Event

The Salesman

Fri May 04: 7.15pm
Sat May 05: 4.00pm, 6.45pm
Sun May 06: 4.00pm, 7.00pm

Albert Maysles, David Maysles, & Charlotte Zwerin
US
1969
1h 25m

About
A landmark American documentary, Salesman captures in vivid detail the bygone era of the door-to-door salesman. While laboring to sell a gold-embossed version of the Good Book, Paul Brennan and his colleagues target the beleaguered masses then face the demands of quotas and the frustrations of life on the road. Following Brennan on his daily rounds, the Maysles discover a real-life Willy Loman, walking the line from hype to despair.

Underneath this critique of failure and smallness lies a more powerful indictment of American commercial society: its petty obsessions with status, its propensity to exploit the gullible, its way of concealing exploitation behind goodwill, and above all, its snide trick of offering religion and its promise of deliverance in the afterlife, rather than improvements in everyday life. Toby Miller, Current