Word: directs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TRADITIONS are evident in current documentary film work-conventional documentary and direct cinema (sometimes loosely termed cinema verite). Both styles work to transform an ambiguous, undifferentiated reality into sets of contradictions; their stance toward reality is ironic. But the means and indeed than creating (or reconstructing) events, attempts to situate himself in the midst of them. Though he does not relinquish his personal reference point, his personal reference point, his subject is an object trouve, a "real-life drama," and the structure of his film is determined by the nature of that subject in action. From this aesthetic of minimum...
...only a one-joke film, salesman, like so much of direct cinema, is a one-short film. Now while we have no right, given the style and the technical different relationships, there is no excuse for spending half of our viewing time in close-medium one0short, mainly contemplating Paul Brennan's dejected visage. The best documentary camera work (Ricky Leacock, sometimes) is distinguished by its description of the whole in the detail, the capturing on hands in Leacock's Mothers day, for instance). Salsman, despite almost mythic possibilities (an existence trapped in motels with their cleaning women; ion rented cars...
...dialectical movement of statement and negation; in other words, soundtrack and image allow for greater possibilities of contradiction. Conventional documentary reconstructs reality through editing and asynchronous sound (voiceovers, etc.) and techniques borrowed form fictional narrative-music, establishing shots, distant shots, etc. Often, conventional documentaries contain footage shot in direct cinema style; however, they do not use it in unreconstructed form. Instead, it is subordinated to larger structural concerns, concerns which aim at focusing the viewer's several perspectives on contradictions the filmmaker considers important. Fearful that the message of implicit contradictions is too ambiguous for it to have any impact...
SALESMAN, by Alvert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, is in the direct cinema style. Its structure. Characteristically, is determined by following the subject-in this case a door-to-door Bible salesman (Paul Brennan) -with sound recorder and camera. The film opens with Brennan and his three selling teammates in Chicago, and the rest of the film takes place in Florida, where Brennan and his buddies are opening new territory. Under direct hortatory pressure from is sales manager and psychological pressure form his less than sympathetic competitors, the elderly Brennan finds himself unable from his increasingly pathetic reactions...
...liberal crusade against the commercialization of religion. Implications might be drawn, weighty ones, about the nature of a commence-ransacked religion; about the everyday violence perpetrated by modern-day moneychangers of the cloth, about a ruling class' interest in the institutionalization of ecstasy through church structure. But the direct cinema aesthetic, in this case dedicated to just being there while a Bible salesman goes under, doesn't permit them. In its exposure of contradictions Salesman is a one-joke film; in intellectual content in never rises above Ferlinghetti's insipid " Christ Climbed Down" ("from his bare tree/this year/and ran away...