The documentary form is often thought to be governed by a manageable feature-length high concept: the story of a person, an institution, an historical episode. The subject itself and the film’s attitude towards it, its editorial slant, are habitually plain enough and the procedure is metonymic: the camera focuses on a part, and the whole is illuminated by implication. Often they have a sexed-up, quirky story to tell, which might mean a selective and sneakily tendentious approach to editing the material. But that is not quite the case with the films of Frederick Wiseman. His colossal, immersive movies about ordinary people and ordinary lives enclosed in some kind of institution, and characterised by the absence of voiceovers, intertitles or the off-camera directorial presence of the interviewing voice, are not amenable to the elevator pitch; they are the entire elevator shaft itself, and the whole building that houses it.
Whereas epic-length films might be generally held to be appropriate for big and distinctively historical subjects, such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah or Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, Wiseman applies the maximal approach to static cross-section studies of sometimes less obviously momentous topics such as Paris’s Crazy Horse nightclub or the French restaurant Le Bois Sans Feuilles. However his greatest works are top-to-bottom body-politic pictures of public institutions, huge, intricate constructions of unglamour; his movies themselves were virtual institutions, movie-edifices mirroring their subjects in architectural form and indeed almost always funded by one particular public institution: PBS, the Public Broadcasting System.
Titicut Follies (1967) is about the life of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, with the title alluding, with a hint of the Marat/Sade, to the hospital’s annual revue. Essene (1972) is about a Benedictine monastery, and Primate (1974) about a primate research centre. The 1986-7 tetralogy Blind, Deaf, Adjustment & Work and Multi-Handicapped is about the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind, while his gigantic and gigantically sombre Near Death (1989), running at six hours, is about a hospital’s intensive care unit.
His masterpiece is arguably Welfare, from 1975, a huge study of the social provision bureaucracy in New York whose title has an irony as vast and inscrutable as the place itself. (A British equivalent might be called Benefits.) We see a wide array of people, stressed officials, security guards and desperate claimants; Wiseman shows that the welfare office, like Kafka’s Castle, both imprisons and repels them; they cannot penetrate it – or escape it.
Watching a Wiseman documentary is to feel that you are encountering a huge archive resource, a massive audio-visual database from which you are at liberty to make your own edits and selections. It is arguably a uniquely empowering and valuable approach, though others might feel that a Wiseman documentary, at once huge and unsignposted, can overwhelm and doesn’t necessarily provoke any great change in the institutions being shown.
My own favourite among Wiseman’s films is his rich and vibrant In Jackson Heights from 2015, an ethnographic study of a diverse New York community, under pressure from gentrification, and the title’s first word is important: you really do feel that you are in this place, in some real-time, unedited sense. Wiseman’s films were monuments to human suffering and human challenge and human potential.
#Frederick #Wiseman #brought #uniquely #empowering #scale #immersive #documents #ordinary #life #Movies
