Frederick Wiseman

I was curious, though, about a comment made in the Chicago Reader review of High School (by Dave Kehr): that Wiseman's roving camera, with its "pointless" close-ups, obscured the social issues and was thus "intellectually dishonest." He claims that Wiseman later learned to tame his camera and developed into a better filmmaker. I can understand this point theoretically, but it seems harsh to apply to this example, which I don't think suffered for its camera-work. And doesn't this ignore the fact that Wiseman (or any documentarian) manipulates his films in myriad ways through editing?

I think it's careful to note that even though all documentarians manipulate their material via editing and other means, one shouldn't jump to the fashionable conclusion that all is subjective and there are no more or less truthful documentaries. Manipulations can be in the service of the truth or of lies.

Noël Carroll has a brilliant essay on this issue in a book entitled Post-Theory. I believe it's called something like "The Documentary Film and Postmodern Skepticism." Also worth reading on truth and form in the documentary is an essay in Gilberto Perez's The Material Ghost which touches on Robert Flaherty and Buñuel's Las Hurdes.

But I do agree with you about the potential of manipulation to serve truth. The reason I mentioned editing was merely to say that all movies are manipulated in some way, whereas Kehr seemed to be wary of manipulation period.

I'll have to check out the Carroll essay -- I generally enjoy his work, even when I disagree with him.

He said that most of his films are getting DVD releases over the next year, by the way.

Why didn't anyone tell me there was a new Wiseman movie out?

http://www.zipporah.com/calendar/press/7

STATE LEGISLATURE

A new documentary film by Frederick Wiseman

STATE LEGISLATURE shows the day-to-day activities of the Idaho Legislature, including committee meetings, debates of the House and Senate, informal discussions, meetings with lobbyists, constituents, the public and the press. The workings of a democratic government are not of interest solely to Americans, but, because so many countries in the world are currently trying to adopt a democratic form of government, the issues presented have relevance on a global scale. The film is an example of the achievements, values, constraints and limitations of the democratic process.

Just watched Public Housing - a revelation, honestly.

Anyone else have recommendations along this line? I added Robert Drew's Primary and Crisis to my queue; any other direct cinema types working today?

i saw meat MEAT once, about 25y ago, and still can remember images.

This has been going on here, gonna try to catch some:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1028

i was actually kinda disappointed when all of this guy's stuff became available because it meant having to sit down and watch it all, rather than just talking about how it was tragic that it wasn't in print.

how long's meat? i have a thing for les sang des betes

From whom is it available? the NYPL only holds VCs you have to watch IN the library!

last time i was at kim's they had a shelf of his stuff?

for purchase btw, not rental
seems like zipporah has put out pretty much all of them, $30 each - maybe a lil cheaper at kim's.

ah, I very seldom buy.

im guessing i shd go see Titicut Follies tonight if I'm not buying, then

if you're feeling long-ass documentary fatigue, you can use 'i'll see it on dvd' as the new 'i'll wait until it plays at the cinema'.

Boxing Gym is one of the best things I've seen this year tbh

There are a number of Wiseman films I love--Welfare and Near Death topping the list--but I didn't get much out of Boxing Gym. I just found that an inordinate amount of time was devoted to various people pummelling the practice bag.

Just watch The Store! Didn't realize it was going to be two hours long, but still really enjoyed it. Felt like I had spent the day at Neiman's but without having a nice shirt or shoes to show for it. I want to watch more docs like this.

i finally broke down and t0rr3nt3d a bundle of wiseman films... this stuff just isn't available ANYWHERE to buy or stream.
Already seen Boxing Gym, Missile and Zoo; all so very good. Now I have beat up copies of Public Housing, High School, State Legislature, Meat, Adjustment and Work, Essene, Juvenile Court, Law and Order, Primate, The Store, Hospital, Welfare, Blind, and Titticut Follies. Kinda excited.

u can buy them directly from his company fyi - http://www.zipporah.com/films

Hospital is on youtube in a high quality rip, in full.

His latest will be at the NYFF

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/at-berkeley

opens in US Nov 8

Thought At Berkeley was very good. I don’t like every Wiseman film I see--found Boxing Gym a bore, didn’t care for his horse-racing film from the early ‘70s. But I’d put At Berkeley just a notch below Welfare and Near Death.

There’s so much that, unless you were taking notes for a review, it’s hard to summon everything afterwards. (The film runs four hours.) There was a point in the first half where I thought, “This is well made, no surprise, but it’s not the ‘70s anymore, and all those sequences of incredible tension and confrontation that would flare up all of a sudden in Welfare and Hospital, you’re just not going to have that here.” And you don’t; Wiseman never manufactures drama, so mostly it’s an endless procession of meetings and seminars. I don't think Mario Savio's even mentioned for the first couple of hours, and when he finally is, it's at a talk given inside something called the Free Speech Movement Cafe. But it did start to involve me more and more as it went along; the last hour, given over to a student protest/building-takeover concerning fees and other grievances, is not handled like you might expect (especially the resolution), and that’s the hour I’m mulling and puzzling over right now, in the best way possible. I do think Wiseman is editorializing there, but I also know my own personality and biases come into how I viewed his handling of the protest. Maybe he isn’t--I don’t know. From a review I found: “Has Frederick Wiseman, the patient filmmaker whose long documentaries listened to the voices of ordinary people in public housing and on welfare, gone over to the dark side of authority? He clearly gives credence to the Cal executives, but, as ever with Wiseman, he leaves plenty of footage with information that gives you a chance to make up your own mind.” Yes--people will see that hour different ways.

Not a great deal of humour, but three things did made me laugh. A couple of shots of a guy on a John Deere mowing the campus lawns--you need the set-up for that one. There’s one seminar where a white girl identifies herself as “squarely middle-class,” says her mom’s a teacher whose income is stagnant while her own fees go up, and the only support she can get are unsubsidized loans; she starts to cry, and the black girl beside her gives her a supportive “now, now” pat on the shoulder. I don’t think there was any intentional irony there, but I did laugh. And I found it funny when Robert Reich showed up halfway through to lead a class, sharing anecdotes from his Clinton days. There was a jarring disconnect between the world of a venerated documentarian and the much-despised political class. I figured that would be enough right there to ruin the film for some people, and that amused me.

From the same Indiewire review: "Another question: Based on the proportion of women filmed by Wiseman in At Berkeley, you might think that the student body was 80% female. That's more a question of taste than reporting chops. Remember, Wiseman is the first person to say he’s not objective. He clearly likes attractive women -- not a sin, even at 83."

Well, at 51, I wasn't immune. Especially noticed the girl to the immediate right of the Thoreau/Emerson lecturer, and Sofia in Reich's class. Shame on Wiseman, shame on me.

...

feel as much shame as u need to just don't be so fucking creepy about it?

Meant as a mild, throwaway joke. No actual shame--just laughing at myself, and laughing at human nature.

at berkeley was excellent and sparked a good conversation later on with an activist friend who was in the library that day. she, unsurprisingly, had a different take on the administration than the one the film more or less lands on.

i haven't seen it yet, but i am extra curious about it for a number of reasons.

in fact, i was explaining that there are different types of documentaries to my students on tuesday and i showed them about 10 min of Juvenile Court and they were visibly repulsed when i turned the lights back on to get their reactions. they were just like OMG THAT WAS SO BORING, like they were going to die of boredom right there in the classroom.

haha

berkeley IS 4+ hours so you damn well better have a taste for wiseman's patient pacing and subtle subfrequency didacticism if you're gonna watch it. There are a bunch of "wiseman moments" where he juxtaposes the near surreal with the quotidian, like when you jump cut from watching a board room meeting to seeing three women dissecting a vulture. The movie plays like his Tempest; like he's looking back on a long creative life and surveying how modern youth is processing. There's a lot of holistic humanism too, both explicit (lengthy talk about Walden and how any disturbance in the pond sends out ripples but ultimately all is quiet unless you look beneath) and implicit (watch for the single lawn mower!). Workers sweeping stairways and laying water lines don't get to talk but Wiseman's point that "you are what you do" keeps everyone equally anonymous and equally honest (or dishonest). He did a brief skype interview from paris following my viewing and he commented that the only thing they didn't let him tape was the tenure committee meetings and that the administration had no oversight or editing capability on the piece.

Seems like the most overlooked Wiseman (and I've seen most of them) is ESSENE. If he only made that and PRIMATE, that would have been enough -- retire, you done good.

i don't like to think that his movies are ultimately about him and his career (rather than his subjects), but maybe at this point, they are? i didn't feel that way about high school 2, which was the most recent one i saw? i think?

oh, i dunno that's what it really was "about" exactly, it just resonated in that way with me.
prob my two faves are "zoo" and "missile" - the former is almost like a dream and the second is like wandering through an alternate military reality

At Berkeley premieres on Independent Lens tonight --some reviews here http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/berkeley-reviews

"National Gallery" is terrific.

i've been watching CANAL ZONE while i practice speed drills and it's surprisingly dull.

man, national gallery is GREAT

If you check out any episode, listen to their interview with Wiseman himself. It's good and covers a lot of subjects that I haven't heard in any other interviews with him.

I'm in the middle of Belfast, Maine right now. Heavy, miasmic, rough road of American gothic but some of the scenes are among Wiseman's best.

(I love that he's into Down By Law)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOpRVNqOZUA

Love that clip. Going to guess he and Jarmusch know each other, but if not, can you imagine sitting there and watching this and hearing Frederick Wiseman say he loves your film and he's seen it six times?

Watching “Central Park” over the last few days.

Early takeaway: I would like to visit this park, but, um, not in the late 1980s.

We watched City Hall over the weekend and I sorta think it should have been called Mayor??

Early takeaway: I would like to visit this park, but, um, not in the late 1980s.

The Midnight Oil show wasn't that bad!

It was nice to see LeVar Burton!

And yeah, the Midnight Oil performance is great!

Damn, people seemed to love Ed Koch.

Happy 93rd birthday today Fred!

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2009), the last Wiseman joint shot on film and the first in a wide format (though interestingly 5:3 rather than 16:9 or 1.85 like the films that follow) is a good deal weirder than you might expect going into it. pic.twitter.com/Py1RQQUIBO

— arlin golden (@cerealburrito) May 13, 2023

Watching “Missile”.

worth turning on the subtitles on that just for the “bland music “ cues

Kinda electric to encounter “Planet Claire” and “Pop Music” in Model.

And … there’s Andy Warhol!

We had to pause Crazy Horse midway through because I outbursted with "this is Fredrick Wiseman's verison of the James Bond opening credits!" and then we wondered what a Wiseman James Bond movie would even be like - we made up more and more preposterous and funnier scenes. Frederick Wiseman's UNIVERSAL EXPORTS: Endless meetings with photo-interpreters, do we/do we not burn fuel on the spy satellite to get a better photo? Lots of one sided telephone calls, many pained looks into screens, others repetetively cleaning up audio transcriptions. A janitor empties the paper shredders and burn bags and night, Bond himself is never direcly on camera, we only see him through drone overheads and surveillance video.

Will never forget the critic who dubbed that movie Tittie-butt Follies.

The restaurant movie gets a title: Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros and a premiere at TIFF this year. It's 4 hours long too - stoked!

I hope it gets a decent run in the U.S.

sounds really good

going through all of his films in order by year I have still only made it up to High School II from 1994

There are a couple of reviews of Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros out - this one maybe the most considered?
https://outskirtsmag.com/Menus-Plaisirs

Tonight: Essene.

oh man, the scene with the flyswatter

watched Ballet, about the American Ballet Theater, from 1995. It is one of my favorite films of his so far. It is, as always for him, about an institution but features an amazing extended interview with Agnes de Mille before she died and many beautiful rehearsal sequences and performances

"Most striking might be the sounds Wiseman captures, not just of the music, hardly at all of the music (there isn't even an orchestra at the Athens performance: Wiseman gives us a close-up of the giant tape recorder filling in for the band), but rather the grunts and thuds and squeaks of the dancers' shoes on the surface of the stage. The sound of gravity in an artform that aspires to weightlessness."

https://theendofcinema.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-frederick-wisemans-ballet.html

this goes about exactly how you'd expect fred wiseman appearing as a talking head in a documentary called "cinema verite: defining the moment" might. pic.twitter.com/hiZR7s4irT

— arlin golden (@cerealburrito) February 3, 2024

(last bit of it) pic.twitter.com/FJE5IHuAOD

— arlin golden (@cerealburrito) February 3, 2024

Man, the judge in “Juvenile Court”… what a job

Apparently you can watch the latest film here

https://www.pbs.org/video/menus-plaisirs-les-troisgros-rbfnou/

we just watched that -- it was very long and medium enjoyable imo. i enjoyed the kitchen scenes and seeing the chefs foraging and clowning around, but it was definitely bougie Wiseman (not my favorite)

i did like that it was an entry into the behind-the-scenes kitchen films/media that did not portray the kitchen as a chaotic/abusive/stressful place. everything was extremely placid.

I’m sure i will eventually get around to it and probably enjoy it, but even as a Wiseman buff i’ve had a hard time working up much enthusiasm for it just based on the subject

After years of having it on my watchlist i finally got around to Near Death a couple weeks ago and it completely rocked my world, i havent been able to stop thinking about it since, might be his masterpiece imho. It wasnt as disturbing or difficult to watch as i’d always feared, but just unbelievably rich & complex.

Such a great film--my second favourite (seems like a weird word to use) after Welfare.

His new film is not as good as "Near Death", however, it is still worth checking out. Wiseman has great rhythm to his films. This latest one is no exception. The 4 hours zoom by really quickly.

Going through his films in order - after Ballet (1995) I had a hard time with La Comédie-Française (1996), I just couldn't relate to it.

Public Housing (1997) is about the Ida B. Wells housing project in Chicago (which was torn down in the 2000s). It is pretty great.

I am watching Belfast, Maine (1999) now and loving it. It is over 4 hours long though, so I'm taking my time