The Church of Movies

Salesman Trailer One of the ironies of the Maysles 1968 documentary, Salesman , is that for years it didn’t really sell.  It’s one of those films that I have been intending to watch for a long time but there was always something readily available that I wanted to see more and this is a film with a few factors that might put you off. Salesman was shot on 16 mm using a pretty basic camera and microphone set-up in which the sound of the film moving through the camera comes very close to drowning out the words of the Bostonian salesmen depicted. After 10 minutes, I resorted to subtitles because I was feeling lost, although thankfully not in the same way as Paul Brennan, the bible salesman at the centre of this piece, a lost sheep who fails to find sufficient comfort in the capitalist gospel of America. Some have made the case that the technical shortcomings of Salesman merely  underline its brilliance. I was, however, amused by Albert Maysles’ response,