There’s something so severe, so sacred about the work of Frederick Wiseman, one half expects the seventy-five year old director to walk around in monastic garb. (Sorry, but I don’t think he actually does.) Since his debut feature, Titicut Follies (1967), the filmmaker’s stringent and scrupulous approach has been a constant in a career that has yielded some thirty-three documentaries.
As a pioneer of cinema verite, the fly-on-the-wall approach that has, in recent times, sadly become synonymous with reality-TV slop, Mr. Wiseman is frequently lumped in with like-minded sixties trail-blazers such as Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker. These gentlemen would form the movement known as Direct Cinema, with an emphasis on the continued unobtrusive filming of human behaviour. Enabled by new technologies like hand-held cameras and synchronised sound, these pioneering directors sought to faithfully represent life and democratise film. While Frederick Wiseman can be easily (or lazily) placed within the Direct Cinema tradition, he has always, in truth, operated just outside of everything.
“Well, those people were all in New York,” he tells me on the phone from Paris. “But I was in Cambridge. Certainly, the same techniques and possibilities intrigued me and I did see a lot of the early cinema verite films. But a lot of those were still about movie stars and criminals. They were good. They were interesting but they were not what I had in mind. I’ve always been more interested in places.”
Where similarly inclined documentarians have sought objective truth through intimate portraits – Bob Dylan in Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back or the Beale women in Albert Maysles’ Grey Gardens – Mr. Wiseman has always inclined toward a bigger picture and longer lens. Since deserting his post as a law professor in the late sixties, his primary preoccupations have been with power, community and social institutions. To date these have included mental hospitals, police departments, welfare offices, public housing, racetracks and the Paris-based theatre troupe La Comedie Francaise.
“Institutions are necessary for government to function and for people to get certain kinds of services,” explains Wiseman. “We can’t go back to a primal state. But I don’t view institutions as inherently sinister. I’m just interested in them as a showcase for the diversity of human behaviour.”
Though unhampered by any prior agenda, Wiseman’s work certainly offers an unparalleled critique of society and how it imprints itself on the individual. In 1967 the controversial Titicut Follies presented the grim realities of life in the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. With patients being force-fed through nasal tubes and kept naked, it is ironically left to the mortician to show them any kindness. When released the film caused a public outcry, and indeed, was banned from general theatrical screening until 1993. Similarly, High School, his 1968 follow-up film, depicts a system of coercion worthy of Orwell.
Mr. Wiseman, however, insists that he is not a campaigning filmmaker or an ideologue.
“I don’t ever set out thinking this film will be about police brutality or how doctors exploit poor people in hospitals. That kind of approach just puts blinkers on. I learn as I film. I think it’s true of myself and probably most people that we hold opinions without really knowing anything. So I’ll film for ninety or a hundred hours and the final edit will be a report of what I’ve learned. I’m not interested in ideologically oriented film or novels. I’m much more interested in trying to explore the complexity of a subject. I’m not interested in simplifying the material to make it correspond to some tyrannical structure. Mainly because I’ve never come across an ideology that explains everything to me.”