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LAW AND ORDER
1969
Director
Frederick Wiseman
Starring
Runtime
81 minutes
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Kansas City, 1968. We ride along with a police squad in a rough part of town. Frederick Wiseman is there, he films every interaction and bears witness to the daily lives of police officers, from serving the public to heavy-handed arrests. His method: no commentary on the images and no interfering in the shoot.
Forever questioning the relationship between the individual and the institution, LAW AND ORDER is among Frederick Wiseman’s most enduring works. Embedding himself with officers of the Kansas City Police Department in 1968, Wiseman turned his camera to law enforcement as the era of the civil rights movement was nearing its end and demonstrations more and more frequently were met with violence. LAW AND ORDER follows the Kansas City officers as they answer domestic disturbance calls, wantonly harass a Black sex worker, banter with each other in their patrol cars, and manage the administrative duties of the station. With an ease only Wiseman is capable of, the film exposes horrifying moments of police brutality and captures gentle instances of police serving their communities productively.
The subject of the police goes beyond LAW AND ORDER in Frederick Wiseman’s filmography. “Far from being a lover of the police”, as he explains, he nevertheless judges it important to show these “collectors of the human race” in what they enact on a daily basis.
“Because Wiseman rarely divulges why the police have been called, the viewer is forced to confront his own fundamental views of American race relations and the legitimacy of police authority. This features passages of ultra-black comedy as morally unsettling as anything in Stanley Kubrick's filmography, and it contains some of Wiseman's most aggressive experiments in editing and sound design, the jarring stylization making the content even more potent.” - Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader
Forever questioning the relationship between the individual and the institution, LAW AND ORDER is among Frederick Wiseman’s most enduring works. Embedding himself with officers of the Kansas City Police Department in 1968, Wiseman turned his camera to law enforcement as the era of the civil rights movement was nearing its end and demonstrations more and more frequently were met with violence. LAW AND ORDER follows the Kansas City officers as they answer domestic disturbance calls, wantonly harass a Black sex worker, banter with each other in their patrol cars, and manage the administrative duties of the station. With an ease only Wiseman is capable of, the film exposes horrifying moments of police brutality and captures gentle instances of police serving their communities productively.
The subject of the police goes beyond LAW AND ORDER in Frederick Wiseman’s filmography. “Far from being a lover of the police”, as he explains, he nevertheless judges it important to show these “collectors of the human race” in what they enact on a daily basis.
“Because Wiseman rarely divulges why the police have been called, the viewer is forced to confront his own fundamental views of American race relations and the legitimacy of police authority. This features passages of ultra-black comedy as morally unsettling as anything in Stanley Kubrick's filmography, and it contains some of Wiseman's most aggressive experiments in editing and sound design, the jarring stylization making the content even more potent.” - Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader