HOSPITAL

Frederick Wiseman, the preeminent chronicler of American institutions, turns his documentary lens of his fourth feature onto the inner-workings of the HOSPITAL. The method and substance of his analyses is a work of genius. Wiseman, who studied law and was a law-school professor, doesn’t so much film institutions as discover them. He goes to a place of concentrated and focussed activity—a hospital, a school, a public-assistance office, a business, a university, even an entire neighborhood—and manages to reveal the abstractions, the rules and the exercise and negotiation of power, behind the surfaces of daily life.

HOSPITAL shows the daily activities of a large urban hospital with the emphasis on the emergency ward and outpatient clinics. The cases depicted illustrate how medical expertise, availability of resources, organizational considerations, and the nature of communication among the staff and patients affect the delivery of appropriate health care.

Critic Richard Brody insightfully compares what Wiseman accomplishes here to the work of classic Hollywood auteur Vincente Minnelli, director of so many timeless musicals and melodramas: “Minnelli, of course, has one of the cinema’s most superbly, floridly decorative imaginations, displaying a painterly eye for texture and color, line and movement, as well as an ear for voices and music—for the surfaces of life. So, actually, does Wiseman; for all his intellectual power of abstraction and analysis, Wiseman is a sensualist, who is also in love with tones and gestures, vocal inflections and bodies in motion. It’s precisely because he finds them both so alluring and so distracting that he finds the ideas they embody. He doesn’t look past or through them; he simply sees them clearly and conveys his own delight in doing so.”