Movies: American Close-Ups

I would guess that for many of us the term “documentary film has a dull, “educational” connotation, bringing to mind stuffy high school rooms with the blinds drawn and a movie screen set up in front of the blackboard, showing farmers picking some crop and trucks taking it to factories and great machines making it into products that are shipped to market, while a voice that sounds like God tells us what is happening and reminds us how dependent our entire civilization is on the lowly soybean. Or perhaps we think of those “TV documentaries” in which the great networks display their social responsibility by showing poor people being exploited or discriminated against or hooked on dope, while a voice like that of Edward R. Murrow, or one of his heirs, tells us how awful it is.

Salesman, directed by Albert and David Maysles (Maysles Films, Inc.)

High School, directed by Frederick Wiseman (OS, Inc.)

Neither of those conceptions serves to convey the form or feel of two new movies I have seen which nevertheless fall under the general category of “documentary,”in that they do not use professional actors, but show people going about the activities of their daily lives, not talking from a script or out of a dramatic improvisation, but speaking from the ordinary demands of the job or amusement in which they would anyway be involved. One of the movies is called Salesman, and it shows four Boston-based door-to-door Bible salesmen as they make their calls, attend sales meetings, and attempt to relax after work, playing cards or telling stories. The other movie is High School, which shows students and teachers in classes, conferences, and extracurricular activities as they take place in a particular American high school. The seemingly mundane nature of the subjects is, in fact, part of the fascination of the two films, for thee portray aspects of American life that are rarely treated in any media because they are neither “newsworthy” nor, even on the surface, “controversial,”and yet tell more about the nature of our society in a personal, immediate manner than any recent documents I have seen of any kind, whether in the form of film, novel, or journalism.

Both films were made on relatively small budgets, with the most unobtrusive of equipment, a handheld camera and a handheld sound system, ingredients that might quality them for the fashionable, fine-art) category of cinema verite. But the makers of both films, with justification I think, prefer not to pin that label on their work. That style, known to its “in” practitioners as “Cin-Vert,”brings to mind its own cliche connotations, which include a shakily held camera jerking all over the place, rough home-movie type editing, and an inaudible sound track. These two movies have no such amateur-art features, but are professional in the sense that their makers are good craftsmen as well as good artists, and consistently avoid the obscurity and boredom that so often are used as the avant-garde rationale for incompetence and lack of imagination.

Albert and David Maysles, the two brothers who made Salesman, have had wide experience in journalistic filming (their most notable previous joint venture is a film portrait of the producer Joe Levine called Showman) and have obviously thought a good deal about the form they are working in. In a background release about their film, they use as epigraphs tor the project two quotations that are probably supposed to give artistic justification to it, but which I think are not only unnecessary (the film is its own justification) but also misleading. They quote the Italian screenwriter who wrote Bicycle Thief to the effect that “the time will come when we shall go to see what a man does in his minute daily actions, and to demonstrate the same kind of interest which the Greeks had in going to then dramas. This sounds more like an argument for the type of Andy Warhol films that show a pretty girl I eating a randy hat for hours on end -the theory that anything that happens is beautiful and significant beta use it happens-and this is not the sort of thing that the Maysles are doing at all in Salesman. They also quote Francis Bacon that “the contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.” As “noble" as that concept may he, it never works, the best illustration being that even in written journalism or nonfiction there has to be selection, there has to be “imposture"; the farts must be ordered and shaped in some manlier, whether we ate speaking of the starkest wire set vice dispatch or of James Agee’s eloquent, and complex “documentary" of the sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The Maysles brothers have certainly imposed such order and selection in the making of their own film, which was edited from six weeks of shooting into an artful, engrossing ninety-minute movie, which beautifully and painfully portrays the humor, hopes, frustrations, dreams, fears, triumphs, and defeats of four men who make a living selling Bibles from door to door. In the process it conveys an enormous amount about the quality of life of their customers, who are the ordinarily unseen Americans scraping along as best they know how in a burdened, confusing, monotonous, often lonely existence.

There is no omnipotent, unseen narrator, but only the voices of the salesmen and their customers and bosses, and their dialogue needs no underscoring or elaboration. The tough district sales manager of the Bible company, who looks and sounds a little like a Southern sheriff, goads and extols and bullies his charges, remarking over breakfast to a harried salesman who is in a bad slump, “You eat like you’re successful"; and, after chewing out the less successful sellers at a meeting, says almost to himself, with great conviction, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” But there is little relief in sight, either for him or the trudging salesmen or the people they visit —the ladies with their hair in curlers, the men in undershirts, the lonely widows, the squalling kids, the indomitably hopeful, frightened, suspicious, trusting, and surely brave human beings whom they find behind the doors of all the little houses halfway up in the next block. Our neighbors; us.

Through a different style and with a different subject, High School conveys the same sort of convincing, personal sense of dramatic revelation that “this is how it is" with the real lives of a whole group of Americans—the teen-agers, and their teachers, counselors, and parents. Frederick Wiseman has used the same technique and approach in making High School as he did in his powerful film about a hospital for the criminally insane, Titicut Follies, which has won international acclaim and top prizes tor film festivals throughout Europe (though it still is banned in Massachusetts, pending an appeal in the courts at the time of this writing). Wiseman uses no narration but depends on the voices of the people being filmed, nor does he employ the narrative aid ol picking out one or more people who servo as “main characters" to be followed through the film. Shilling from scene to scene in a kind of moving montage, the high school itself becomes the “main character in the sense that an unseen God was a character in some nineteenth-century novels—indescribable, all-powerful, speaking only through his servants (in this case the teachers and administrators).

Watching classes and counseling sessions, sports and fashion shows, and informal discussions, what slowly, mountingly becomes clear is that the real, underlying subject the high school is teaching is not French or typing or sociology, but what in its own words might be called “good citizenship,”which means doing what you are told, respecting authority for authority’s sake (this includes all elders in or out of home or school), behaving and dressing and thinking like “everyone else.”

A boy pleading innocent to a disciplinary charge is persuaded to take his punitive “detention” period in order to show that he is mature; a girl who wants to wear a short dress to the senior prom is told that she would “offend people, and that being “individualistic” is all right, of course, but there is a time and place for it—evidently not in this life. A boy with long hair tells how an administrator calls him in and criticizes him for not “looking like a Northeaster.” (Northeast is the name of the high school.) These incidents occur naturally throughout the busy activities of classroom and extracurricular involvements and almost unconsciously continue to build, then gather and drop like a bomb in the final scene. This last episode is a faculty meeting where a lady teacher reads a letter from a former student who is now serving in Vietnam and is about to parachute behind the DMZ; he writes to thank his teachers and the school and says some people may not understand why he is risking his life to do what he is doing, but he thinks it is right, and besides he understands that ‘I’m only a body anyway.” The teacher beams with pride and says she is sure the faculty agrees with her that in the case of this boy, “Northeast has been successful,”

There is as yet no adequate categorization for these two powerful and absorbing movies, and I personally prefer to think of them as poems. But then that’s the way I think of Agee’s famous Men and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier.