Salesman (1969, The Maysles Brothers & Charlotte Zwerin) (Patreon)

65/100

Second viewing, last seen 1997. I have a short Heisenberg Uncertainty rant ready to go, but will make that a postscript since it's not actually that much of a factor here (compared to, say, the average Wiseman film). A landmark documentary by any measure, Salesman should be especially dear to me for having pioneered the anti-expository approach; my favorite "scene," for example, is what I guess you'd call the rehearsal session, in which it's never explicitly laid out that we're watching one salesman practice his pitch while the others serve up customers' typical reasons for hesitating. (Best moment: A new voice suddenly butting in just as the deal's about to close. "I'm his brother-in-law. I think you better ask Alice, honest to god." "You're his who?") This is the kind of just-follow-'em-around doc I favor, made even more appealing via stark b&w photography (though I kinda wish there'd been a switch to color when the film moves to Florida—that shift should be more visually dramatic, the absence of blue skies hurts) and the inclusion of such random bits as The Badger getting hopelessly lost in Opa-locka, which he later hilariously concludes must be Miami-Dade's "Muslim district." (The city has an Arabian Nights theme of sorts.) What holds Salesman back from greatness, to my eyes, is simply this: Its subjects aren't interesting enough. Of the four nicknamed Bible slingers introduced at the outset, two ("The Gipper" and "The Bull") remain largely undefined at film's end, to the point where I never stopped having trouble remembering which one is which. James "The Rabbit" Baker, who looks like a weedier Harry Dean Stanton, has the most compelling personality imo, but the Brothers understandably emphasize The Badger, who's kind of a real-life Shelley "The Machine" Levine, in terms of both his demeanor and his being stuck in a slump. (A cross between Levine and Aaronow, really, with plenty of the latter's frustrated whining thrown in. We get a milder Alec Baldwin figure at the Chicago convention, too!) And ultimately there's just not quite as much going on with him as I'd have preferred, with the movie concluding on an especially forgettable note. That's the risk one takes with vérité—you never know what you're gonna get. Essential viewing all the same, needless to say. 

Okay, the rant. Again, it's not a huge deal in this particular case, but as usual I sometimes did find myself wondering whether and how the camera's presence affected people's behavior. Especially during sales calls. Could see it going either way, honestly: Some people might be more likely to buy, for fear of looking cheap, while others might be less likely to buy, for fear of looking gullible. Also, I was curious about how the salesmen explained the Maysles' presence in the first place, and any possible effect of that contextualization. Turns out the Criterion release includes among its supplements an interview that the brothers did with Jack Kroll at the time of the film's release, and one of the chapter headings on that interview is "The effect of the camera." Ho ho! So I skipped straight to that, and was pleased to hear Kroll ask them the very question that I, as a scientifically-minded viewer, have always wanted to ask fly-on-the-wall documentarians: Have you ever observed without the camera present, in order to potentially establish a baseline? Here's how Albert Maysles responded:

We actually believe that we can come to situations without materially affecting them. If we didn't have that belief—and the surest way to indicate that we didn't have that belief, to ourselves, would be to go without our equipment and try the other—we know very well that that equipment is not gonna change things materially. And maybe that's why it doesn't.

Obviously, that is complete fucking nonsense. It's certainly possible that documentary cameras rarely or never influence their subjects (though I'm very skeptical), but it doesn't work that way because you believe that it works that way. You're not solving the potential problem via sheer self-confidence. This is like asking a scientist if their study included a control group and getting the reply "We know without using a control group that the dose can't possibly be acting as a placebo. And maybe that's why it doesn't." I mean jesus. Granted, documentary filmmaking isn't science, and Kroll's suggestion, even if attempted, wouldn't necessarily clarify much—there are way too many variables involved. But that's such a boneheaded answer that it makes my basic Freddy Riedenschneider suspicions feel totally justified.