching the film, he rejected it for broadcast (see Liz Stubbs’s 2002 interview with

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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, blending elements of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill with Edward Hopper to suggest the loneliness and desolation as well as the poignancy and rueful humour haunting the American highways, diners, motels, sales meetings and strange suburbs. Jean-Pierre Gorin (2012), in placing Salesman at no. 6 on his Top 10 list of world cinema classics, 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 Maysles’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 disappeared, 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 Salesman, Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. So this claim might be dismissed as pure hokum or salesmanship – prestidigitation called magic by other magicians – were it not for its yearning tone, its 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 shot 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 (McElhaney, 2009, pp. 1, 165–6).

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These and other hints about the theoretical quicksand of nonfiction film also suggest a site of vast pleasure. In his notes on Salesman, Gorin (2012, section 6) wishes to ‘celebrate the film as definitely proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and documentary’. Yet even if we replace dichotomies with distinctions, all the perennial, unsolvable questions about reality, performance, framing and fictionalisation remain encoded in non-fiction’s ‘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 to a 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 are implicated’; Rouch, 2003, p. 328). It’s his last line in the film, and it remains a coda for future documentarians. Nearly fifty years later, Molly Dineen described similar paradoxes in her own films: I’m trying to say, ‘This really is real.’ This is me … they’re talking to me, there are no other gizmos, this is life as it happens. But obviously that’s also rubbish, because I’ve chosen that person, that person’s changing their behavior because I’m there … in the edit they’ll be put in a context that makes them slightly different. (Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary, dir. Pepita Ferrari, 2008)

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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 Europe; the ‘livingroom war’ in Vietnam; the moon landing. Very early on, between 1958 and 1961, film-makers understood that with the new lightweight equipment, like the 16mm Auricon Cine-Voice, the Éclair Noiseless 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, they could record on the fly and also pick up synchronised sound and images with hand-held gear (Ellis and McLane, 2005, p. 210; McElhaney, 2009, pp. 4–5). This meant the abandonment of unwieldy tripods and large crews, developments that, 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 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Drew, who had been a photojournalist, was primarily interested 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

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really happened’. His plan entailed founding something no less grand than ‘a whole new basis for a whole new journalism’. It would be: a theatre without actors, it would be plays without playwrights, it would be reporting without summary and opinion, it would be the ability to look in on people’s lives at crucial times from which you could deduce certain things, and see a kind of truth that can only be gotten by personal experience.4

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 Film Culture, in which he expressed what sounds like a shared wish to ‘record aspects of what did actually happen in a real situation … what did happen in 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, hand-held, balletic, single take following JFK through 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 because of its intrusiveness and sense of editorialising, but the footage can be related to Albert Maysles’s enduring interest in discovering

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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.5 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 voiceover – 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 Strategic 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 Close-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, ice 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

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Jewish parents, living adjacent to the rough Boston Irish 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 Monroe pictures Bus Stop (1956) and The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) before joining Albert on the motorcycle tour behind the Iron Curtain that led to Russian Close-Up and the brothers’ first film together, Youth in Poland (1957, unfinished).6 An image reveals the brothers in identical-looking jackets on their BMW in front of the Kremlin, David on the front wearing goggles and bracing strappeddown boxes of equipment, Albert on the back looking directly into the camera. In a 1998 profile by Brooke Comer, Albert described the motorcycle journey in terms of a closeness so in synch 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 Showman, about producer Joseph E. Levine’s promotional campaign for De Sica’s 1960 film Two Women. Showman was created under trying conditions – access was fettered, a 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 explained Showman, in the process delineating key elements of the philosophy that would guide future films. Plus X film ‘pushed’ to 1,000 ASA didn’t feel overly grainy; whenever possible, no attempt

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would be made to elicit acting; the modus operandi would involve a rigorous insistence on not directing or controlling the subjects: Q: Did you put the camera down if you found anybody acting, or what? A: I don’t understand the nervousness on the part of the film-makers about what’s going to happen when people see the camera. Nothing’s going to happen if you don’t think too much about it. If you’re concerned about the presence of the camera, others are going to be concerned about it. The camera stays on my shoulder all the time so sometimes I am shooting and sometimes I am not. It’s in the same position all day long and they can’t tell. If they were to think about it, they’d get awful tired of thinking about it. It’s like it’s part of the room, part of the furniture. (Beattie, 2010, p. 4)

In the interview, the brothers also introduced an idea for an ambitious film project: We have plans for a major film to be made specifically for the motion picture theatre. This film is going to cost about 175,000 dollars, which isn’t very much for an American feature production. We’ll shoot less than 100,000 feet of film, but it’ll take four or five months to shoot and double that time to edit. It’s like the Family of Man exhibition in motion pictures. (Beattie, 2010, p. 6)

An initial idea for a feature involved working life on a whaling ship, recalling Moby-Dick (Junker, 1969, p. 108).7 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 1955. The Family of Man encompassed the globe, selecting over 500 photographs from 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

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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 is a good story, but not because it’s about a “famous person.” It will 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 Française. 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, Leacock, the Québécois Michel Brault, and the French film-makers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Leacock 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 find ‘the reality of life’, ‘the truth in people’ hidden under the superficial conventions of daily living. Rouch sought to

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pierce the observable surface to reach this underlying truth by means of discussion, interview, and a fictional sort of improvisation. Leacock thought he could capture the same obscured reality by photographing people without intruding; that subjects would reveal what they really felt and were like when unself-consciously relaxed or deeply involved in some activity. (Ellis and McLane, 2005, p. 217)

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 Morillère 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 but an active intervention to cut across appearances and extract from them their hidden or dormant truths’ (Rouch, 2003, pp. 252–3). Rouch’s restlessness remains satisfying – the ending of Chronicle of a Summer contains a meditation on the film’s failures: ‘We wanted to make a film of love, but 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 artifice and intervention. In a 1964 profile by Maxine Haleff, Albert Maysles rejected any labels or styles of filming … If you have to use a label, I suppose direct cinema is the one that’s the most meaningful. What we’re doing is direct in every way. We’re not using scripts which frequently make for indirection.

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It’s a kind of barrier. For us it’s another impediment between the moment something is really happening in life and the moment that it gets recorded into film. (Beattie, 2010, p. 13)

Here, immediacy sounds like an obtainable goal; everything would have looked the same had the camera not been present. Such impossible statements must be historicised as an allergic reaction to what felt like phoney and overly artificial styles of filmmaking, 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 about becoming ‘a transparent eyeball’ in a moment of insight: ‘I am nothing; I see all’. Other statements Albert 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 him a 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 antitheoretical. In a 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 that. 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

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flies on the wall. Taken together, the films suggest increasing ease with reflexive strategies such as showing the camera, revealing the editing equipment and depicting interactions with subjects. As Albert 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 …’8 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 process in terms of what is ‘not cut in’ rather than what is ‘cut out’. ‘Obviously we’re biased about what we do put in,’ he said. ‘Again, that’s why I 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 but creatively fecund, these practices were shot through with paradoxes and even inconsistencies that failed three times to prevent the production of masterpieces. ‘Something that’s better than Hollywood’ In its focus on working people, Salesman departed from the emphasis of Robert Drew Associates on well-known figures facing public crises, 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 Fantastic Dream (1966). Several of these films contain hints of the breakthrough to come. Meet Marlon Brando was the first Maysles film fully edited by Charlotte Zwerin. What’s Happening! contains a vital sequence considered a precursor to Salesman in its unexpected emphasis on ordinary lives. While the Beatles played live on The Ed Sullivan Show at NBC studios in Midtown Manhattan, the Maysles brothers went out to a nearby apartment building and filmed a New York family watching the Fab Four on television.

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A counterpoint to this scene occurs in 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 novel’, with In 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, who often used thirdperson 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, but all of these writers were after poetic and subjective effects. The implicit argument was that there might not be anything else, especially since journalism and traditional documentary, with its clumsy ‘Voice of Doom’ narration, could seem like a particularly out-of-touch, establishment fiction when it came to rapidly spiralling events.

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In Cold Blood hides its author’s 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 ‘journalist’. Roughly analogous moves exist in the editing of Salesman 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 literature and the film of the era are seen in conversation. As David Maysles made clear to Blue in 1965, the goal was a new type of feature film, a novel form of drama, not a documentary defined in any traditional sense: We are trying to do something no different at all from a Hollywood feature except that we are using real situations. That’s our challenge. That’s why we are so excited. We’re trying to do something that’s better than Hollywood can do with actors. We feel that we can get in film something no scriptwriter can invent. Things as they come in real life are much more exciting than anything that you could invent or stage … If we knew what the next scene was going to be – exactly how it was to be played out – we wouldn’t have any interest in it. The excitement comes from seeing something revealed before our own eyes. (Beattie, 2010, p. 31)

Although Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens would increasingly abandon the more Capote-like style of Salesman, that mode was always intended as novelistic 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 newspaper reporting of an event’ (Beattie, 2010, p. 57). Non-preconception and chance David Maysles’s excitement about finding a story through the filmmaking process itself recalls Robert J. Flaherty’s overall method of ‘non-preconception’ (see Mamber, 1974, p. 9). Flaherty’s philosophy

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of film-making as an act of ‘discovery’ and active collaboration with his subjects – pioneered in Nanook of the North (1922) – informed many later projects that were otherwise radically opposed. Another connective thread between more than a few film-makers of the 1960s – one that can be traced across national boundaries, and 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 Mamber’s words – or undirected in various ways and to various degrees, made a large impact. Chance and accidents could enter and had entered into cinema before, of course, but now these became deliberately cultivated arenas that changed the conception of film direction. In 1965, for example, Albert Maysles would suggest a film of radical spontaneity: ‘to meet somebody and begin filming them right away. Just to see what would happen’ (Junker, 1969, p. 111).9 Mamber traced the concerns of direct cinema and cinéma vérité to the Italian neorealist Cesare Zavattini, who noted that ‘I am interested in the drama of things we happen to encounter, not those we plan’ (Mamber, 1974, p. 16). What Jean-Luc Godard 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 ‘shot’ – or the plane of a camera angle – and there’s always an angle. The 1965 anthology film Paris vu par … (Six in Paris) included Montparnasse et Levallois, a collaboration between Godard and Albert Maysles, and Rouch’s ‘real-time’ short, Gare du nord. Taken together, the two films reflect a ‘French’ acknowledgment of

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reflexivity and fictionalisation – vérité as a loose and open style. Yet Maysles’s appearance suggests the extent to which collaboration could be more fruitful than doctrinal purity and how the critical concept of serendipity acts as a secret conduit between film-makers often considered in terms of schools of thought or national styles. 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 also about randomness and chance: a woman 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 based upon including serendipity when ‘chance enters into the creation of the sculpture’. The other lover is a garage mechanic: we assume he’s also a sculptor until Maysles, in a characteristically brilliant decision, pans out to reveal that his own artistry is worked on automobiles. Godard’s titles called Montparnasse et Levallois ‘un action film’ and presented Maysles as a co-creator, the kind of collaborative crediting decision that became a signature of Maysles Films as well. Maysles, the ‘greatest cameraman in America’, according to Godard, was ‘a painter in his way of seeing’ (Vogels, 2005, p. 5; McElhaney, 2009, pp. 27–8). Godard’s remark remains resonant in describing the keynotes of Albert Maysles’s camerawork, dynamism and movement, which make even Rouch’s innovative Gare du nord feel static by comparison. Calling Albert Maysles an action cinematographer or a film-making action painter or action sculptor sounds farfetched given his emphasis on human 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 traditional documentary. When Godard and Coutard 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 convincingly than Gimme Shelter, perhaps in part because it imposes too much order and control on its material.

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The multifarious moment Another obvious way in which Maysles Films differed from the French productions involves politics. Salesman’s devastating portrayal of the American Dream could hardly be called apolitical, yet the film’s complicated social and cultural resonance is pointed in its utter lack of glamour, its absence of fervour, its disinterest in ‘answers’ and its apparent deficit of urgency about its historical moment. As Saunders (2007, p. 2) argues, the received opinion that direct cinema more generally is ‘an uncommitted aesthetic mode’ that leads to ‘a craven, politically purposeless vacuum’ ignores too much about these films and their context. Compared with One + One, Gimme Shelter might appear depoliticised, but in fact it remains a complicated text revealing the true chaos of a multifarious moment, the tragic Altamont concert, said to define the end of the 1960s. Salesman, for its part, appears studied in its avoidance of the maelstrom of current events – the decade of civil unrest, riots, protests, assassinations and war seems not to exist, or floats just outside the frame. For an American non-fiction film shot in late 1966 and early 1967, Salesman remains curiously devoid of references to Vietnam or even to political ‘time-stamps’ or social issues. This characteristic of the film is particularly notable given the directions that were being pursued simultaneously in North America, France and the UK. In 1967 alone – the year in which the shooting for Salesman was completed and the marathon process of editing began – two pioneering non-fiction films about mental illness appeared: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, set in a state prison for the criminally insane, and Allan King’s Warrendale, about an experimental group home for disturbed children. That remarkable year also included Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back; Chris Marker’s The Sixth Side of the Pentagon, concerning marches against the Vietnam War; Stan Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch, a Vietnamprovoked meditation on violence; Peter Whitehead’s Benefit of the Doubt, about Peter Brook’s political theatre production US; Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason, a record of a long interview session with a

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street hustler and performer; and Godard’s turn toward more essayistic film-making with 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her. Salesman would find its métier elsewhere, focusing on real working people instead of specific acts of political advocacy or social commentary. Yet for Saunders (2007, p. 1), direct cinema evolved in ‘compelling dialogue with America, about America, in an epoch beset and defined by upheaval’.

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2 Performers, Authors, Directors Very quickly, after the opening sequence in which we’re introduced to the four salesmen – Brennan, ‘The Badger’, Charles McDevitt, ‘The Gipper’, James Baker, ‘The Rabbit’, and Raymond Martos, ‘The Bull’ – we find ourselves trapped in a breeze-block motel room, and then an office during a meeting with their manager, Kennie Turner. Before five minutes have elapsed, we’re led to understand what this line of work is all about – ‘money is being made in the Bible business’ – and we see

Introductions

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Kennie praising Martos as ‘a producer’ 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 a fabulous business,’ Kennie tells his decidedly not-fervent listeners, ‘it’s a good business. And all I 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 cards containing more or less promising ‘day leads’. Another round of selling commences somewhere along the Massachusetts turnpike (possibly the area near Spencer or Webster): another failure for Brennan. But a 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: No joy at the sales meeting; Kennie

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Leads

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WOMAN

You men are doing fine. I like to see men out, you know, on their own, doing things.

THE RABBIT

Independent.

WOMAN

Right. Get away from companies. Get away from people over you.

THE RABBIT

Get away from pensions.

WOMAN

Right.

THE RABBIT

And do what you believe in life, just like you.

WOMAN

Yeah, I’m doing swell.

THE RABBIT

You’ve got a good job.

MOTHER

No, she don’t believe in what she’s doin’.

WOMAN

I don’t believe in it.

About eleven minutes of the film have elapsed, and the meaning of Salesman 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 can

‘Do what you believe’

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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 crux 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 Gimme Shelter as a ‘cinéma-vérité sham’, Kael also ridiculed Salesman: ‘Would audiences react to the Arthur Miller–Eugene O’Neill overtones in Salesman the 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.10 Both of the scholars who have made book-length critical studies of the Maysles’s films, Jonathan B. Vogels and Joe McElhaney, 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 does 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, but 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 to ‘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 forced to ‘make a selection’

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during editing (Rouch, 2003, pp. 257–8). 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 of themselves into the frame. In a 1964 review of What’s Happening!, Maurice Wiggin called the Maysles’s style ‘the self-effacing technique that masquerades as nonexistent’, yet this wasn’t any major source of alarm (cited by Haleff in Beattie, 2010, p. 7). We see a collaborative artistic process emerging in Salesman, between the subjects and the film-makers, through a series of ad-hoc, open-ended and unpredictable performances, and between the filmmakers 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 it is 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 working 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 wearing thin, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that we ever see him when he’s ‘not performing’, or what this might mean. A more intriguing possibility exists, which is a

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film that reveals Americans working at playing their roles like actors, but who are not allowed to confess (or even necessarily admit to themselves) that the act is an act. Salesmanship represents this American problem par excellence, since it is by no means certain that 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 must 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 Chronicle of a Summer, that ‘each person can only express himself through a mask, and the mask, as in Greek tragedy, both disguises and reveals, becomes the speaker … [in the film] each one was able to 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 viewer from the subject. Despite his radically dissimilar methods and diametrically opposed point of view on the role of the camera, Morin reveals a humanism relevant to Salesman: ‘the viewer finds himself to be less alien to his fellow man, less icy and inhuman, less encrusted in a false life’ (Rouch, 2003, p. 232). The Informer Performance in non-fiction film could be viewed as a form of selfscripting, as self-inscription on a film by its subjects. Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text (1975, p. 66), described what he called ‘writing aloud’ or ‘carnal stereophony’, a vocal and gestural imprint that he found active in cinema. So too do the performances in nonfiction film become a sort of text. When a Salesman book was published in 1969 by the New American Library, it presented a script (it cannot be called a straight transcript) in which the images of the mother in her apron and the daughter in her pyjamas appeared to a national mass-market paperback readership, and in which their words appeared as a screenplay. The book also adds ‘Screenplay Scene Settings’ by Paul Zimmerman. Zimmerman’s scene settings, if

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reliable, contain information that is not readily apparent in the film. The Bible in the opening 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 salesmen 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 ever-shifting form of selfscripting. 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.11) 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 … I gotta go.’ In that moment, he sounds a lot like Jack Lemmon.

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We next see Paul in his car pursuing a day lead. First he supplies helpful exposition: ‘I’ll try this one. Maybe Mrs Rafferty is home. Give it a try anyway.’ Theoretically, we understand that the camera is present and that somebody must be holding it. Yet Brennan’s the type of guy who might well talk this way to himself. Then he breaks into song, repeating a line from an earlier scene – ‘Wish’d I were a rich man’ – but here embroidering it darkly with an improvised line not taken from Fiddler on the Roof: ‘Then I wouldn’t be goin’ round this shit land.’ What follows is a confusing and grimly comic jumble of outbursts that combine to form a running commentary on his day and his life, mixing together a variety of voices and styles: Ohh, shut the window now. Let’s see where I go next. Get another one of these beauties. Mrs Rafferty. I don’t know if Mrs Rafferty will be home, but I know I’m not home. Be you sellin’ anything? Naw, we’re not sellin’ anything. The Irish fightin’ with the English. When it comes right down to it, it makes no difference to me. ’Cause the English are not payin’ me bills. The Irish are taking away from me … Jeez, I got some beauts today. Gypo! The ‘Infarmer’! I’m ‘infarmin’ ya that I’m here!

Several cuts – were they made to eliminate footage of Paul directly addressing Albert and/or David Maysles (‘shut the window now’)? – and a change in the car radio music make clear that this performance Unhappy thoughts at the diner

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has gone on somewhat longer than the episode we see in the finished film. The logic of this sequence is confusing, but we can attempt to reverse-engineer Paul’s train of thought here. From subsequent remarks by Albert Maysles, we know that several of Brennan’s heroes were Jewish, but in this sequence he mangles his touchstone from Fiddler to sing that he’s in 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 to travelling salesmen. His offensive and cross-gender put-on Irish brogue as poor Mrs Rafferty unsettles our understanding of Paul as an Irish-American from Jamaica Plain, Boston, and emphasises his dislocation as a man who knows ‘I’m not home’. As does his continuation into a botched but fascinating rendition of John Ford’s 1935 The Informer. In that film, Victor McLaglen 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 English not paying his bills and the Irish taking away from him are not to be found in Ford’s film, but they do reveal the psychology of a salesman who has latched on to this movie as a representation of his own life. Paul feels crushed between the demands of his boss to become ‘a producer’ and his working-class Irish customers, the folks he’s selling, and selling out, by placing $50 Bibles in their homes. Paul’s identification 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 and bitter. He mocks himself by announcing his own arrival on a sales call with Gypo’s name, and then puns his way out of a very bleak corner by ‘infarmin’’ someone – himself? Albert Maysles? Mrs Rafferty? one of the 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 Salesman. Albert and David Maysles are doing just that, but Brennan’s own rendition of Ford’s film twists the knife. This passage in Salesman can be viewed

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as a kind of confession: Brennan feels his own Gypo-ness or Judaslike role in a double sense, since he’s also ‘informing’ here on the ethical dubiousness of the whole Bible-selling scheme, informing on the Mid-American Bible Company and, in the more private zone of his car, informing on his fellow salesmen, or at least informing on himself as a salesman. The allusion to The Informer also informs on the American Dream, since throughout that film Gypo is haunted by street posters offering £10 one-way fares from Ireland to America. What if a guy’s family did immigrate to Boston, and what if he wound up deposited in a shit land where his employment options involved selling something that made him feel like a sell-out? Cuts Following his peculiar monologue in the car, Paul fails to find anyone at home, and shuffles down the steps of the house in the snow. Maysles’s camerawork and Zwerin’s editing have subtly continued the theme, built up from the opening scene, of Paul’s appearance amidst children; here, a kid dragging a sled through the street and another packing and throwing a snowball. The Rabbit, meanwhile, has notched yet another sale, at the McDonald household. The sequence is interrupted just after Mr McDonald has teased The Rabbit in his own put-on Irish accent, asking if their Bible comes in ‘green’. As McElhaney has noted through careful detective work, this segment of film represents the most obvious example of the filmmakers attempting to excise themselves from the picture. Someone rings the McDonalds’ doorbell, whereupon The Rabbit turns quickly to unseen standing figures and says, ‘It’s like a railroad station today.’ When the McDonalds’ caller, their ‘best pal’, Mrs Wadja, enters the room, an arm clad in a white shirt helps her in – the sequence is not clear, but it’s probably the arm of Mr McDonald, not that of David Maysles. Zwerin’s two cuts here disguise footage that would have to show Mrs Wadja being surprised by and introduced to the film-makers (McElhaney, 2009, pp. 48–9). Mrs Wadja drops hints about not buying ‘another’ item from salesmen, and then

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misremembers the premise of a brutal joke we’re glad not to hear about ‘the Scotchman and the Jew and the Irishman who were gonna get a beating for something’. The scene becomes wobbly again when we glimpse the shadow of the room’s 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 Brennan, 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 diner seen earlier, or another roadside restaurant, to his shared room at the 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 Bull sums up their business well: THE BULL

Paulie, I remember about eight years ago you were telling me that this business is ‘on the fringes’. It’s still on the fringes.

PAUL

It’s worse now.

THE BULL

On the fringes.

PAUL

Well, this business reminds me of a surrey, of a … one of those – you know – the little things in the olden days, you know, the wagons with the thing on top.

THE BULL PAUL

Carousel? Yeah. Well, a surrey with a fringe on the top. And they got these little tassels. Now the way I take this business, only – the tassels aren’t even left. They’re nothin’ but shreds.

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 another female Irish routine that will be performed again poignantly at the end of the film:

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Me father’s on the force. He gets a pension. It’s a good job. He’s a fine workin’ boy, Pat. Puts in a lot of time, but he gets his reward. Gets his reward on the other end. He retired, he lives it, he’s livin’ a good piece of money, then. He lives about two weeks after and died.

The Bull shares Paul’s gallows humour and laughs along, but tells him that his negativism is putting him in a bad frame of mind for their upcoming sales meeting in Chicago. ‘You’ll be all right for Chicago,’ Paul says. Then we see Paul catching a train to the sales meeting, while his boss’s voice plays out of synch over footage of Paul in the moving train car. In this interpolated piece of sound, Paul appears to hear Kennie saying, ‘If a guy’s not a success, he’s got nobody to blame but himself.’ Intercutting drags us forward into the midst of the Chicago sales meeting and then back in time to Paul’s train journey, radically compressing the timeframe to a short piece of visual information. The sales meeting, which forms a logical completion to the first part of the film, marks the spot where the salesmen will be told by the ‘designer and theological consultant’ of $50 Bibles, Dr Melbourne I. Feltman, Vice President, Consolidated Book Publishers, that ‘the good that comes from the selling of Bibles and the getting of Bibles and the reading of Bibles is definitely identified with the Father’s business’. In a move beyond belief, Feltman’s text is Luke 2:49: ‘Wist ye not that I am about my Father’s business?’ The team applauds.

Feltman’s sermon in Chicago; The Father’s business

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Another cut, and they’re playing poker while Kennie discusses their next move, a sales trip to Florida. Sound and sight In her DVD commentary on Salesman, Charlotte Zwerin noted that she came under heavy criticism for the train sequence, which appears to stick Kennie’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 drive 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 element of imposed structure and meaning’ in Salesman. The first puzzle in this sequence is relatively minor but telling, and it occurs during Paul’s drive to the Yankee Drummer Inn after his horrendous 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 whatever was playing on the radio at the moment – but in fact the music is used as a soundtrack for a subtle montage. Shots of Paul driving through a road lined with snowy trees at dusk give way to a 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. It’s no longer diegetic, in other words. In a neat sleight of hand, after a shot of the dashboard we appear to leap out of Paul’s car altogether. The next shot following this cut shows a car turning into the parking lot of a motel, at which point the camera finds and then zooms in on the Yankee Drummer sign.

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We presume we’re no longer with Paul, yet the same orchestral music continues without any breaks, pauses or jumps. This is impossible, but we accept it without much notice, perhaps because this move is so common in fiction feature films. The Yankee Drummer sign is also a signpost signalling the editing techniques Zwerin will be using. (In Gimme Shelter, these techniques would achieve their full flowering in the sequence connecting a Rolling Stones concert with images of the band rushing away by helicopter.) ‘Nobody ever asks’, Zwerin suggested in her DVD commentary on Salesman, ‘how a hundred hours of film became ninety minutes.’ We might believe what we’re seeing here are two vignettes of the salesmen swapping stories at the Yankee Drummer Inn after a hard day’s work around Christmastime, Paul and The Bull in one room, The Gipper and The Rabbit in another. But if we keep our eyes on the furniture, we’ll begin to notice that the two motel rooms look nothing alike. The room shared by The Gipper and The Rabbit has Signpost

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wood panelling on the walls; the room shared by Paul and The Bull features white breeze-block. Surely not the same building 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.12) The January boxing match scene probably happened after the diner would have stowed its Christmas decorations. What’s more, the film itself contains evidence that 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. These two rooms contain identical wall art, drawers, sink design, mirror placement and television screen. The same personal effects, including a portrait of somebody’s wife or loved one, can be seen in the same spots underneath the television. During the boxing match scene, we can 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 see in a travelling salesman’s motel room in an area outside Boston in the dead of winter. It is difficult to resist the Motel room interiors as chronological puzzle

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The boxing match scene, presented as taking place in Massachusetts, appears to have happened in the Florida motel room depicted much later in the film

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conclusion that later footage of Florida in January has been spliced in to appear as if it is continuous with earlier footage from Massachusetts around the holidays. 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. We see The Bull sitting on the bed. Paul stands up, and his head goes out of the frame. We hear Paul say, ‘I don’t want to seem negative, but I can’t see anything here but delinquent accounts.’ The Bull puts his right hand up to his face, obscuring his mouth. We hear The Bull say, ‘I’ll tell ya one thing, Paul. You’re putting me in a very negative frame of mind for the sales meeting in Chicago.’ The camera tracks over to Paul, who’s standing directly next to the image of the two boxers. A cut brings us back down to The Bull, and once again Paul’s head is out of the frame. We hear Paul say, ‘You’ll be all right for Chicago.’ At no point in this limited, final segment of their exchange do we actually see the mouth of either man moving. Mamber (1974, p. 162) suggests that ‘the line looks dubbed in for transitional purposes, as we don’t see the speaker’. Another possibility is that a short burst of sound was pulled (not dubbed) from other rushes, then used as a connector between Massachusetts and Chicago. However we read or attempt to reconstruct these editing decisions, they speak to Zwerin’s ‘murderous’ process of establishing The boxing match, the TV, the golf clubs, the bedspreads and the wall art suggest problems of chronology

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narrative continuity in the film. The boxing match casts doubt on Zwerin’s claim that the editing process entirely eschewed ‘pulling events out of chronological order’ and ‘juggling’ things out of ‘the order the thing was filmed’ (Rosenthal, 1971, pp. 88, 90). But this passage only increases the viewer’s feeling of remaining trapped in a world destined to repeat its scenes over and over again. Here, Zwerin may have cobbled together footage from various places and times and edited it to 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 Möbius strip of time. At this weak point in the film, Zwerin finds ways to patch together a story using oddments of sight and sound, string and glue. ‘As I began editing I found I needed certain establishing shots, and Al ‘You’ll be all right for Chicago’

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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) argues that the film-making philosophy of ‘non-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 order 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, p. vii) suggests that ‘a strict adherence to an observational direct cinema is not the sole or exclusive characteristic of the films’; because of the filmmakers’ need to ‘respond to specific situations and exigencies … the brothers were willing to restyle and re-inflect – and even abandon – extant principles and understandings of direct cinema in their approach to film-making (thereby casting doubt on assumptions concerning direct cinema as a proscribed set of practices)’. Salesman’s excision of its own cinematic apparatus is deliberate but inconsistent. Just once, hovering 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,

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in fact ‘the Maysles brothers often make themselves physically present in their films, arguably more so than any other American direct-cinema practitioners’. The brothers continued developing this flexible approach to their film-making after Zwerin left her role as their film editor, as in the celebrated shot of Edith Bouvier Beale turning the tables on the film-makers and taking photographs of 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 Hovde, Froemke and Deborah Dickson, includes footage of the celebrated Japanese classical music conductor Seiji Ozawa asking the filmmakers to stop recording at a sensitive point, a request with which they comply, but which they add to the film. It was Zwerin who generated the ideas to show intercutting in Salesman and to film her own editing board in Gimme Shelter, reflexive strategies that remind us we’re watching a film. A self-reflexive glimpse of the camera

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‘We’ Zwerin’s artistic partnership with Maysles Films as a co-author and credited co-creator on Salesman was always openly acknowledged. Albert Maysles dislikes the term ‘director’ applied to any of his films – saying ‘nobody really directs a film in our documentary’13 – while Zwerin self-described as a ‘co-film-maker’ in the opening lines of her DVD commentary. Editors did the back-breaking labour on non-fiction films – the shooting for Salesman took weeks but the editing occupied nearly two years – and many of these editors were women. Zimmermann (1999, pp. 64, 76) suggests that, viewed in a more general sense, these collaborations tended to be ignored or undervalued despite strong evidence to the contrary: the history of documentary translates into the history of control over space(s) by individuals, a fiction that maintains order … these canonical films were not produced by lone male directors but were in fact collaborations, often with women. Despite years of dismantling the myth of authorship, much film history has difficulty theorizing collaborations.

With regard to Zwerin and Salesman, the film-makers’ approach to co-crediting emphasises collaboration as the basis of authorship, although the film’s branding as ‘The Maysles Brothers’ Salesman’ is admittedly more auteurish. It’s possible that the inherently collaborative relationship between the Maysles brothers themselves allowed for greater conceptual clarity than was common at the time. If there’s a signature feature of Maysles Films productions, it’s the number of names that appear: Grey Gardens has five credited directors/co-film-makers. From the early days in Moscow with Pennebaker and Shirley Clarke, to his co-film-making approach with artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Albert Maysles’s modus operandi has remained consistent. On a later Maysles Films production, the order of crediting shifted further: LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2001) first lists its producer (Susan Froemke) and then its editor (Deborah Dickson) as directors along ‘with Albert Maysles’. In the

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late 1960s, the co-crediting approach of Maysles Films would have seemed innovative, even if it didn’t always imply gender equality; Zwerin 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 ‘undramatic and flat’ (Rosenthal, 1971, pp. 87–9). Separated from the filming, and viewing the rushes for quality, Zwerin 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 ‘in himself as a kind of independent free spirit’ pursuing ‘the American dream of independence and wealth and working for oneself’. Zwerin and David Maysles began structuring ‘a story about four people’, but 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 lot 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 OpaLocka, 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: We left out the wedding of Paul’s daughter, and a sequence of Paul going back to Boston by train … There was also one scene Al shot early on, showing Charlie and his family at Christmas; but we realized very soon that this was not the proper line for the film. Also all the salesmen had a problem of stiffness and shyness in front of a camera; and whereas they were willing to

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cooperate about selling, they simply did not want to reveal anything about their personal lives.

‘We’ made the decision – important in the film – to exclude any delving into private life. Another account of Zwerin’s collaborative authorship on Salesman involves the creation of the rough cut: In all, the shooting took some six weeks. The editing, by David and by Charlotte Zwerin (contributing editor Ellen Giffard [aka Ellen Hovde], and assistant editor Barbara Jarvis), took fifteen months. It proceeded intuitively, in a manner not readily put into words. The first assembly or rough cut boiled thirty hours of footage down to an hour and a half. That took five months. ‘And it didn’t work at all,’ Charlotte remembers. ‘It was a total disaster. So it was a matter of refining and refining and refining the material until it began to work.’ ‘That sounds odd but that’s the way it was,’ David adds. ‘We would try different things, different continuities, until finally the connections between the scenes began to work and so did the overall timing.’ (Junker, 1969, pp. 119–20)

Reading this together with Zwerin’s ‘we’ and David Maysles’s ‘we’ suggests a shifting collaborative bundle that included Zwerin, Giffard [Hovde], Jarvis, David Maysles, Albert Maysles and, interpreted in an expanded sense, even the salesmen and housewives themselves, through the self-inscription of performance. Zwerin’s account of the first assembly, however, uses a passive construction – ‘It was a total disaster’ – which nonetheless implies her own exertion of power over the film’s final shape. Zwerin’s self-deprecating analysis of the film has every hallmark of a perfectionist prestidigitator examining the inner workings of her own magic tricks: I was very happy with the general structure of the film, but wasn’t happy with the pace of it; I don’t think anyone is. I think it is a difficult film to view. It has some excellent things but it isn’t very easy for you to look at; it comes across at a very slow and rather undramatic pace. (Rosenthal, 1971, p. 91)

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It’s 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. Sarris sought to explain film art as a ‘meaningful coherence’ made ‘more likely when the director dominates the 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 juxtaposition, film editing as film art? Is there a ‘meaningful 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 each decision in Salesman or what exactly this might mean? Scholars differ here. The claim of Vogels (2005, p. 50) that Charlotte Zwerin exerted ‘creative control’ over the film isn’t exactly wrong, it’s simply incomplete. McElhaney (2009, p. 3), by contrast, persuasively argues for ‘a certain inflection to the images’ that endures in Albert 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).

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3 Americana During a poker game in which Paul defers to Kennie because he’s afraid to bet, the salesmen discuss their next project, a trip to Florida that could take them away from home for up to ten weeks. A seagull floats across frame, and we’re there, with Paul singing an ‘Irish lullaby’ as he drives past palm trees and ocean views of Miami Beach in a convertible. He acts even more performative than before, calling out the names of movie-themed hotels – ‘Casablanca! Humphrey Bogie’ – and pulling faces as he searches for the Fontainebleau, supposedly because he’s interested in investing his money in the resort. As he stops to stare at the Fontainebleau, we’re reminded of how the film acts as a troubled investigation into

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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. In a 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 A sort of seminar

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generate obstacles to the sale by play-acting the parts of various members of a family. Kennie’s hard-sell approach – ‘Do you like it?’ he says. ‘Then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have it’ – is not something we’ve seen tried by the salesmen, who bring a lighter touch. Kennie’s comfort with hard-edged tactics – impressive and unnerving – reminds the salesmen that their success in business has only one measure. Next, Paul and The Bull encounter an Irish housekeeper cleaning their room, and a strange episode ensues in which Paul puts on his mocking brogue. They’re strangers randomly crossing paths in an American scene straight out of Edward Hopper, a chance meeting in a Florida motel thousands of miles from either Boston or Ireland. The cleaning lady’s Irish accent is real, while Paul’s is fake – he’s behaving appallingly in his clumsy attempt to connect through a gallows joke about his imaginary relative on the ‘force’: He’s a strong breath of a man. God, God bless him. He’s over there. He’s, he’s livin’ right in that cemetery. He’s got a big headstone. Even the Father said he’d never seen anything like that headstone. Beautiful headstone. I can see him now in his uniform with the shiny buttons.

We work all our lives, Paul seems to ask, and for what, and for whom, and why? To get a nice headstone? This line of thinking is the Brogue

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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 to the motel room during Paul’s speech will recognise that they’ve seen this place before, with its characteristic white walls, wall-mounted television, poster art and sink outside the bathroom. As argued in the previous chapter, footage from this room was probably spliced into the Yankee Drummer Inn sequence leading up to the sales conference in Chicago. Here we are again: the sameness of all motel rooms, the reiterations 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 Ali Baba Ave to Sesame St, Harem Ave and Kandahar St. In a remarkable moment, chance enters the frame when Paul tunes his car radio to a station playing a muzak version of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ as he wanders lost in this strange only-in-America environment, eventually driving in circles and winding up back in front of the mosque-like city hall. This is stuff you cannot make up.

Opa-Locka

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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 depressing 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 graveyards. ‘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 outside 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, prefacing 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 illustrates the nicknames: The Rabbit is impulsive 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 heroics 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

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running in circles, Florida being a repetition of Boston, bound to end in something less than a pot of gold. As The Gipper cons a family with no cash into promising a down payment on a Bible – leading to one of the bleakest moments in the film, when Paul visits the family to collect the money, posing as The Gipper’s district manager – Zwerin jumps to Paul’s undercutting laughter. Then we see Paul – The Badger, whose nickname needs no explanation – out pitching his wares. He sells a Bible to a Mrs Chrissea Gorman, an elderly woman who lives ‘all by myself’ and who, we might imagine, welcomes the salesman into her home for company. Then he visits a sanitation worker and his wife, praising them for a ‘sense of humour which most people lack’. Has Paul’s luck taken a turn for the better? It would seem not: in the latter sequence, while closing a sale, he describes how his mother beat him; then he breaks down with a flat tyre after his slippery and manipulative performance posing in sunglasses as The ‘Eat like you’re successful’

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Customers

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Closed doors

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Gipper’s manager. In a motel room sales post-mortem, Paul reveals his negativity about his home town, Boston, singling 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 at 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.’ Afterwards, 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 I 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. The Rabbit refuses Paul’s invitation to 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 successful sale by The Bull. The husband of the couple plays 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

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haircut, while Paul holds up his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate a day of zero sales. ‘I can’t get any action out there,’ he says. ‘I’m not thinking negatively but …’ In a revealing moment, Paul relates the story of attempting to sell a Catholic encyclopedia 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 buck a week. Too much money. You know, it’s ridiculous. No husband. I don’t know where the hell her husband went.’ The Bull sorts through his receipts. He’s tried his best to advise Paul, but now he’s at a loss for words. ‘I may be wrong but I can’t see it here,’ Paul says. Then Paul falls silent, watching The Bull counting his sales. Bibles, cookware, safety razors, insurance During the montage-like sequence explaining their animal nicknames, a housewife in a 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 deluded; 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 tells the vacuum cleaner salesman and his wife, who just cannot afford that dollar a week and who probably ‘gave their name at the church’ out of pure politeness.

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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’: The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers.

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 eating (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 $3–5 billion by the early 1970s (Pluenneke, 1970, p. 11; Osk, 1966, p. 34; ‘Marketing: KnockKnock’, p. 28).14 Direct selling was begun by Nutrilite in 1941 and popularised by Amway from 1959, marketing goods and services directly to consumers in homes and workplaces. Four big names in the business were Avon Products cosmetics, the Fuller Brush Co., Electrolux vacuum cleaners (perhaps Paul’s failed sale who ‘scoops ’em up’ worked for Electrolux) 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).

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Were Bibles really any different? According to a 1966 article, Bible sales were ‘enjoying a boom that has caused the corporate cup of its major publishers to runneth over’, yet since ‘everyone is 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, on a 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 eighty hours per week (excluding Sundays) as independent contractors, without the 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, ‘it is door-to-door selling, where prices are outrageous and the methods obnoxious.’ One favorite ploy is to tell women (who are considered more vulnerable than men) that the Bible being offered for $25 to $30 is certified or recommended by the local church or parish. Actually, anyone can secure a Bible for $1 from the American Bible Society, which even gives away thousands every year. (Thackray, 1966, p. 40)

The $50 Bibles in Salesman, then, must have been scandalously overpriced even among door-to-door merchants. Mid-American’s strategy of targeting Catholics as a niche market was particularly 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 benefit’ out of the deal.

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‘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. ‘Frankly, a great many people who have had only casual contact with selling and marketing would say something pretty critical. They would be critical because 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 victim of bad PR such as comments like these: ‘Nobody backs you up. You’re out there all on your own.’ ‘It’s a rut … leads no place.’ ‘A lot of the people in it may not be cynical, but they are serving cynical ends.’ ‘It’s a squalid life …’

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 up to me. I’ve got my personal car. (And notice there’s no company insignia on the car? That’s typical of Lever.) … But nobody gets me up in the morning. Nobody dictates my day. Nobody tells me when to quit. Except me. Don’t I have a boss? Not exactly.

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All this can be read more negatively, of course. That ‘personal’ car doesn’t belong to this salesman any more than the sleek 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. Yet the film does leave its viewers feeling that selling is a ‘rut’ that ‘leads 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 to business groups (‘Direct Selling’, 1969, pp. 41–2). Like the paperback book containing the ‘screenplay’ 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 Salesman’s salesmen were rather literary (Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller are duly mentioned) and ‘out of date’ in comparison with the ‘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 Management reprinted the next month. ‘Show Biz Bible: Salesman BOMBS’ ridiculed the film for what it called a ‘superior,

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condescending air’, designed for ‘liberal intellectuals’ to sneer at the common man (Lyro, 1969, p. 41). Perhaps what Sales Management magazine said about Salesman is less important than its anxious 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 recapitulates 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 circumspectly to the film in a letter dated 3 January 1969: ‘Congratulations on an unusually good presentation with deep 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.15 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 trade press, Time (‘Arresting’, 7 March), Life (‘A Singular Dramatic Success’, 14 March) and several other leading magazines had already covered the film before its ‘world premiere’.16 Canby (1968, p. 40) noted in his first article on the film that the originally planned release date for Salesman was autumn 1968. His coverage started out matter of fact, reporting the outlines of 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 or the celebration of noted personalities’. The film-makers, like their salesmen, were out on their ‘own hook’, in the sense that they had invested $100,000 of their own money. ‘Purist movie critics’ would not like the film, because it

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was designed not as journalism but as a cinematic equivalent to Truman Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’ In 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’, Canby 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 as a 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 made’, Alpert limned both the ideal audience reaction (‘It may hurt 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’). In a 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 an icon or representative American; according to Timothy B. Spears (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 tricks. Salesmen are deeply embedded in the American tradition, from Henry James’s account of them as ‘touchingly, tragically doomed’ in The American Scene (1907), to H. L. Mencken’s derision for ‘shoe-drummers and shop-girls’ and Norman Rockwell’s images of salesmen on magazine covers for The Saturday Evening Post

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(Spears, 1995, pp. 3, 5). Travelling salesmen also play significant roles in American fiction by Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, 1900), Sinclair Lewis (Elmer Gantry, 1927), Eudora Welty (‘Death of a Traveling Salesman’, 1936) and Flannery O’Connor (‘Good Country People’, 1955). 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 Iceman 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 starring 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 to 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 not 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 literature, 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

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‘competition with the entertainment business’? Lancaster’s character described his life in ‘a land of great opportunity’ as one featuring ‘filthy, dreary hotel rooms, always chasing trains, always telling dirty stories … that kind of fellow is no success at all’. Had he pre-empted Paul in a 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. I was in Hell. I knew all the salesman’s tricks. Why wasn’t I 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 remarking, ‘This is one part I will always be proud of. Lead on MacBeth & tell Arthur Miller I am ready’ (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 Iceman Cometh, or the motels revealed by Salesman, these are sad rooms filled with melancholy jokes (O’Neill, 1979 [1939], p. 523). 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 Iceman (ibid., p. 529). In Salesman, we see the man at the Chicago conference who stands up to assert that ‘I think I can do it’, who sets a personal goal of earning $50,000 a year. The travelling salesman who dominates Iceman, Hickey, presents a different point of view, at first. Pipe dreams are the things that really poison and ruin a guy’s life and keep him from finding any peace. If you knew how free and contented I feel now. I’m like a new man. And the cure for them is so damned simple, once you have the nerve. Just the old dope of honesty is the best policy – honesty with yourself,

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I mean. Just stop lying about yourself and kidding yourself about tomorrows. (Ibid., p. 563)

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 course, yet the film’s gradual revelation of Paul’s character does 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.’17 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 a 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 to a 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 Iceman: ‘Will you let me go, for

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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 I 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 that 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 either excluded from the film for aesthetic reasons, according to Charlotte Zwerin, or intended only as a 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 Kennie. 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

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salesmen – but 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 the living room of a potential customer, but this time he does much better with the kid, though far worse with the sale. Paul and The 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 smouldering 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.

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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 touch on the belly to indicate that he’s going to return the toy car. In a brilliant decision, the camera follows the child back 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 characteristic shot in which the child’s sister is glimpsed brushing her doll’s hair, Paul asks if he might ‘interject to say one thing’. Then he loses his temper and blows the sale, showing a shrill and desperately badgering persona: The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, is that right? The woman – behind every great man there’s a good woman. Now she spends, according to the Reader’s Digest, about 85 per cent [of the parenting time] with the children. Now, whatever she is, and what she imparts to them, is how those children are going to grow up. And this is the age when they need it, because if your house doesn’t have a foundation, you’ve got no kind of a house. Does that make sense? There we are! There we are! And we have that in white and red, and in any colour that you might like. And that’s another thing, too. The Bible is the heritage of life. So when you come right down, I know that price is something that doesn’t enter into it at all. It’s the utility of it. And believe you me, I think you’ll both have to agree, that you have the utility there. Is that true, or isn’t it? That’s all we have to say.

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,

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Paul: positive and negative

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unable to look up from the floor, shoulders hunched, as The Gipper humiliates him: He’s dropping way down. He used to write, if I recall, at one time, Paul, in your prime you were writing twelve a week. He dropped way down to three. He says, ‘What’s the matter, Mr McDevitt?’ And I said, ‘Well, Paul, I think you’re a little negative. You’re negative, and I think this is what you need, a little spark. Somebody should take you out and spark you up.’

At the word ‘negative’, the child Paul had been playing with trips lightly by The Gipper as he pontificates, as if annotating the scene. 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.

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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 that 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

Checkout time

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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 stocks. They’re hard-working, hard-working people, hard-working …’ 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

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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 full line of the film before the credits. He tries to carry on: ‘He—’, Paul says, but stops himself before he chokes up. We see 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 were 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 for a 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 each 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 Maysles 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 documentary film as a counterforce to a then-moribund studio system: In America, real innovation was coming not so much from feature directors as from the practitioners of cinéma vérité like Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers, who had developed cheap, lightweight equipment that enabled a whole generation to take to the streets to capture a reality that was rapidly becoming more fantastical than anything springing from the febrile brow of even the most inventive screenwriters.

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Assassinations, love-ins, prison breaks, bombings, airplane hijackings … There were no maps to this wilderness of change.

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 Jones: ‘something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is’. The differing tones of two other popular songs from the era, The Byrds’ faux-naïve ‘What’s Happening?!?!’ (1966) and Marvin Gaye’s 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 I had understood it no longer existed’ (p. 5). Another product of 1968, Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, viewed unfolding ‘history 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 trip on

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The Bus, which, according to Tom Wolfe (2008 [1968], pp. 89, 136), was ‘taken under conditions of total 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.18 A sense of infinite regression between being and acting becomes the central issue in William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm [Take One], shot in 1968, a hall of mirrors film about a film production in which no clear separation between fiction and nonfiction can be obtained. Haskell Wexler, an uncredited cameraman for a brief stint on Salesman, took a related approach in his 1969 film Medium Cool, which incorporated real footage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.19 Wexler is hit by tear gas during a protest march (leading to the film’s famous line, ‘Look out, Haskell, it’s real!’), and Medium 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 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 filmmaker-protagonist, puts a very similar case: ‘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:

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the film-makers themselves who were doing this kind of thing – the Maysles brothers, Ricky Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and a bunch of others – they got so enamoured with this way of making films that they began to think they were actually filming truth. The premise of making David Holzman’s Diary was not to rebut that idea but just to explore the idea in personal terms.20

Like Medium Cool, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm [Take One], Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I 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 pioneering British film-maker John Krish – director of The Elephant 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 a day in the life of an elderly man – rejected the idea of unstaged cinema as an illusion, telling Patrick Russell in a 2011 interview, ‘There’s no truth in film … it is a confection, it is organised deliberately to deceive, to give the impression of the truth … I have never thought that I was dealing in the truth.’21 Though their thinking lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Maysles brothers had never accepted the idea that they were filming ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ in any purportedly objective fashion, seeing their films as more poetic, and increasingly opening themselves to reflexive elements of film-making – a process accelerated by Zwerin’s authorship, particularly on Gimme Shelter. This drift left formal decisions loose, practical and collaborative. It also led to selfcontradictions – ones that fed rather than diminished the power of their films.

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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’. As 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 2011.22

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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 dressed as a Bible salesman. These films connect with Salesman, not 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 acclaimed twenty-first-century documentaries about work: Sweetgrass (2009), a study of Montana sheep farmers by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and Last Train Home (also 2009), Lixin Fan’s film about migrant industrial workers in China. James Naremore (2010, p. 46) called Sweetgrass ‘a triumph of the “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: The filmmaker’s presence – or feigned absence – carries significant implications. The organization of cinematic space (the placement of the filmmaker, the camera’s proximity to subjects, the exclusion or inclusion of contextual information) becomes the principal means by which ethical issues concretely manifest themselves in documentary filmmaking. Historical place becomes ethical space.

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. Yet the ‘organization of cinematic 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

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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 feeling 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 Salesman and weep when what rules as “documentary” these days comes to mind’, Jean-Pierre Gorin (2012, 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. Zoë Druick (2010, p. 4) suggests the ‘actuality dramas’ of Canadian film-maker Allan King, especially A Married Couple (1969), as 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 Salesman’s moment and the twenty-first century. Video-equipped mobile phones, palm-of-the-hand video recorders and online video-sharing are all 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

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spontaneous environments, and how (or whether) to include reflexive or staged elements. Serendipities Salesman abandoned old certainties and assayed the untried, seizing 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 chance, and in more improvisational modes by which the filmmakers could not predict exactly what would happen when their cameras began to record. (In a witty fit of pique recorded in the 2009 documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, Clouzot seemed to respond to this spirit of the age by bemoaning it: ‘I improvise on paper,’ 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 early 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 nonfiction film. ‘Would you say’, Sharon Zuber asked Albert Maysles in 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 “discovery” and “serendipity”, is the idea of uncontrolled’ (Beattie, 2010, p. 155). In the Bible-selling scenes of Salesman, we might see the choice of living rooms as a very tightly controlled arena – in terms of sound and lighting, for example, never mind the somewhat predictable pitches of the salesmen themselves – into which elements of 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’

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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’?23 We’re rightly sceptical of such claims from the very beginning of film history, although 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 nonfiction 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 splitsecond 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 generational outburst of the daughter in Last Train Home; the discovery that a murder site lies beneath the concrete driveway of a suburban mansion in Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss (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 bearing witness to remarkable images that presented themselves only once on a particular day? Surely this is not the same thing as pretending that we have any objective or omniscient way to capture reality – in fact, it might well reveal the opposite. In a later documentary, Sally Gross – The Pleasure of Stillness (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

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movement class. She describes her own creative process in terms that recall the ideals of direct cinema: ‘I don’t go in there and “make a movement”. I move around and I improvise … the possibilities are endless.’ In fact, the film reveals a complex interweaving of serendipity and rehearsal. In one work, Letter to Esther (1989), Gross and Jamie Di Mare incorporated Di Mare’s pregnancy into the performance. Gross had been part of the Judson Dance Theater movement in New York, where postmodern principles had been 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 meeting people on trains and filming them talking about their lives (see Zuber, 2002, pp. 147–8). It’s intriguing to note that, despite their radically different visions, Marker found himself in a somewhat similar place for his 2011 exhibition Passengers, depicting riders on Paris Métro trains.24 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 ferries and trains in Sans soleil. By contrast, clips from In Transit show Maysles’s own 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 to the classics of 1960s non-fiction film, the project would be yet

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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. Just to see what would happen.’

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Appendix: Albert Maysles on Salesman – An Exchange with J. M. Tyree The following exchange took place via email, with the film-maker’s responses received on 1 October 2010. Many thanks to Laura Coxson of Maysles Films for arranging the Q&A. J. M. Tyree: When you are asked to screen a single film representing your work, you still choose Salesman, right? Why? Albert Maysles: Because it’s a near-perfect representation of my philosophy of direct cinema. No interviews, no narration and a love for the subjects – the salesmen and their possible customers. Also, unlike other documentary film-makers we didn’t restrict ourselves to a point of view, refusing to take the easier course of being hard on the salesmen and/or their customers. The filming style also avoids fast cutting and/or music to overdramatise. Also, in the making of this film we were privileged to have our best editor, Charlotte Zwerin, putting the film together. The film occupies a special place in documentary history in that it can be considered to be the first documentary feature, not just feature-length, but feature. More than any of our other films, teachers of documentary choose Salesman to teach their students. 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 I recall correctly, you describe how one person could fall asleep while the other drove the motorcycle. It’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, both of us learning how to get along with people from our parents, who taught those lessons so well. It also helped that we had complementary roles that never led to a competition between us. 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 Truman Capote my brother had lunch with Joe Fox, Capote’s editor at Random House. As we both got inspiration to follow Capote’s lead in inventing the non-fiction novel, we wanted to create the first non-fiction feature film. David asked Joe Fox what might be a good subject to achieve that result. Joe suggested door-to-door salesmen. David did the sound, supervised the editing and handled most of the business affairs. Because he didn’t do the camerawork, which I did, people tended to think that I deserved more of the credit. We tried to counter that impression by crediting each other and the editor as co-directors.

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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? AM: Since there was no script and no attempt to control things, there wasn’t that much for us to talk about except that at the end of each day we could express our joy in capturing whatever it was of relevance 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? AM: We were all brought up at a time when there was much anti-Semitism on the part of the Irish, whether it was Jamaica Plain, Dorchester or Brookline. This was our opportunity to cross the line from prejudice to friendship by getting to better understand and empathise with our subjects, all of whom were Irish. The transition from fists to handshakes. 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 I recall, our only intention in filming the wedding was as a gift to the family. There were several scenes not in the film of the salesmen doing their pitch. I remember one where the parents kept interrupting, calling to their child in the bathroom and asking the child what he was doing there. 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 breakthrough; unfortunately it hasn’t yet been shown on television or put onto DVD for commercial exploitation. I like some of the films of Jean Rouch but his first film from which came the label ‘cinéma vérité’ wasn’t quite pure enough observationally, in that he set up the scene, the roundtable, and asked questions. David and I did reiterate our plea for the purest form of cinéma vérité or direct cinema, each time reinforcing our own determination to follow this path of strict observation and non-interference. I was quite happy to discover Alfred Hitchcock’s quotation, ‘In fiction films the director is God, in documentary films God is the director.’ What better companion to help us adhere to reality? 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.

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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? AM: Yes, I agree, the emphasis on ordinary life. It all happened in an interesting way. We were with the Beatles as they entered the building housing CBS studios to join The Ed Sullivan Show, but as they entered the building, we stopped short, because we knew that as much as we might want to film the show, we’d first have to enter negotiations with the union in order to film. With all of that extra expense and so forth we’d miss filming the show. All of which gave us the idea of just walking down the street, entering a tenement building and possibly hearing the Beatles from an apartment, then knocking on the door and filming that scene. I would agree that we had done all the better by filming ordinary life, with the Beatles entering that life in such a natural way. 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: I agree that the kids are important, especially that opening scene where the child gets off the mother’s lap, goes to the piano and knocks out a tune so reflective of Paul’s anxieties that only a Beethoven could match its near-perfect expression. 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: I already mentioned how Capote led us to create the non-fiction feature, as he did the non-fiction novel. Otherwise, I don’t know of any literary or film influences. We were not particularly moviegoers. David was a big fan of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller is quoted as liking Salesman, and I hadn’t yet seen a Cassavetes film. Our more central influence came from my working on Primary, and putting into practice the principles of direct cinema. Also, learning how I might design my own camera to enable us to achieve our direct cinema goals. 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

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similar 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: It’s interesting to know our similarities with Hopper. God, or reality, always furnished us with 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 that you should mention Truman Capote. Again, we made a film of him and his book In Cold Blood. We have the same commitment to telling the truth. I’m quoting Capote: ‘Salesman is a difficult film to escape. Its originality of method, its human poignance and tough humour walk with you right out of the theatre.’ 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: 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, that it was not a ‘fly on the wall’, but rather the two of us giving a glimpse of us, or at least establishing our presence. JMT: Do you remember the boxing match motel scene being filmed in Florida? It’s Florida footage, I 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, nobody really directs a film in our documentary. I would rather use the term film-maker, and list all three of us as film-makers, as we actually did on the film Salesman. This still asserts our authorship. As stated in the above-mentioned quotation from Hitchcock, ‘in non-fiction film God is the director’. Charlotte was

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particularly insistent that we use the term director, if only for the fact that awards are given to directors, not film-makers. But with Salesman we gave all three of us a film-maker credit, not director. In 1970 we took her advice and for her reasons gave all three of us a director’s credit for Gimme Shelter. 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, but I don’t remember the rough cut. 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 so. 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: It’s true that not enough documentary film-makers have followed the purest ideals as in the making of Salesman. Fellow film-makers Leacock and Pennebaker follow 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? AM: In so-called reality TV, the makers think they can have it both ways. Enough semblance of reality to give it that appearance, but at the same time betraying true reality by exercising full control, even using scripts in the filmmaking. Viewers like to think they’re getting the real thing, and even the New York Times has been fooled by this approach. Early on, when reality shows were first coming into being, the New York Times would put quotes around the ‘reality’ of reality television. Later on they dropped the quotes as if to concede the films were really real.

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Notes 1 From email to the author dated 1 October 2010. For the full exchange, see the Appendix. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Drew’s quotations taken from DVD extras on Primary (Robert Drew Collection, Docurama Films/New Video Group, 2003). 5 Wording from Maysles Institute summaries. (See ‘The Thaw’ [2010]: .) Cf. Chaiken, Kasher and Maysles (2007), pp. 18–63. 6 Biographical details are derived from the Chronology in Beattie (2010), p. xiii. 7 Albert Maysles discusses the whaling ship idea in his DVD commentary on Salesman. 8 Email to the author, 1 October 2010. 9 Albert Maysles told James Blue: ‘I want to meet a girl and film the very moment I’m meeting her and stay with her for awhile’ (Beattie, 2010, p. 27). 10 The text of Kael’s review (The New Yorker, 19 December 1970) and the film-makers’ response are both available at: . 11 From my notes of a conversation with James Baker (aka ‘The Rabbit’), Michael Rezendes and the author, September 2010. 12 See the clip ‘Joey Archer vs Emile Griffith – II 3/6’ at: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=spWAQXoyUKI>. 13 Email to the author, 1 October 2010.

14 Gail Gradowski of Santa Clara University unearthed many of my sources on the business of direct sales. Vogels (2005, p. 50) relates similar numbers: by 1972 annual direct sales receipts were about $4 billion, with 66,000 companies and around 2 million salespeople involved. 15 See the pamphlet accompanying the Masters of Cinema DVD release of Salesman (Eureka Entertainment, 2007), p. 7. 16 On the film’s release date, see my note ‘Salesman (1966–9)’. 17 Miller was quoted on the cover of the ‘screenplay’ published in 1969 by the New American Library. 18 See Peter Whitehead’s interview with William Fowler, a DVD extra on Peter Whitehead and the Sixties (BFI Video, BFIVD750, 2007). 19 Wexler ‘only’ worked on the Chicago sales meeting, Maysles told McElhaney (2009, p. 166). Is that Wexler and camera at 6:45? 20 Interview with Jim McBride, a DVD extra on David Holzman’s Diary (Second Run DVD, 2006). 21 Interview with John Krish on the BFI Films YouTube channel. Available at: . 22 See . 23 See ‘A Sneeze Caught on Film’, American Treasures of the Library of Congress. Available at: . 24 See .

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Credits Salesman USA/1968 © The Bible Salesman Company 1968 A Maysles Films, Inc. Production © Maysles Films, Inc. 2001 A film by the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin Researched and developed by David Maysles

Film-makers Albert Maysles David Maysles Charlotte Zwerin Photography Albert Maysles Sound David Maysles Editing Supervisor David Maysles Editor Charlotte Zwerin Contributing Film Editor Ellen Giffard Assistant Editor Barbara Jarvis Sound Mixer Dick Vorisek

CAST Paul Brennan 'The Badger' Charles McDevitt 'The Gipper' James Baker 'The Rabbit' Raymond Martos 'The Bull' Kennie Turner 91 minutes (16mm; black and white; 1.33:1)

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References Alpert, Hollis (1969), ‘That Great Territory in the Sky’, SR Goes to the Movies, Saturday Review, 22 March, p. 75. Amberg, George (ed.) (1971), The New York Times Film Reviews 1913–1970: A One Volume Selection (New York: Arno Press). Barthes, Roland (1975 [1973]), The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang/FSG). Beattie, Keith (ed.) (2010), Albert & David Maysles Interviews. Conversations with Filmmakers Series, General Editor Peter Brunette (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi). Biskind, Peter (1998), Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster). Blue, James (2010), ‘A Discussion with The Maysles Brothers’, in Beattie (ed.), Albert & David Maysles Interviews, pp. 17–32. Originally published in Film Comment, Vol. 2 No. 4, 1964, pp. 22–30. Canby, Vincent (1968), ‘And Now, the “Spontaneous” Film’, New York Times, 4 September, p. 40. —— (1969), ‘Screen: “Salesman,” a Slice of America’, New York Times, 18 April, p. 32. Chaiken, Michael, Steven Kasher and Sara Maysles (eds) (2007), A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/ Documents (Göttingen and New York: Steidl/Kasher). Comer, Brooke (2010), ‘Man of the People’, in Beattie (ed.), Albert & David Maysles Interviews, pp. 107–13. Originally published in American

Cinematographer, Vol. 79 No. 1, January 1998, pp. 83–8. Didion, Joan (2006 [1967]), ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’, in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. Everyman’s Library 304 (New York, London and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf), pp. 1–178. ‘Direct Selling: Wish I Were a Rich Man’ (1969), Sales Management, Vol. 102, 15 February, pp. 41–2. Druick, Zoë (2010), Allan King’s A Married Couple. Canadian Cinema 5 (Toronto, Buffalo and London: TIFF/University of Toronto Press). Ebert, Roger (1969), ‘Haskell Wexler: “See, nothing is ‘real’”’, Chicago Sun-Times, 10 August. Available at: . Ellis, Jack C., and Betsy A. McLane (2005), A New History of Documentary Film (New York and London: Continuum). Gorin, Jean-Pierre (2012), ‘Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Top 10’, published on The Criterion Collection website. Available at: . Haleff, Maxine (2010), ‘The Maysles Brothers and “Direct Cinema”’, in Beattie (ed.), Albert & David Maysles Interviews, pp. 7–16. Originally published in Film Comment, Vol. 2 No. 2, 1964, pp. 19–23. Hall, Jeanne (1991), ‘Realism as a Style in Cinema Verite: A Critical Analysis of Primary’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 30 No. 4, Summer, pp. 24–50.

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Harrington, Michael (1971 [1962]), The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books Inc., revised edition). Hyde, Ralph W. (1985), ‘The Traveling Bible Salesman’, in Allene Stuart Phy (ed.), The Bible and Popular Culture in America (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press), pp. 137–63. Junker, Howard (1969), ‘Production Notes’, in Maysles, Maysles and Zwerin, The Maysles Brothers’ Salesman, pp. 106–21. Kolker, Robert Phillip (2010), ‘Circumstantial Evidence: An Interview with David and Albert Maysles’, in Beattie (ed.), Albert & David Maysles Interviews, pp. 55–64. Originally published in Sight and Sound, Vol. 40 No. 4, Autumn 1971, pp. 183–6. Kracauer, Siegfried (1960), Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. A Galaxy Book (GB 143) (New York: Oxford University Press). Leacock, Richard (1970), ‘For an Uncontrolled Cinema’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers), pp. 76–8. Originally published in Film Culture, No. 22–3, Summer 1961, pp. 23–5. Lyro (1969), ‘Show Biz Bible: Salesman BOMBS’, Variety, in Sales Management, Vol. 102, 15 March, p. 41. McElhaney, Joe (2009), Albert Maysles. Contemporary Film Directors Series, ed. by James Naremore (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press). Mamber, Stephen (1974), Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled

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Pluenneke, Geraldine (1970), ‘Welcome Mat: It’s Out for the Fast-Growing Door-to-Door Vendors’, Barron’s, 13 April, pp. 11, 19–20. Rosenthal, Alan (1971), The New Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press). Rouch, Jean (2003), Ciné-Ethnography, ed. and trans. by Steven Feld, Visible Evidence, Vol. 13 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press). Russell, Patrick (2010), ‘A Time to Heal’. Film notes in the booklet published in conjunction with the DVD set Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951–1977 (BFI). Sales Executives Club of New York (1967) [circular/newspaper insert], New York Times, Section 13 (advertisement), 19 November. Sarris, Andrew (1968), The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: E. P. Dutton). Saunders, Dave (2007), Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London and New York: Wallflower Books). Schnack, A. J. (2011), Interview with Jeff Malmberg, All These Wonderful Things [blog], 12 January. Available at: . Scorsese, Martin (2007), ‘Foreword’, in Chaiken, Kasher and Maysles (eds), A Maysles Scrapbook, pp. 12–13.

Scott, A. O. (2007), ‘The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer’, New York Times, 20 July. Available at: . Shivas, Mark (2010), ‘Albert and David Maysles’, in Beattie (ed.), Albert & David Maysles Interviews, pp. 3–6. Originally published in Movie, No. 8, April 1963. Spears, Timothy B. (1995), 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Stubbs, Liz (2010), ‘Albert Maysles: Father of Direct Cinema’, in Beattie (ed.), Albert & David Maysles Interviews, pp. 124–39. Originally published in Liz Stubbs, Documentary Filmmakers Speak (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), pp. 3–20. Thackray, John (1966), ‘The Boom in Bibles: Publishing’s Biggest Success Still Sets a Fast Pace’, Dun’s Review and Modern Industry, Vol. 88, July, pp. 39–40. Vogels, Jonathan B. (2005), The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press). Wolfe, Tom (2008 [1968]), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Picador/FSG). Wollen, Peter (2002), Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London and New York: Verso Books). Zimmermann, Patricia R. (1999), ‘Flaherty’s Midwives’, in Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (eds),

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An Interview with Albert Maysles’, in Beattie (ed.), Albert & David Maysles Interviews, pp. 140–59. Originally published in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, Vol. 26 No. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 6–21.

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