The Moviegoer

TWO 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 interference are derived the techniques of direct cinema, the result of ways in which these film-makers are forced to work (since they cannot structure the situations to suit their techniques-the real world doesn't provide set-shots-they must adapt their techniques to the situations). Hence synchronous recording and close-shooting, most often with telephoto or zoom lenses. Direct cinema is therefore a simpler and more intimate style of exposing contradiction. The implicit contradictions in an intrinsically ironic situation are given free to play to reveal themselves without benefit of reconstruction by the film-maker.

Conventional documentary style, largely derived from English and French films of the thirties, exposes contradictions through reconstruction's. In the spring issue of Film Quarterly, Judith Gollub says that what attracted Alain Robbe-Grillet to the cinema was its ability to act on two sense simultaneously in a 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, he seeks clean cut dialectical movement through analysis.

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 to seemingly ordained failure. At the film's end he is packing his bags and contemplating an unknown, precarious future.

Critics who are lauding this as an indifferently lighted Death of a Salesman are missing the point. (Besides, if it's a death, it's a movie death. A central duplicity is being practiced here-a duplicity which violently, perhaps fatally, transgresses principles of minimum interference. How likely is it that a man whose drag a film crew wit him from house to house, despite tapering sales?) This isn't any salesman; it is a Bible salesman. The choice is not that arbitrary. The world of commerce has sucked up religious life; Christ's passion is another pitch in American's long sales talk. The contradictions of salesman lie in the sinister meaning the history of capitalism has given to Luck 2:49. Christ, having been reprimanded by his parents for I must be about my Father's business?" A Catholic priest, spiritual consultant to Brennan's employer (each Bible salesman begin his talk wit "I'm from the church"), exhorts God to grant these good men "an abundant harvest." A salesman stands up and, an affirmation of fait, declares before the assembled conference (moral witnesses all), "I expect6 to make $35,000 next year." Applause. "Yeah, well, I expect to make $50,000." More applause.

THE MAYSLES brothers have thus picked up the cudgel in that tired old 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 to where /no intrepid Bible salesman/covered the territory/in two-tone cadillacs").

Not 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, with their clean ashtrays, in strange locals; living rooms never to be visited again; a thousand children played with and forgotten), is content to dwell solely on isolated portraits of individuals, invariably assuming neutral backgrounds tension; Brennan looks pathetic no real narrative defeated after his first missed sale-he looks just as pathetic and defeated in the final frames.

In exposing contradiction, the intellectual limitations of the direct cinema style are stifling to all but the simplest ideas. Don't Look Back never gets us [pat one man's faltering sales pitch. The unreconstructed reality of direct cinema can give us only those dialectic contradictions observable from a single perspective; for dialectic and analytic insight we must look elsewhere.