Documentarian Frederick Wiseman gets a big screen upgrade at The Cinematheque
The series presents 14 titles by the master of nonfiction film, rarely seen in the cinema
Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital.
The Cinematheque presents Frederick Wiseman: The Choreography of Everyday Life from March 6 to April 30
FREDERICK WISEMAN’S FIRST film, 1967’s Titicut Follies, is simultaneously one of the greatest and one of the most upsetting documentaries you’ll ever see.
Taking his camera deep inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, Wiseman spares no detail in his depiction of institutional abuse, where men are routinely stripped, bullied, and medically tortured.
It remains the most well-known title in Wiseman’s expansive filmography—almost 50 docs in as many years—partly because of the legal problems it invited.
When Titicut Follies was finally made available again in 1991 after a long and some-feared permanent absence, Wiseman was court-ordered to add a title card explaining that “changes and improvements” had been made to the facility. And so he did. In the most sardonic way possible.
“Which is such a great gag,” says The Cinematheque’s Michael Scoular. “If you haven’t gotten some of Frederick Wiseman’s sense of humour through the runtime of Titicut Follies, by the end you will. We’re going to make sure the house lights don’t come up before that title card appears on screen.”
The programming associate is speaking with Stir about the monumental series of Wiseman films coming to The Cinematheque in March and April. He might be considered America’s greatest documentarian, but Wiseman’s work, funded largely through public broadcasting, has been consigned almost entirely to the small screen.
The Choreography of Everyday Life brings 14 titles to The Cinematheque in the wake of a mammoth effort to restore and upgrade Wiseman for the big screen. Notes Scoular: “They haven’t really had that intensive viewing experience that you get in a cinema nor have they been properly appreciated for the beauty of their images or the complexity of their sound design.”
Titicut Follies is in there, screening April 4 and 12, but The Cinematheque has elected to launch the series on March 6 with a less obvious title—1990’s sprawling, three-hour essay Central Park. The Village Voice called it “maybe his greatest work” although that’s obviously a matter of debate. Scoular will elaborate on the personal reasons behind his choice in an introduction on opening night, followed by a video message from Wiseman himself.
“Titicut Follies does set up a lot of his concerns for his career,” he says. “But I think that impression of Wiseman as exposé-doc filmmaker who courted controversy—not entirely of his own making—has overshadowed the many different types of films that he’s capable of making. I found myself most surprised by the films that he made in the ’90s. They kind of exploded some of my notions about how his films work. Central Park is one that really invites people into his mode in a way that’s no less complex, no less filled with sorrow and elation than his other films, but it might be a surprise for people who associate him more with High School, and Hospital, and Welfare.”
Frederick Wiseman’s High School II
Those last three are all included in the series, while the pairing of 1968’s High School with 1994’s High School II further illustrates, as Scoular says, Wiseman’s drive to “capture more variation while being interested in the same things, which expands over the time of his career”.
The development of his initial interest away from social and governmental agencies and frequently marginalized settings—1969’s Hospital is a less-harrowing experience than Titicut Follies but is pointedly set in an East Harlem ER overrun with stabbings, abandoned children, and ODs—is also seen in later works like Model, Belfast, Maine, and The Store.
It’s also where we see Wiseman’s approach honed to a singular kind of language. He does little prep, moves in with a small crew, produces staggering amounts of footage, and then spends months in the edit intuitively crafting a narrative. In all cases, even with seemingly mundane subject matter, the effect is deeply absorbing. Its unifying feature is the mind and the personality behind the craft.
“The joke among people who are really into Wiseman is that Wiseman will have you rapt with a 20-minute scene that’s mostly a board meeting, which is true, but there’s also a lot more than that,” says Scoular. “Once people get hooked on Wiseman, they want to see as many as possible. His energy never seems to flag and that’s what made selecting the films so difficult. He’s a remarkably consistent filmmaker. Once you find him captivating or start to trust his ability to find amazing scenes no matter what the subject matter is, you can just keep going.”
There is also, as noted earlier—and even with the heaviness of something like 2001’s epic Domestic Violence—a current of humour and irony in the work. It made a peculiar kind of sense when Wiseman was recently asked by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine to pick the 10 greatest movies of all time, and he filled the top three slots with Marx Brothers pictures.
“I think some of my movies are very funny,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “There’s a burden imposed on documentaries that they’re supposed to be good for you, like Ex-Lax.”
The attentive viewer can’t help but see the wry juxtapositions he conjures, while Scoular adds that Wiseman is often linked with absurdism and modernism.
“We’re so used to documentary filmmaking as having a certain social purpose, a utility, to teach us something, et cetera,” he says. “But when you sit back and think about what Wiseman is doing, he goes into these environments with none of those intentions. Instead he essentially goes in to find characters, to find narrative, to use this environment as a kind of—I don’t want to say lab—but he’s using it as a shooting stage, and he’s free to move around and find whatever characters he wants to find. There’s something almost experimental or modernist about that. Because it’s this idea of: why would I make a film with a script, with actors, when I can find much more unpredictable but potent dramas in real life?”
In Domestic Violence, which screens on April 27 as one of the last films in the series, there is an entire cosmos inside the exchange between a social worker and a genteel older lady who cheerfully insists, after 50 years of abuse by her partner, that her life has been guided and protected by the “voice of a little angel”. The fascination is endless. As Scoular remarks, with audible reverence: “Some of these films you could talk about for days…” 
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