When I find a new director, writer or musician, I lock into them and dive into their respective catalog. I knew of Frederick Wiseman after hearing about Titicut Follies years ago. Then I started hearing about his other work and how wide ranging it is. Titles like Welfare, Law and Order, and Public Housing. I started with a place I always go to, the library. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library presented the documentary form stricken of all of its tropes. There are no talking heads. No background music telling me what I should feel during a particular scene. The library is shown for all the public good it does. It has everything you could want: knowledge, education, community, race, class, politics. It explores these topics through budget meetings, book clubs, guest speakers pooled from diverse background, community outreach, brail classes, photo archives used for creators. The ins and outs of a particular institution or place is something that has fascinated me and something I really haven't seen since The Wire. The documentary was 206 minutes and I figured I'd divide it into two days. I ended up watching the whole thing in one sitting.
When I finished Ex Libris, I was hungry for more but I didn't know where to go next. Choosing from the rest of his forty two documentaries can be a daunting task. So I looked to a Letterboxd user named Esther Rosenfield, well versed in the language of Wiseman, for guidance. She pointed to Central Park as the best starting point. The next problem was access. Kanopy was the streaming service I kept hearing about to stream his films. The trouble here was, it isn't available in my area. So the next step I took was going to the Harold Washington Library and seeking out his docs that way. I got a hold of Central Park.
After watching Central Park, I was again blown away by the ground he managed to cover. I sought out more. His distribution company Zipporah Films had a website in which you can order them. The pricing however was too high for just a DVD-R. So I crossed my fingers and hopped and Ebay and found a user selling them for 30% off the price Zipporah had listed. In the mean time, I would rent Aspen and Public Housing from the library. Two radically different settings. One a vacation spot consisting of 95% white people. The other setting a housing project where everyone is black. Once again, I was taken with how many incredible scenes there are. There are people documented here who I will never forget.
I sought out any podcast there was on Wiseman and landed on one that covers each film. Two hosts and a different guest for each film they cover.
Learning about Wiseman's process is something that endeared me even more to his films. When he begins filming a particular place, he has no idea what the film is going to be about. There's no script. No outline. No research. He finds the film in the edit. For four to six weeks, he works in the institution he portrays. He then spends a year editing. He starts from hundreds of hours of footage. He begins by reviewing the material and uses a grading system adapted from the Michelin star guide of 1 to 3 stars. At the first phase, he sets aside forty to fifty percent of the material. It takes him six months to do all of this. After editing these sequences he begins to work on structure. It is through working on the structure, he is able to find a shape and what the film will ultimately be about. So when you sit down and watch one of his films, it begs the question, of all the footage he chose to keep, why did he keep that. How does it connect with the whole and what is he trying to say with it?
Because Wiseman's films rely on conventional techniques of narrative construction (establishing shots, cutaways to reaction shots, continuity editing), individual sequences are relatively easy to understand. His cameraman John Davey employs a good deal of camera movement and long takes. These shots require just as much active participation on the viewer's part as the editing does. Wiseman scholar Barry Keith Grant observes, "The mosaic structure encourages the viewer to focus on the logic of cinematic construction and institutional organization rather than empathize or identify in any consistent fashion with specific individuals." When watching Welfare, it felt like watching Nashville for the first time.
Fred says he never pushes a point of view on the audience because he abhors being didactic. Instead, he is dialectical, asking the viewer to tease out meaning by discovering the structural logic in his work. The viewer, in a sense, repeats Wiseman's own process by discovering the structural logic in his films and exploring their implications. "They have to fight the film, they have to say, 'What the hell's he trying to say with this? And they have to think through their own relationship to what they're seeing."
He makes call backs and parallels to his previous films so with each new film of his I watch; a new piece of the puzzle is unlocked. In an interview Wiseman compared the theme of education in both High School and Basic Training. "In many ways, the army was much more successful in its educational method than Northeast High was." When I first watched Public Housing, I was taken with the sharp contrast regarding community when compared with Aspen. On the second watch, I watched it after Welfare and again, it felt like a continuation of bureaucratic frustration but instead of the confinement of an office, the canvas is an entire housing project.
Wiseman makes no pretense at being objective. When it comes to the "cinema is truth" discussion he scoffs. "The notion that cinema is the truth is preposterous I never get involved in those discussions. Everything is subjective and everything represents a choice. To use the word "truth" is incredibly pretentious. It's such a typically French term: cinema verité."
Looking back at the last fourteen films of his I have seen, I am more than thankful for all the faces and places etched into my brain. Helen Finner tirelessly stating her case on the phone about the importance of the housing project in Public Housing, the daughter outraged at the "runaround" the welfare office is giving her mother and the dismissive reaction of the office worker in Welfare, the juxtapositions of agriculture work to a rich couple getting married in a hot air balloon in Aspen, the 45 minute scene in Deaf between the administrator, counselor, mother and deaf child, the way the guards mock the patient Jim in Titicut Follies, the birthday chicken scene in The Store, Steve the mescaline guy from Hospital. I could go on. There are dozens of unforgettable scenes across the 15 films of his I have watched that have run the spectrum of emotions. From horror to laughter to shock to tension to sadness.
When I think about the long journey ahead (30 films to go!!) I realize just how monumentally generous Frederick Wiseman has been in his contribution to cinema. I haven't even hit the halfway point and already consider him the biggest discovery of the last fifteen years and locked into my top 10 favorite filmmakers.
You can watch the full-length documentary Hospital here.
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