Frederick Wiseman Always Made His Point

Before he became a filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman was a professor who was in over his head. Wiseman had gone to Yale Law School partly to avoid the Korean War draft (though he ended up drafted anyway), but also, by his own admission, because he lacked a better idea of how to spend his time. At Boston University, he taught classes on topics that he claimed he didn’t know much about, so he would take his students on educational field trips to sites where their defendants might end up if they received insufficient legal representation.

One of those places was the since-renamed Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he got a different idea. After the facility superintendent accepted his proposal to film at the hospital, Wiseman began filming, with permission from authorities. By merely observing the appalling conditions at Bridgewater, Wiseman made Titicut Follies, a film so threatening to the Massachusetts state government’s reputation that the Massachusetts Superior Court ordered it to be pulled from distribution, citing patient-privacy concerns. This de facto government censorship lasted from 1967 until 1991, after a court lifted the ban and allowed Titicut Follies to be publicly screened. In the interim years, Wiseman, who died last week at the age of 96, built a career by chronicling the state of American institutions—and, in doing so, changed documentary cinema forever. By focusing on how organizations operate, he captured their central character, and gave voice to the people caught up in their intricate systems.

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The beginning of Wiseman’s career coincided with the post–World War II rise of portable filmmaking equipment, a boon to a generation of mid-century documentarians. Handheld cameras facilitated intimate access to the various places he profiled, allowing Wiseman to survey without additional distraction. Along with a small crew, he immersed himself in hubs of American activity: high schools, hospitals, court rooms, meat-packing plants, military bases, stores, parks, and theaters. His films eschew traditional documentary techniques such as explanatory voice-over and talking-head interviews, and his presence isn’t acknowledged by on-camera subjects. He didn’t artificially impose drama while filming—only during the editing process, when he would compress and shape hundreds of hours of footage.

Wiseman frequently rejected critics’ attempts to characterize his style, or pigeonhole him into a cinematic tradition. He disdained labels such as observational cinema, fly-on-the-wall, and cinema verité—all used to describe certain modes of naturalistic documentary-making—because he believed they signaled a lack of editorial judgment on the part of the filmmaker. Wiseman thought that all documentaries were composed of choices—in focus, composition, and structure—that inevitably presented a point of view. For example, 1975’s Welfare carefully documents the hoops that working people had to jump through to obtain welfare benefits at New York’s Waverly Welfare Center, representing the government as an intractable and unfeeling force.

Wiseman once said that he had an obligation “to the people who have consented to be in the film,” but befitting his contempt for neat characterizations, he also seemed uncomfortable having a more activist role foisted upon him. In a 2011 interview with The New York Times for his eventual obituary, he said that he didn’t believe that his films were primarily exposés. “There are people who think if I don’t make a movie about how poor people are being taken advantage of by the system, it’s not a real Fred Wiseman movie,” he argued. “And I think that shows a complete misunderstanding about what I’m doing.”

But his social consciousness shone through even in films where politics aren’t explicitly foregrounded. Consider Aspen, an exploration of the Colorado resort community that sees Wiseman balance his respect for the town’s palatial beauty and the workers tasked with its upkeep with his sly contempt for the wealthy denizens treating the town like their playground. Wiseman’s films often feature people speaking at length to various congregations, whether a church service or an informal assembly. He allowed his subjects to talk uninterrupted for long periods of time, rather than chop up their language into its juicier excerpts.

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In Aspen, Wiseman deployed this method to showcase the casual obliviousness of some of his subjects. A man complains about the rise of no-fault divorce at a Bible study. A cosmetic surgeon pontificates to fellow conventioneers that their job has roots in the myth of Narcissus, while exchanging disparaging comments about “non-Caucasians.” An artist holds a gallery show for her lifelike portraits of phone booths and Coke machines—all of which had already sold, she boasts—and proudly explains that she abandoned abstract expressionism in favor of realism, in order to reflect the conservatism of the Reagan era.

A subtle criticism of upper-class indifference emanates from the film, a product of Wiseman’s judicious editing. Near the beginning, he cuts between a farmer providing grass for a herd of cows and a couple in brightly colored après-ski gear getting married in a hot-air balloon. Later, he turns his camera on miners drilling into a mountain; when they dump out debris, we see skiers cruising down the slopes below, blissfully unaware of the manual labor occurring just out of sight. Snowplow drivers clear high-traffic areas; corporate flunkies dance to “Twist and Shout” in tacky Hawaiian wear at a ski resort. These juxtapositions are never heavy-handed, because Wiseman allows the film’s images to speak for themselves.

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In Jackson Heights, which focuses on the predominantly immigrant population of the eponymous Queens neighborhood, deploys a gentler touch. Wiseman was likely America’s preeminent “meetings filmmaker,” someone who relished filming any kind of professional or community gathering. Although local government meetings in Wiseman’s films are often sources of bureaucratic frustration, the meetings in In Jackson Heights are sites of potent expression. Many scenes take place at local grassroots organizations, such as the headquarters of Make the Road New York, where immigrants congregate to tell their stories and find solutions to problems such as acquiring an ID and avoiding police harassment. Small-business owners gather to discuss the specter of gentrification as their local mall considers mass evictions—a scene that’s provided the same weight as a large Pride march or a dance night at a local bar. Wiseman, carefully considering each of these moments, lends equal weight to leisure and work.

In Jackson Heights was the first Wiseman movie I saw, and I mostly remember being stunned by its egalitarian spirit. Street vendors, soccer fans, Arabic teachers, LGBTQ activists—all deserve to assert their dignity in Wiseman’s eyes. The documentary never resorts to pedantry in communicating its feelings about the community, but instead operates from an assumption of equality. Near the film’s end, Wiseman spends time with a “taxi tutor,” someone who teaches prospective cabbies how to pass their license test. The instructor’s patience and gregarious spirit as he explains to a group of immigrants how to navigate the city, with Wiseman’s camera also capturing the students’ joy and rapt attention, deeply moved me.

In Belfast, Maine, a chronicle of life across the historic seaport city, Wiseman presents a lengthy scene of a high-school English teacher extolling the virtues of Herman Melville to a classroom of students. He explains how, in Moby-Dick, Melville elevates a commercial fisherman to tragically heroic status, which literature usually reserved for the royal or the wealthy. (The common man “is as good as the rich,” the teacher says proudly.) He then goes on to outline Melville’s final novel, The Confidence-Man, in which the author argues that the American dream is a false bill of goods.

Though Wiseman would likely dismiss comparisons between himself and Melville, this crucial scene pulls together the two threads that he spent his career exploring. He believed, staunchly, that ordinary people had a dignity and grandeur worthy of cinematic treatment. But he also understood how their dreams were at the behest of systems designed to hinder progress. As much as his films mix compassion and scorn, Wiseman never seemed to become jaded enough to lose his essential curiosity. His final feature, Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, about a three-star Michelin restaurant in France, explores the culinary process from the market to the table, interrogating every single step from the selection of produce to the choice behind each dish. Wiseman was one of America’s finest artists because he never stopped wondering how things worked; even if the answers weren’t pretty, the people who were affected—that is, all of us—deserved to know.

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