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Frederick Wiseman (born 1930) was an American documentary filmmaker whose "fly-on-the-wall" films revealed what happens in a hospital, school, meat-packing plant, police department, modeling agency, department store, zoo, and other public institutions. Many of his films focused public attention on problems in the places he portrayed.
Frederick Wiseman was born in Massachusetts on January 1, 1930. He graduated from Williams College and Yale Law School. Wiseman was a graduate fellow at Harvard for a year and was then drafted into the army. He worked for a short time as an assistant to the attorney general of Massachusetts, then lived in Paris for two years (1956-1958). On his return to the United States he taught at Boston University's Institute of Law and Medicine, often taking his students to visit law courts and prisons.
Titicut Follies
Increasingly bored with the abstractions of the law, Wiseman bought the film rights to The Cool World (1963), a novel about Harlem delinquents, and produced the film, which was directed by Shirley Clarke. After taking his law students to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, a prison for the criminally insane, to show them the conditions there, Wiseman decided to make his own film. Titicut Follies (1967) is a brutally realistic, extended gaze at the oppressive conditions at Bridgewater, offered without any commentary.
Titicut Follies was widely celebrated by critics and academics, but was attacked in courts by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1968 Judge Harry Kalus ruled in Commonwealth v. Wiseman that Wiseman had breached an oral contract with the state and had invaded the privacy of one of the Bridgewater inmates. Kalus ordered the film banned in Massachusetts. On appeal, the Massachusetts Supreme Court softened the decision and permitted showings of the film to special audiences; in 1991 the injunction was lifted completely.
In Titicut Follies and the documentaries that followed, Wiseman used a small, unobtrusive crew, including a cameraman using lightweight equipment and no additional lights. Wiseman recorded sound, while an assistant supplied fresh film and tape. His straightforward films contain no on-camera interviews or commentary by the filmmaker. All scenes are unstaged to achieve what Wiseman called "a natural history of the way we live." His films are shot in black and white with no music. Wiseman's method gave the films the feel and texture of reality, but they were deftly and slowly edited in a way that encouraged the viewer to make connections, to speculate about social themes, and to reflect about the subject. "The whole point of this technique is to put you right into the middle of things so you have to think through your relationship to them," Wiseman said in 1993 to Vogue magazine.
"Reality Fictions"
Wiseman called his films "reality fictions," acknowledging that he was employing his own perspective. "All the material is manipulated so that the final film is totally fictional in form although it is based on real events," he explained. Wiseman's films have both the gravity of reality and the pleasures of art. They examine the oppressive, silly, and mundane procedures of human institutions, but they are not cynical, depressing, or vicious. Wiseman's wry, detached tone, accompanied by the patient's probing curiosity of his films, resulted in a humanistic focus on the quality of our everyday lives.
After Titicut Follies, Wiseman produced High School (1968), filmed at the middle-class Northeast High School in Philadelphia, a widely admired exposure of the oppressiveness and boredom imposed on adolescents and their apathetic response. After the angry tone of Titicut Follies and High School, Wiseman turned increasingly to a more complex interest in cultural issues, in which problems and victims are seldom clear-cut. Wiseman's subsequent documentaries were produced under contracts with New York City Public Television station WNET and were often shown on TV's Public Broadcasting System, but rarely in movie theaters.
Wiseman's Law and Order (1969) follows police procedures in Kansas City. Hospital (1970) explores the routines of an urban hospital. Basic Training (1971) shows a group of young draftees being prepared for infantry service in Vietnam. Essene (1972) focuses on a group of Benedictine monks. Juvenile Court (1973) explores a juvenile justice system in Memphis, presenting the paradoxes of attempting to combine justice and therapy. Primate (1974), one of Wiseman's most controversial films, shows the destructive results of human curiosity on a colony of captive apes at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta. The PBS broadcast of the film brought viewer complaints and a bomb threat.
Many consider Wiseman's Welfare (1975) to be his most effective work; it shows the frustrating interaction of a New York City welfare center and its clients. Meat (1975) is a dark comedy about a meat-packing plant in Colorado, where bleating animals are reduced to stacks of neat plastic packages for supermarkets.
Institutions Laid Bare
Wiseman said his goal in his films was to "discover what kind of power relationships exist and differences between ideology and the practice in terms of the way people are treated. The theme that unites the films is the relationship of people to authority."
Wiseman ventured outside the United States in Canal Zone (1977), which shows how American residents of the Panama Canal Zone try to keep their American cultural routines intact. In Sinai Field Mission (1978) Wiseman explored American soldiers on a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai Desert. In Manoeuvre (1979) Wiseman watched a National Guard unit participating in war games in Germany, rehearsing for a war with the Soviet Union.
Model (1980) extended Wiseman's analysis of American culture by looking at how images are constructed in the advertising business. In The Store (1983) Wiseman moved from modeling to merchandising, choosing the Neiman-Marcus store in Dallas as his setting.
Wiseman released one fiction film, Seraphita's Diary (1982), which explores the theme of self-awareness. He went to Belmont Race Track in New York to film Racetrack (1985), then in 1987 released a pair of films on people with disabilities: Blind and Deaf. Also in 1987 he released Missile. In 1989 his Near Death chronicled the intensive care unit of Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. In 1990 he returned to New York City to shoot Central Park. In 1993 his look at Miami's Metrozoo, Zoo, was widely praised. In 1994 he returned to an earlier subject with High School II, about Central Park East Secondary School in East Harlem, New York. In 1995 he chronicled the American Ballet Theatre in Ballet. In 1996 Wiseman released La Comedie-Francaise Ou L'Amour Joue, a tribute to a three-century-old Paris theater. "Wiseman at last has made a totally positive case for a human institution," wrote Robert Brustein in the New Republic.
For his work, Wiseman won three Emmys. Melissa Pierson noted in the June 1993 Vogue, "Under Wiseman's steady, perseverant gaze, these almost banal institutions yield fascinating information on their customary play of power, or what happens to individuals venturing into their works, or the gap between what society professes and what it ends up doing. His films require patience, but the viewer is rewarded with crucial truths about the way we live - and lie."
Wiseman told Pierson that he considered his earlier films, Titicut Follies and High School, too "didactic." Thus, in his later years Wiseman tried to avoid being too partisan. "There's a lot of heavy freight connected with the documentary," he said. "It's supposed to instruct us, uplift us, right a social wrong. But it can be other things; it doesn't have to be an exposé. That's too simpleminded. Why bother?"
Further Reading
Wiseman's films are the central texts that he has produced, and they are available for rental or lease from his distribution company, Zipporah Films, in Cambridge, MA. A standard reference work is Liz Ellsworth, Frederick Wiseman: A Guide to References and Resources (1979), which provides descriptive material, and in some cases transcripts, of the films up to 1977, as well as an extensive bibliography. Tom Atkins, Frederick Wiseman (1976), contains several useful interviews and reviews. Several books provide material on Wiseman in the context of documentary film in general; see Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (1973); Lewis Jacobs, The Documentary Tradition, 2nd edition (1979); G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Filmmakers (1971); Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (1974); and Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (1981).
Bibliography
See studies by T. R. Atkins, ed. (1976), T. W. Benson and C. Anderson (1989, rev. ed. 2002), and B. K. Grant (1992).
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Frederick Wiseman (born 1 January 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American documentary filmmaker. Born into a Jewish family, he came to documentary filmmaking after first being trained as a lawyer, a fact that has influenced his style and choice of subjects ever since.
In 2003, Frederick Wiseman received the George Polk Career Award given annually by Long Island University to honor contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting.
The first feature-length film that Wiseman worked on was Titicut Follies in 1967. This explosively controversial film launched the career of one of the grand-masters of American documentary. Not only is Wiseman a master of his art, but he has remained almost unbelievably prolific throughout his career. He has made 36 films in 38 years, many of them considered by documentary historians to be masterpieces of the form. His films have become longer and longer as his career progressed, with many of his films being more than 3 – some more than 4 – hours long. In spite of their length, all of his films are shown on PBS, which is one of his primary funders.
While Wiseman certainly has a strong interest in social issues, he is not an exposé film maker; he does not build his films
around exposing a specific injustice. The only exception is his first film, Titicut Follies. Here he did seek to effect
change on the situation, but the experience left him disillusioned with the "naïve and pretentious view that there was some kind
of one-to-one connection between a film and social change." (Poppy) Since then he has hoped to effect change at a more
abstract level, by illustrating to his audience the everyday interactions between people and
Wiseman has a unique style of filmmaking. His films seldom utilize any predictable or overt
What I try to do is edit the films so that they will have a dramatic structure, that is why I object to some extent to the term observational cinema or cinema verité, because observational cinema to me at least connotes just hanging around with one thing being as valuable as another and that is not true. At least that is not true for me and cinema verité is just a pompous French term that has absolutely no meaning as far as I'm concerned. Aftab, Weltz
Wiseman's films are, in his view, an elaboration of a personal experience. They are not an ideologically objective portrait of his subjects, and certainly not a generic illustration of the nature of all instances of the institutions represented, as the titles of his films (High School, Hospital, etc.) might suggest.
In many interviews Wiseman has emphasized that his films are not and can not be unbiased. In spite of the inescapable bias that is introduced in the process of "making a movie", he still feels he has certain ethical obligations regarding how he portrays the events in his films:
[My films are] based on un-staged, un-manipulated actions... The editing is highly manipulative and the shooting is highly manipulative... What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it... all of those things... represent subjective choices that you have to make... In [Belfast, Maine] I had 110 hours of material ... I only used 4 hours – near nothing. The compression within a sequence represents choice and then the way the sequences are arranged in relationship to the other represents choice. Aftab, Weltz[1]
All aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are therefore manipulative. But the ethical ... aspect of it is that you have to ... try to make [a film that] is true to the spirit of your sense of what was going on. ... My view is that these films are biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed but fair. I think what I do is make movies that are not accurate in any objective sense, but accurate in the sense that I think they're a fair account of the experience I've had in making the movie. Spotnitz
I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented to be in the film, ... to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time in the original event. Poppy
Wiseman works only four to six weeks in the institutions he portrays, with almost no preparation in advance. He spends the bulk of the production period editing the material, trying to find a rhythm to make a “movie”. Unlike some documentarians, he does not invite his subjects to participate in the process of editing.
Present in every Wiseman film is a dramatic structure. Not necessarily a narrative arc per se – his films rarely have what could be considered a distinct climax and conclusion; any suspense there may be is at a per-scene, human experience level and not constructed from carefully placed plot points; there are no consistent human characters with whom the viewer is expected to identify. Nevertheless, Wiseman feels that drama is a crucial element for his films to "work as movies" (Poppy). The "rhythm and structure" (Wiseman) of Wiseman's films pull the viewer into the position and perspective of the subject (human or otherwise). The viewer feels the dramatic tension of the situations portrayed in the films, as various environmental forces create complicated situations and conflicting values for the subject.
Wiseman openly admits to manipulating his source material to create dramatic structure, and indeed insists that it is necessary to "make a movie."
I'm trying to make a movie. A movie has to have dramatic sequence and structure. I don't have a very precise definition about what constitutes drama but I'm gambling that I'm going to get dramatic episodes. Otherwise, it becomes Empire. ... I am looking for drama, though I'm not necessarily looking for people beating each other up, shooting each other. There's a lot of drama in ordinary experiences. In Public Housing, there was drama in that old man being evicted from his apartment by the police. There was a lot of drama in that old woman at her kitchen table peeling a cabbage. Peary
A very distinctive aspect of Wiseman's style is the complete lack of expository (narration), interactive (interviews), or reflexive (revealing to the viewer some part of the filmmaking process) elements. Regarding the lack of reflexive elements, Wiseman has stated that he does not "feel any need to document [his] experience" and feels that such elements in films are vain. (Lucia)
In the process of producing a film, Wiseman will often acquire more than 100 hours of raw footage. Cutting this down to a feature length film that is engaging and interesting, without the use of any voiceover, title cards, or motion graphics, while still being "fair", is the reason that Wiseman is seen as a true master of documentary film.
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
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