THE FILMS OF FREDERICK WISEMAN
The Beacon Cinema and SIFF team up to celebrate the master of immersive, fly-on-the-wall documentaries—Frederick Wiseman—with THE FILMS OF FREDERICK WISEMAN, a shared ten-film series showcasing his groundbreaking work, all newly restored in stunning 4K.
“Wouldn’t it be funny,” wondered Mark Binelli in the New York Times Magazine a few years go, “if the Great American Novel actually does exist, only it’s not a novel and has been quietly appearing in serialized form on public television for the past fifty years?” For over half a century filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has been obsessively crafting an expandingly monumental body of work—a series of nonfiction portraits of the intricate networks of the human interactions that drive American institutions.
Whether embedded in a hospital, a high school, a zoo, a welfare center, an army training camp, a public library, a city hall, or an entire neighborhood, his films are “stylistically ur-vérité,” as Errol Morris put it in the Paris Review in 2011. “No narration. Available light. Fly-on-the-wall. But Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. He may be a direct-cinema guy in form, but the content is not valetudinarian but visionary and dystopian. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”
Wiseman’s career is so prolific and consistent that it can appear daunting to the uninitiated. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the titles Wiseman chooses for his films: unassuming, nearly generic tags that might blend invisibly into the public broadcast programming for which they were often commissioned. Rather than being descriptive, each title might be better understood as a form of classification, a genus whose taxonomic reach allows for the early-career Wiseman to sum up a high school in 75 minutes, and later return to the same type of institution for nearly four hours of playful research.
Arcs, characters, and resonant emotional climaxes, not to mention harsh encounters with the conflicts and violence of common experience, are not in short supply in Wiseman’s films. Yet they do not feature onscreen interviews or title cards, and their narrative accumulation follows no formula, except the one Wiseman builds in relation to his chosen subject. They resemble almost nothing else in filmmaking, except for those who have chosen to imitate or be influenced by his approach. (TITICUT FOLLIES is in the DNA of exemplars of New Hollywood and superhero film maudit alike.)
In interviews, Wiseman plays the resilient, unaccusatory charmer, as he apparently does in order to gain access to each setting in his films. But the work is uncommonly powerful, maybe even life-altering, because the films demonstrate something genuinely principled: that if you were to see the work that happens to keep any enterprise in human society running, the experience might break through hardened routine conceptions to illuminate the too-often distorted and hidden reaches of social experience, in all its mundane horror and beauty.
“Rigorously shot, impeccably edited, and at times startling in their beauty, these films usher us into often otherwise anonymous spaces and lives, and help make the invisible visible.” - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“It is precisely the unveiling of what is most common that makes [Wiseman’s] documentaries an absolutely particular type of film … I would say, as with opera, one enters it or does not enter it; it requires a belief in something other than what one sees.” - Pierre Legendre, Cahiers du cinéma
“At every occasion, Wiseman hastens to remind us that he is a person, not a robot—his editing choices informed by his instinct, his moods, his rakish humor. He is a humble, elfin saint.” - Matt Morrison, Film Comment
“For Wiseman, there’s no such thing as banality; he sifts the material of the apparently banal until he’s found the variety of its texture. The process is not only deeply engaging but deeply beautiful.” - Steve Vineberg, Artforum
Films in this Program
Frederick Wiseman
84 minutes
Through a combination of observational footage and stark, unfiltered moments of daily life at the institution, TITICUT FOLLIES reveals the dehumanizing and brutal treatment of the patients. Wiseman captures moments of psychological distress, neglect, physical abuse, and the overall erosion of dignity faced by the mentally ill within the system. The documentary does not provide commentary or interviews but instead lets the raw footage speak for itself, presenting a harrowing portrait of institutional life and the mistreatment of vulnerable individuals.
TITICUT FOLLIES was banned in the United States for many years, with concerns over patient privacy and the negative portrayal of the mental health system. Despite its initial ban, it became an influential work in the documentary genre, sparking debates about ethics, the treatment of the mentally ill, and the power of documentary filmmaking to expose societal issues.
“A principled and gravely disturbing look into the void. Now, 50 years later, the film can be seen for what it was: a work of political art and moral courage.” - Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Frederick Wiseman
81 minutes
Forever questioning the relationship between the individual and the institution, LAW AND ORDER is among Frederick Wiseman’s most enduring works. Embedding himself with officers of the Kansas City Police Department in 1968, Wiseman turned his camera to law enforcement as the era of the civil rights movement was nearing its end and demonstrations more and more frequently were met with violence. LAW AND ORDER follows the Kansas City officers as they answer domestic disturbance calls, wantonly harass a Black sex worker, banter with each other in their patrol cars, and manage the administrative duties of the station. With an ease only Wiseman is capable of, the film exposes horrifying moments of police brutality and captures gentle instances of police serving their communities productively.
The subject of the police goes beyond LAW AND ORDER in Frederick Wiseman’s filmography. “Far from being a lover of the police”, as he explains, he nevertheless judges it important to show these “collectors of the human race” in what they enact on a daily basis.
“Because Wiseman rarely divulges why the police have been called, the viewer is forced to confront his own fundamental views of American race relations and the legitimacy of police authority. This features passages of ultra-black comedy as morally unsettling as anything in Stanley Kubrick's filmography, and it contains some of Wiseman's most aggressive experiments in editing and sound design, the jarring stylization making the content even more potent.” - Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader
Frederick Wiseman
84 minutes
HOSPITAL shows the daily activities of a large urban hospital with the emphasis on the emergency ward and outpatient clinics. The cases depicted illustrate how medical expertise, availability of resources, organizational considerations, and the nature of communication among the staff and patients affect the delivery of appropriate health care.
Critic Richard Brody insightfully compares what Wiseman accomplishes here to the work of classic Hollywood auteur Vincente Minnelli, director of so many timeless musicals and melodramas: “Minnelli, of course, has one of the cinema’s most superbly, floridly decorative imaginations, displaying a painterly eye for texture and color, line and movement, as well as an ear for voices and music—for the surfaces of life. So, actually, does Wiseman; for all his intellectual power of abstraction and analysis, Wiseman is a sensualist, who is also in love with tones and gestures, vocal inflections and bodies in motion. It’s precisely because he finds them both so alluring and so distracting that he finds the ideas they embody. He doesn’t look past or through them; he simply sees them clearly and conveys his own delight in doing so.”
Frederick Wiseman
115 minutes
The heart of the movie is its view of the immensely complicated systems, with codes and keys and a repertory of precise gestures, that a launch requires—a chillingly abstract and impersonal vision of the end of the world.
“Wiseman's most existentially terrifying film but also maybe his funniest.” - Esther Rosenfield
Frederick Wiseman
176 minutes
“A cubist-like vision, superimposing many perspectives of Central Park onto the same canvas. Wiseman’s creative imagination gives us the freedom to come to terms with our emotions and, in modernist fashion, to translate our deepest concerns and greatest fascinations into artful narrative.” Richard A. Schwartz, Film Quarterly
