Frederick Wiseman, Restored
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“Wouldn’t it be funny,” wondered Mark Binelli in the New York Times Magazine a few years go, “if the Great American Novel actually does exist, only it’s not a novel and has been quietly appearing in serialized form on public television for the past fifty years?” The idea emerges a little over halfway into a remarkable profile of Frederick Wiseman, who turned ninety-five on January 1, the day that The Worlds of Wiseman opened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.
Like the American Cinematheque retrospective currently running in Los Angeles through January 25 and Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution, which will be presented at Film at Lincoln Center in New York from January 31 through March 5, the Chicago series, running through February 5, showcases new restorations Wiseman has spent the past five years overseeing. He’s made a few films in France and one, National Gallery (2014), in London, but the great majority of his more than forty features are nonfiction portraits of the intricate networks of the human interactions that drive American institutions.
Whether embedded in a hospital, a high school, a zoo, a welfare center, an army training camp, a public library, a city hall, or an entire neighborhood, his films are “stylistically ur-vérité,” as Errol Morris put it in the Paris Review in 2011. “No narration. Available light. Fly-on-the-wall. But Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. He may be a direct-cinema guy in form, but the content is not valetudinarian but visionary and dystopian. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”
Most of Wiseman’s films are “long, strange, and uncompromising,” wrote Mark Binelli. “They can be darkly comic, uncomfortably voyeuristic, as surreal as any David Lynch dream sequence. There are no voice-overs, explanatory intertitles, or interviews with talking heads, and depending on the sequence and our own sensibility, we may picture the ever-silent Wiseman as a deeply empathetic listener or an icy Martian anthropologist.”
We’ll delve into this body of work a bit more when the FLC retrospective opens, but let’s note here that contributors to the Chicago-based resource Cine-File have been wading deep into the series running at the Siskel. “Wiseman always shows to tell,” notes Kat Sachs, who writes about Law and Order (1969), Essene (1972), Juvenile Court (1973), and Meat (1976). Ben Sachs draws connections between High School (1968) and Basic Training (1971), “an angry and righteous film,” and observes that Wiseman “has cited Samuel Beckett as one of his primary influences, and in no other film with the possible exception of Sinai Field Mission (1978) does that influence feel more pronounced than in Welfare [1975].”
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