Andrew Chan
Elegiac and optimistic, misanthropic and humanistic: a retrospective of the documentarian’s extraordinary work spanning over half a century.
Still from Near Death. Courtesy Zipporah Films.
“Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution,” organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson, Film at Lincoln Center, New York City, through March 5, 2025
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Every movie by the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman emphasizes the fluid exchange between parts and their wholes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way so many memorable scenes in his films function as synecdoches of his entire oeuvre. At one point during the second half of Near Death (1989), a few dozen staffers at a Boston hospital gather to assess the recent passing of a cancer patient. Here we get Wiseman’s attentiveness to the obfuscatory powers of language, even at its most precise, when a young doctor rattles off exotic names of conditions, procedures, and drug treatments (“orchiectomy,” “Bleomycin,” “pneumoperitoneum”) as if they could be cleanly separated from human suffering. We also get Wiseman’s love of polyphony, as members of the group take turns weighing in, lending this routine endeavor the air of a democratic tribunal. And, strikingly, we get a feeling of stony, unyielding factuality. When the attendees are encouraged to lay hands on the deceased’s internal organs—displayed on a tray like charcuterie, their texture described by one doctor as “fibrotic” and “woody”—we can’t resist seeing the objects of examination as metaphors for Wiseman’s own materials: blocks of time and space, slabs of corporeal experience.
Still from Meat. Courtesy Zipporah Films.
If all this sounds forbidding, so do the titles of the director’s forty-three nonfiction features (Hospital, Welfare, Meat, Deaf, etc.), their typically epic lengths, their preference for presenting events in medias res, their lack of explanatory voice-overs or talking heads, and their tendency to chronicle meetings, town halls, and long, winding conversations in an approximation of real time. The ninety-five-year-old Wiseman, who worked as a law professor before disillusionment led him to cinema in his thirties, primes us to expect a vérité approach, whose main purpose is to mine reality for various forms of evidence. But if his films were merely legalistic, they wouldn’t be so compulsively watchable. It turns out that a retrospective is an ideal context in which to take in his work. Marathon viewing emphasizes his career as one cohesive project, in a way that would not have been so apparent when many of these documentaries were first broadcast on public television. Watching several of his films in a row, one sees how they are unified by details that recur subtly but resonantly throughout an oeuvre that spans more than half a century. One also begins to notice the tonal gradations contained within Wiseman’s trademark detachment.
Still from Near Death. Courtesy Zipporah Films.
As we follow the director’s arc from the savagery of his first film, 1967’s correctional-facility exposé Titicut Follies, to the ode to epicurean sublimity that is 2023’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, he gradually seems to emerge from behind the camera, no longer the unobtrusive observer but a character as rich and self-contradicting as any of his subjects. His passions and temperament are detectable in what he continually devotes attention to; his worldview, though rarely made explicit, drifts from disgust and despair to something like optimism. Among the dozens of newly restored titles showcased in Film at Lincoln Center’s current Wiseman program, many of the highlights come from the 1980s and ’90s, a period when the outrage of his earliest films gave way to a more slippery understanding of morality—one that makes it possible to describe him as both a misanthrope and a humanist. Near Death stands tall among these exquisitely ambivalent works; despite the clinical atmosphere of scenes like the aforementioned postmortem, this six-hour, black-and-white odyssey through ICU purgatory is also about a shared effort to sustain sympathy—both that of the healthcare workers, who endlessly debate the ethics of prolonging a patient’s life until loved ones can make peace with the inevitable, and that of the families, who try to keep their faith in the doctors’ cautiously hedged, sometimes comically circular explanations.
Still from Central Park. Courtesy Zipporah Films.
Released just a year after Near Death, Central Park would seem to occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. Shot in color, largely in the open-air beauty of the title location, its cumulative effect is one of exuberance; it’s hard to name many other films that so leisurely capture the joy of finding oneself at home in public space. But even in this sanctuary, there is dysfunction. Police officers hassle drug users and homeless people. Death’s specter looms at an exhibition of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which brings the city’s bereaved gay community out to the Great Lawn. And, in one thrillingly uncomfortable scene, permitless T-shirt sales at a peace rally are halted by authorities, causing one indignant male vendor to invoke Nazism and a tearful woman to cry out, “Where are the people for freedom in this country? How does this happen in America?”
Still from Belfast, Maine. Courtesy Zipporah Films.
Belfast, Maine (1999) is the most haunting of all the Wiseman films I have seen. Impressive both in the range of activity it catalogs and in the emotional states it evokes, this portrait of a small town features views of sunsets, lobster fishing, theatrical rehearsals, church services, high-school literature classes, and floral-arrangement lessons. But these images of provincial tranquility never escape the film’s elegiac mood—conjured by the desolate grays that pervade John Davey’s cinematography, and heightened by depictions of social workers tending to the town’s elderly and disabled population. This feeling is palpable even in Wiseman’s signature process sequences, methodical records of manual labor as spellbinding as the heist in The Asphalt Jungle and the kitchen scenes in Jeanne Dielman. As we watch assembly-line workers packaging food (and hear the clicking and buzzing of their machines, reminiscent of the ceaseless EKG beeps in Near Death), we might imagine we are witnessing something eternal, but Wiseman undermines this notion with a presentiment of impermanence. In the film’s final minutes, we visit the offices of a multinational corporation that has established itself in the area, and just a few shots of the cubicle-filled interior and a sign reading “Think of yourself as a customer” are enough to portend the death of a way of life.
Still from Public Housing. Courtesy Zipporah Films.
Because one of Wiseman’s abiding preoccupations is how society assigns us scripts that we go on to repetitiously enact, his human subjects can seem, at first, interchangeable. A set of people come into view, only to soon be replaced by another, each group performing tasks and behaviors we may well have already seen in a different corner of Wiseman’s world. But such typification coexists with the individuality of those who have entrusted pieces of their lives to his camera. Public Housing (1997) is a prime example of this duality. It’s an extraordinary film with a preponderance of unforgettable faces, voices, and gestures, including those of a man being interviewed for admission into a drug-treatment program. As the social worker reviewing his case vacillates between care and condescension—listening patiently, then lecturing his client on the declining life expectancy of Black men like themselves—a look of sad knowingness comes over the man being questioned, resolving in a smile that might be a sign of resignation, an expression of resistance against existentially absurd circumstances, a symptom of intoxication, or all of the above. I’ve never encountered a smile quite like this before. What moves me about Wiseman’s films is that, within their hulking structures, and amid their dense layers of verbiage and incident, such fragile moments carry the weight of lives lived beyond the frame.
Andrew Chan is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Why Mariah Carey Matters, published by University of Texas Press.