THE FILMS OF FREDERICK WISEMAN
4/19 - 6/5
The Beacon Cinema and SIFF team up to celebrate the master of immersive, fly-on-the-wall documentaries—Frederick Wiseman—with THE FILMS OF FREDERICK WISEMAN, a shared ten-film series showcasing his groundbreaking work, all newly restored in stunning 4K.
“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?” For over half a century filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has been obsessively crafting an expandingly monumental body of work—a series of 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.”
Wiseman’s career is so prolific and consistent that it can appear daunting to the uninitiated. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the titles Wiseman chooses for his films: unassuming, nearly generic tags that might blend invisibly into the public broadcast programming for which they were often commissioned. Rather than being descriptive, each title might be better understood as a form of classification, a genus whose taxonomic reach allows for the early-career Wiseman to sum up a high school in 75 minutes, and later return to the same type of institution for nearly four hours of playful research.
Arcs, characters, and resonant emotional climaxes, not to mention harsh encounters with the conflicts and violence of common experience, are not in short supply in Wiseman’s films. Yet they do not feature onscreen interviews or title cards, and their narrative accumulation follows no formula, except the one Wiseman builds in relation to his chosen subject. They resemble almost nothing else in filmmaking, except for those who have chosen to imitate or be influenced by his approach. (TITICUT FOLLIES is in the DNA of exemplars of New Hollywood and superhero film maudit alike.)
In interviews, Wiseman plays the resilient, unaccusatory charmer, as he apparently does in order to gain access to each setting in his films. But the work is uncommonly powerful, maybe even life-altering, because the films demonstrate something genuinely principled: that if you were to see the work that happens to keep any enterprise in human society running, the experience might break through hardened routine conceptions to illuminate the too-often distorted and hidden reaches of social experience, in all its mundane horror and beauty.
“Rigorously shot, impeccably edited, and at times startling in their beauty, these films usher us into often otherwise anonymous spaces and lives, and help make the invisible visible.” - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“It is precisely the unveiling of what is most common that makes [Wiseman’s] documentaries an absolutely particular type of film … I would say, as with opera, one enters it or does not enter it; it requires a belief in something other than what one sees.” - Pierre Legendre, Cahiers du cinéma
“At every occasion, Wiseman hastens to remind us that he is a person, not a robot—his editing choices informed by his instinct, his moods, his rakish humor. He is a humble, elfin saint.” - Matt Morrison, Film Comment
“For Wiseman, there’s no such thing as banality; he sifts the material of the apparently banal until he’s found the variety of its texture. The process is not only deeply engaging but deeply beautiful.” - Steve Vineberg, Artforum
“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?” For over half a century filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has been obsessively crafting an expandingly monumental body of work—a series of 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.”
Wiseman’s career is so prolific and consistent that it can appear daunting to the uninitiated. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the titles Wiseman chooses for his films: unassuming, nearly generic tags that might blend invisibly into the public broadcast programming for which they were often commissioned. Rather than being descriptive, each title might be better understood as a form of classification, a genus whose taxonomic reach allows for the early-career Wiseman to sum up a high school in 75 minutes, and later return to the same type of institution for nearly four hours of playful research.
Arcs, characters, and resonant emotional climaxes, not to mention harsh encounters with the conflicts and violence of common experience, are not in short supply in Wiseman’s films. Yet they do not feature onscreen interviews or title cards, and their narrative accumulation follows no formula, except the one Wiseman builds in relation to his chosen subject. They resemble almost nothing else in filmmaking, except for those who have chosen to imitate or be influenced by his approach. (TITICUT FOLLIES is in the DNA of exemplars of New Hollywood and superhero film maudit alike.)
In interviews, Wiseman plays the resilient, unaccusatory charmer, as he apparently does in order to gain access to each setting in his films. But the work is uncommonly powerful, maybe even life-altering, because the films demonstrate something genuinely principled: that if you were to see the work that happens to keep any enterprise in human society running, the experience might break through hardened routine conceptions to illuminate the too-often distorted and hidden reaches of social experience, in all its mundane horror and beauty.
“Rigorously shot, impeccably edited, and at times startling in their beauty, these films usher us into often otherwise anonymous spaces and lives, and help make the invisible visible.” - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“It is precisely the unveiling of what is most common that makes [Wiseman’s] documentaries an absolutely particular type of film … I would say, as with opera, one enters it or does not enter it; it requires a belief in something other than what one sees.” - Pierre Legendre, Cahiers du cinéma
“At every occasion, Wiseman hastens to remind us that he is a person, not a robot—his editing choices informed by his instinct, his moods, his rakish humor. He is a humble, elfin saint.” - Matt Morrison, Film Comment
“For Wiseman, there’s no such thing as banality; he sifts the material of the apparently banal until he’s found the variety of its texture. The process is not only deeply engaging but deeply beautiful.” - Steve Vineberg, Artforum
