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Jean-Pierre Gorin recommended Salesman (1969) in Movies (curated)

 
Salesman (1969)
Salesman (1969)
1969 | Documentary
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"In many ways the perfect double bill with Young Mr. Lincoln. Democracy in America, Part II. There is a lot of carbon dating at work in this movie (how an interior, a suit, a gesture spell class—as in middle or working—and the historic moment, 1969, in which these classes function); but this unfurling of specificity is there to give us its metaphysical sense and resonance (the essence of labor, its afferent solitude, the pathos of success). A lot has to do with the amount of space the frame encloses and how resolutely off center it chooses to remain. For all its relentless attention to the matter at hand, Salesman is never a claustrophobic film. It is a film that often goes one (or two or three) better on what a long line of American writers (from Dreiser on) have tried to pin down. Which might explain why Salesman often feels like a valentine to a time in film (and society in general) when work defined character, registering the cusp moment after which it will cease to do so. One can look at Salesman and weep when what rules as “documentary” these days comes to mind; one can—maybe naively—take the film as a perfect illustration of what the genre might still produce; one can celebrate the film as definitively proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. I tend to go for the latter."

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The Protecting Veil by John Tavener
The Protecting Veil by John Tavener
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"This is a record that got me through quite a difficult point with The Verve. I was expecting my daughter at the time and we were recording A Storm In Heaven at Sawmills in Cornwall. It was pretty remote. We'd polished off a bottle of wine at dinner and we were smoking quite a lot as well. I just needed to go and get my head together for an hour before I went back to making the record and this was the album I listened to. I see it as a very ecstatic and comforting record. And I've played it to people since and the reaction seems to be, "This is terrifying!" But I really don't see that at all. To me it was just disappearing into something for an hour that was heavenly and ecstatic, which was exactly what I needed. I was conflicted and worrying about my future – whether I was doing the right thing. For a long time I had this feeling that what I was doing was a complete joke and I'd be exposed as a charlatan. There was a general sense of paranoia – that working class thing. Lots of people around me were saying get a proper job. My thinking on the whole thing was that it was all going to end rather badly, which wasn't really conducive to being creative. The album was a freebie from Virgin, and it had a huge comforting effect on me."

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