The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman lived 96 years, long enough to watch the world remake itself many times over. Most of his movies were studies of communities, subcultures, and pursuits, and were titled after the institutions, locations or jobs they depicted: “Hospital,” “Basic Training,” “Juvenile Court,” “Primate” (about animal testing”, “Canal Zone,” “La Comédie-Française ou l’Amour joué,” “Central Park,” “Boxing Gym,” “Jackson Heights” and “City Hall.” Wiseman’s filmography as a director kicked off with 1967’s “Titicut Follies,” about a state-run mental institution in Bridgeport, Massachusetts, and continued through 2023’s “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros,” about the day-to-day operations of three family-owned restaurants in France. His work would be considered essential even if it did nothing more than capture specific places and people at specific points in history. But it’s much more than that. Taken as a whole, Wiseman’s features exemplify nonfiction filmmaking at peak originality and exactness.
Wiseman directed nearly 50 movies. All were made in accordance with rules and conditions devised by Wiseman, and were as uniquely specific as any in cinema history. First, Wiseman would get permission to film somewhere that didn’t normally tolerate film crews, at such length (anywhere from four weeks to three months) that the people who passed through his viewfinder forgot they were on camera and gave him material that seemed as close to authentic and natural as anybody could get. Wiseman would live in those spaces, often amassing hundreds of hours’ worth of material showing people and communities caught in the act of existing. Then he and his assistants would sift through the material, pick the most fascinating or informative bits, and assemble them into narrative mosaics of then-contemporary life.
The results were mesmerizing in their placid focus, despite or maybe because of how they ignored received wisdom about how to make a proper documentary. Wiseman had no interest in moving things along to prevent the audience from getting bored. Where most documentaries keep their running time between 90 and 105 minutes so they’ll fit in a two-hour time slot on TV, Wiseman’s routinely ran three to six hours with intermissions. There were no narrators or formal interviews. He didn’t use onscreen graphics or narration. He didn’t begin a film with a brisk summary of the work you were about to watch, or end it with a summation, or even a parting thought. His editing was precise and deliberate in its choices, but it was executed with such subtlety that you couldn’t be sure if Wiseman was consciously drawing connections between outwardly disparate people, facts, or events, or if you’d done that on your own.
Wiseman was a Boston lawyer who switched to filmmaking after producing 1963’s “The Cool World,” a low-budget drama about a Harlem youth gang directed by Shirley Clarke, a rare Black female filmmaker. In 1966, Wiseman shot his debut “Titicut Follies,” after taking his law students there on a field trip. The movie’s images of inmates being neglected, taunted, improperly medicated, force-fed, and stripped naked were so horrifying that the state sought a court injunction to prevent it from premiering at the 1967 New York Film Festival on grounds that it violated inmates’ privacy. This was the opening salvo in an ongoing legal battle that seemed to end with a federal appeals court deciding that “Titicut Follies” could only be shown to people in jobs related to medicine and its institutions. (The US Supreme Court could have heard the case one more time, but declined.)
Then, two decades later, the families of seven inmates who had died at Bridgewater between 1967 and 1987 sued the state of Massachusetts. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that if “Titicut Follies” had been given a proper release, the public would have been appalled enough to demand reforms that would have saved those inmates’ lives. In 1991, a Superior Court judge concluded that the movie was no longer a privacy violation because most of the inmates in the movie had died by then, and that the First Amendment right to free expression was more important anyway. The ruling allowed “Titicut Follies” to be shown publicly for the first time, 25 years after its completion. (It was unveiled on PBS, which would go on to become Wiseman’s most important patrons.)
Wiseman came up during the formative years of Direct Cinema, a movement originated by documentary filmmaker Robert Drew. Drew’s movies about John F. Kennedy’s presidency, “Primary” and “Crisis,” were works of exceptional frankness, made with the enthusiastic cooperation of the president, who agreed with Drew’s mission to record history as it happened, in an intimate, quietly observational style. Drew’s approach was only possible because of a recently invented advance in the nonfiction filmmaking toolkit: a battery-powered, handheld, shoulder-mounted 16mm film camera, outfitted with a shotgun microphone that could capture dialogue on the other side of a room or across a noisy street. The sound was recorded directly to the same spools of film unreeling within the camera, rather than being recorded separately by a boom operator and a sound engineer and merged in postproduction.
All of a sudden, work that once required separate picture and sound crews, lighting kits, and 35mm cameras too heavy to carry for hours on end could be done by one or two people. It could also enable what would later be called “fly on the wall” filmmaking, renamed “cinema verite” by French New Wave filmmakers who adopted it for fiction and added many innovative, energetic, low-budget films to the canon, including ”The 400 Blows” and “Breathless.” Documentaries made this way tended to adhere to a minimalistic, truth-oriented code. Events could be observed by the filmmakers, but not initiated or manipulated on location or through montage editing. Sound could not be dubbed after the fact, nor could events be shown out-of-sequence to make the movie more superficially dramatic or simplify a complicated chain of events.
An impressive group of US filmmakers emerged from this movement, including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, the sibling duo of Albert and David Maysles, and their editor Charlotte Zwerin, who later segued into directing. But none practiced their trade with the monklike zeal of Wiseman. In a 2000 Star-Ledger interview to promote his two part, four hour, PBS-funded epic “Belfast, Maine,” about life in the eponymous fishing village, Wiseman told me he didn’t appreciate being lumped in with other filmmakers in the Direct Cinema movement because to one degree or another, all but Wiseman routinely broke the same rules they’d set for themselves, allowing themselves a bit of post-production dialogue replacement or a pop music-scored montage as a treat.
Which isn’t to say Wiseman saw himself as a heroic avatar of non-intervention. He often told interviewers that the location shoots for his movies were conducted under a non-interventionist policy, but that in the editing process, he’d avail himself of editing’s liberating powers, and create a work that was more of a subjective personal take than something in the vein of a reference book. Accepting an 2016 honorary Oscar for his unique contributions to cinema, Wiseman was self-deprecating about his process, which could seem to the uninitiated like no process. “I usually know nothing about the subject before I start, and I know there are those that feel I know nothing about it when it’s finished,” he told the audience.
In interviews with publications that cared about aesthetics, Wiseman admitted he was working mainly from instinct, on location as well as in the editing room, and did not consider any of his films to be definitive statements on their chosen topics, but glimpses of moments in time that accumulated power and suggested meanings when laid end-to-end on an editing timeline.
Wiseman’s movies recapture the original impulse that drove early cinema: to show things that viewers might not experience otherwise, be it a bare-knuckle boxing match, a train pulling into a French railway station, or the construction of the Panama Canal. And yet, in their meditative, hands-off way, these proto-documentaries were aesthetically radical, because they rejected every supposed norm of motion picture storytelling, including ones that had been explored by his colleagues in the Direct Cinema movement.
The way he talked about them sometimes made it sound like as much a record of a roving mind as Kenneth Anger’s experimental films, Jean Luc-Godard’s essay movies, and David Lynch’s phantasmagoric explorations of his dreams and nightmares. In a 1994 interview with CINEASTE, Wiseman said, “This great glop of material which represents the externally recorded memory of my experience of making the film is of necessity incomplete. The memories not preserved on film float somewhat in my mind as fragments available for recall, unavailable for inclusion but of great importance in the mining and shifting process known as editing. This editorial process is sometimes deductive, sometimes associational, sometimes non-logical and sometimes a failure. The crucial element for me is to try and think through my own relationship to the material, by whatever combination of means is compatible. This involves a need to conduct a four-way conversation between myself, the sequence being worked on, my memory, and general values and experience.”
Wiseman’s films are as recognizably Wiseman’s as all the films of Hollywood directors routinely name-checked as masters of auteurist filmmaking. Once you’ve seen a couple of his movies, you can identify the rest from watching a couple of minutes of a scene on somebody else’s phone. His stated approach to capturing reality evoked the opening lines of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” But the reality was something else. The passivity ended once the editing began.
“I try to avoid imposing a preconceived view on the material,” he told The Paris Review in a 2018 interview. “Editing is a process that combines the rational and the nonrational. I have learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material. My associations are often as valuable as my attempts at deductive logic. It’s the old cliché—you find a solution to a problem because you dream it, or you’re walking down the street and it occurs to you, or you think of it in the shower. I’ve resolved editing problems many times that way, by trying to be alert to the way my mind—or what’s left of it—thinks about the material.”