“The end result has to feel like a gift to the public that they can receive without explanation.” – Executive Committee Member, La Danse
Frederick Wiseman is the greatest documentary maker in film history. If you don’t believe us, that only means you haven’t seen his films. In his almost 50-year career he has trained his film camera on institutions ranging from mental hospitals (Titicut Follies), welfare departments (Welfare), courts (Domestic Violence I & II) and hospices (Near Death) to New York Central Park (Central Park) and the Paris Opera Ballet (La Danse, UK released last month). In each film, through a series of stripped down, self explanatory scenes, he explores the minutae of life within an institution or system, taking in the activities, conflicts, distress and triumphs of the people who reside in and occupy the place. His films are marked by their complete lack of narration, title cards, interviews to camera or discernable characters, but are filled with situations, stories and drama and fragments of lives. In the same way the ballet dancers in La Danse are taught to place all significance on every minute movement of each individual muscle, each movement contributing to the dance as a whole, these fragments and scenes build up into a complex, immersive portrait of their subject. The presence of a filmmaker in any of these scenes is invisible, and the openness and intimacy on display is almost unmatched in documentary. No-one is acting up, nothing is staged, no complexities are removed for the sake of offering explanations to (patronising) the audience. The films feel honest and disarmingly real in a way that few documentaries (any film even) ever do. A film by Frederick Wiseman is a perfect document, taking the viewer inside the subject matter, letting us experience a place first hand as if we’re standing at his side.
In spite of his relative obscurity, Wiseman’s influence is widely felt. He is often called the godfather of documentary. The Wire/Treme co-creator David Simon describes himself as “working in the tradition of Frederick Wiseman”. Wiseman’s film about the marine corps, Basic Training, was taken, near shot for shot, as the basis for the first half of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
His first documentary was instantly banned. Titicut Follies (released 1967) is bleak, a study of an American hospital for the criminally insane, the title taken from the macabre annual talent show put on by the residents. The film opens at this talent show as a group of patients, on stage and in marching band uniforms, wave pom-poms and sing “Strike Up The Band” in nervous flat unison. Wiseman’s camera moves in to look at the faces of the singers and each man is revealed, conflict written on every fascinating face. One is a mixture of nerves and distraction, nodding to himself as he counts his choreographed dance moves, still practising the dance as he performs it. One is a dead ringer for Fred Astaire, putting his heart into it. The sunken eyes of another man beam with pride as the song concludes, he smiles, oddly childlike with his cap tipped backwards, and the singers take a bow. A suited man, presumably one of the wardens, takes the stage and tells a couple of jokes before the next act, to roaring laughter from the crowd. The film cuts to a patient, skin and bones, undressing for examination.
The talent show is a sorry sight no doubt, but the men performing are not shown up as a sideshow spectacle, nor are they our characters - this is not the beginning of their journey to rehabilitation, we learn nothing more about them. This film is not their story. We see the men as part of the institution, and we can both identify with them and feel repulsed in this moment but, denied any continuity or development and onto the next one, moments are all we have, moments collaged by Wiseman into a deep and lasting impression of the film’s real character – the institution itself. We’re not here to pass judgements or draw conclusions on individuals, we’re here to experience every intimate corner of the big picture. There’s no linear progression and no talking head justifications distract us. Through his alert and wide open eyes, Wiseman simply presents us with the reality of the situation as he observed it, and that is enough. His great talent is in making us feel that we’re right there with him. This is documentary in its purest form.
So we see the abusive guards, the overworked doctors determined to help, the inmates masturbating in corners, the scores of sick men wandering in circles around a gym hall, mumbling, shouting, ticking nervously to themselves, building in one seemingly endless scene into something unbearable. Wiseman’s films have a musical quality – the filmmaker handles all of the sound design, and the editing is very deliberate. Hundreds of hours are often lost to the cutting room floor as the director shapes the material into what he considers a fair and authentic representation of his experiences, each film the story of a place. In this way his films are diaries, not unlike those of Jonas Mekas, chronicling his observations of each place or institute and the people within.
For Titicut Follies, these observations were deemed unseemly by the nervous medical and judiciary authorities of the time. Their concerns over the privacy of the patients were matched by concerns (particularly on the part of the institute used in filming) that the material in the film would cause a public outcry. However, while kept from the public, the film was screened in elite academic circles and to professionals with interests in the field, themselves not immune from the feelings of shock and anger that Titicut Follies inspires. The film played a large part in the wide ranging reform of the mental health system in America and, in 1991, by now a historical document, Titicut Follies was eventually cleared for public broadcast.
The film, like all of Wiseman’s documentaries, has been screened in the United States on the publicly funded PBS channel, which is also a frequent funder of his work. From Titicut Follies onwards, all of his films have been rigidly independent, all rights owned by Zipporah Films, his own production company (who kindly granted us the use of their stills archive for this issue) who also sell DVDs and distribute prints of his work, the takings from which fund future films. This strict independence aside though, Wiseman refuses to be drawn on the potential political implications of his films, preferring to present them as self explanatory and leaving any inference to the viewer.
This is an unusual position given the impact of Titicut Follies and the definitive way that many of his films, from his second feature High School onwards, are presented. They are named as definite articles – Law and Order, Hospital, Juvenile Court, Domestic Violence – so that this High School stands for any high school in the country; this Hospital is a representative, almost scientific, example for study, analysis and conclusions to be drawn. Within this wide variety of places, themes and situations often recur – injustice, abuse of power, poverty, suffering and sickness. So in Juvenile Court we’re party to back room barrister discussions and offender’s family conferences. In Law and Order we see police authority misused. Muddled beaurocracies and deliquents in High School. Equally though there are insightful, determined teachers and energised students. There are comic OTT hippies freaking out and vomiting on their first acid trip. There are repentant criminals and tireless nurses and loving marriages, all seen as moments within any system put before the camera.
To see only the altruistic, protest side of the films is to misunderstand Wiseman’s grand project and to ignore the fact that for every Domestic Violence there’s a Model, for every Blind there’s a Central Park. Any sense of discomfort and outrage arising from the films occurs only because it exists to be filmed in the first place, living under and on the surface of any situation or system, waiting to be manifested by a documentary lens. To call Wiseman a political filmmaker would undermine the scope of his work. Just as each scene in his films builds the larger picture of an institution, each of Wiseman’s films is a piece of a much larger picture and a much larger project, to experience and observe civilisation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by way of its institutions, its shared rituals and its rites of passage. In Near Death, the terminally ill say their last goodbyes. In Department Store, baby boomers flock in their optimistic thousands to buy their own little piece of progress. In Belfast, Maine, an entire town is put in front of the lens.
Often when audiences see his films for the first time they mistake the keen observation and quiet camerawork for something approaching objectivity. But watching Wiseman’s films in a linked light, the similarities and connections become all the more apparent, not just in the rhythms and style of filmmaking, but in the conversations and ideas picked up and noticed by the camera in every situation, in the values that he finds in each location. Seeing the films in this way, Frederick Wiseman is betrayed as the second character, after the institution, in all of his films. We experience his documentary through his eyes, his subjective observations. The fact that these observations are so nuanced, so insightful and relevant is testament to his skill and the harmony between the man and the medium. Wiseman is the silent storyteller, totally dedicated to his grand project. It’s why we call him the greatest documentary maker in film history. The man and the films are indistinguishable - Frederick Wiseman is documentary.
Re: Questions from British journalist
1. Having trained as a lawyer, what made you change course and become a filmmaker? Was it a longstanding interest, were you inspired by any particular contemporaries? Do you see parallels between documentary work and legal work?
I HATED LAW SCHOOL AND REACHED THE WITCHING AGE OF 30 AND DECIDED TO DO SOMETHING I LIKED. ABSOLUTELY NO PARALLELS FOR ME BETWEEN LAW AND FILM-MAKING.
2.Do you consider yourself a political filmmaker, in the sense that many of your films present places and situations that many people would not otherwise experience, and so would remain unaware of the issues affecting those places (Titticut Follies being perhaps the most obvious example of this)? To what extent do your personal views influence the context of the films?
I DISLIKE OVERT IDEOLOGICAL AND/OR DIDACTIC FILMMAKING. MY FILMS ARE COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE (WHAT ELSE COULD THEY BE?) BUT I TRY TO MAKE THEM FAIR REPRESENTATIONS OF MY EXPERIENCE AT THE PLACE WHICH IS THE SUBJECT OF THE FILM. I DISCOVER THE FILM IN THE EDITNG AND USUALLY ONLY TOWARD THE END OF THE EDITING.
3.Stylistically, your films are often labelled 'objective', 'cinema verite' and so on. Would you agree with this? How do you feel about the huge trend in modern documentary making for message-led films?
I BELIEVE IN THE WISDOM OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHER SAMUEL GOLDWYN WHO SAID "IF YOU HAVE A MESSAGE SEND A TELEGRAM." THE POINT OF VIEW OF MY FILMS IS EXPRESSED INDIRECTLY THROUGH THE STRUCTURE.
4.You retain the rights to all of your films and use public funding to make them. Has this ever affected the content of the films, has there ever been an outside, funding related influence in the filmmaking process?
NO ONE SEES THE FILMS UNTIL THEY ARE COMPLETELY FINISHED. FUNDING IS ALWAYS DIFFICULT. I RETAIN THE RIGHTS.
5.How long does a film typically take? Is there usually an adjustment period for your subjects to become comfortable with the filming, or is it an instant thing? Is there anything you yourself particularly do to make people more comfortable with filming?
FUNDING MAY TAKE UP TO SIX MONTHS. IT VARIES FROM FILM TO FILM. PEOPLE ADJUST WITHIN NANO-SECONDS TO BEING FILMED. I AM ALWAYS VERY STRAIGHTFORWARD ABOUT HOW THE FILM WILL BE SHOT, EDITED AND DISTRIBUTED.
6.Have you ever had a negative response from potential subjects, even a dangerous reaction to your enquiries? Do you find that, in the modern, internet influenced world, with a lot of people projecting personalities onto social networking sites, image consciousness, that the people you film with are any more self conscious than they used to be, or make any more effort to project something other than their everyday selves?
IT IS NO DIFFERENT THAN WHEN I BEGAN 44 YEARS AGO.
7.Do you ever develop a relationship with your subjects that continues once the film is completed? Where does Frederick Wiseman's experience end and the film begin?
THE FILM DOES REPRESENT MY VIEWS OF THE PLACE AND IS MEANT TO BE A FAIR REPORT ON WHAT I HAVE LEARNED.
8.Many of your films, including your latest, are made on 16mm.Is this purely an aesthetic choice?
I LIKE FILM BETTER THAN HD. IF I CANNOT RAISE ENOUGH MONEY TO SHOOT ON FILM, I WILL USE HD.
9.What prompted your interest in the Paris Opera Ballet?
I LIKEALLET AND I LIKE LIVING IN PARIS. THE PARIS OPERA BALLET IS ONE OF THE GREAT BALLET COMPANIES OF THE WORLD.
10.What are you working on at the moment?
I JUST FINISHED A MOVIE ABOUT A BOXING GYM IN AUSTIN, TEXAS. "BOXING GYM" WILL HAVE ITS WORLD PREMIERE AT THE DIRECTOR'S FORTNIGHT AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL IN MAY.
NB: Wiseman clips are difficult to locate online, owing to his reliance on takings from Zipporah Films' releases of the DVDs to fund future productions (Zipporah is Wiseman's company). Visit www.zipporah.com for details of how to obtain Wiseman's work.
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