An Introduction to Frederick Wiseman by Shawn Glinis
Our guest of honor for March 17th, Wiseman Podcast host Shawn Glinis, breaks down the great documentarian's process and how best to approach his body of work.
There are two different ways that people commonly refer to Frederick Wiseman’s cinema: as either an important, albeit intimidating, monolith within vérité documentary, or the guy who makes four-hour films about board meetings.
Neither are entirely incorrect, I guess. The first reputation, as the important doc figurehead, has been immaculately daisy-chained from the first decade of Wiseman’s career — particularly from the films Titicut Follies, High School, Law and Order, Hospital and Welfare — or what I like to call his punk era. The second reputation has sort of filled in as whole-cloth shorthand for the other three-dozen films he’s made since then.
Years ago, in an interview, Wiseman characterized his films as “reality fictions.” It caught on, including being used as the title of a book on his films. If you mention it to him now, he claims he was joking, but there’s a reason why it’s now mentioned ad nauseam by critics: it’s a tidy summation of his method. It suggests the poetic liberties inherent in how Wiseman privileges his personal perspective over any idea of sociology or academic representation. As J. Hoberman once put it, “he’s more voyeur than social documentarian, less muckraker than aesthete.”
The point is that it’s fruitful for viewers, when approaching his work, to eschew traditional expectations of the documentary form. A better, and much more fun, place to start is thinking about the films as montage — as thematic arrangements that reveal themselves via juxtapositions.
Carlos Valladares recently wrote, “What we see in a Wiseman documentary has only the illusion of feeling comprehensive…the more you watch, the more you realize that he can’t be here and elsewhere. One is here, others are elsewhere. He is a subject in a web of other subjects.” In other words, to watch Central Park is less about discovering something about Central Park than it is to discover what Wiseman thinks about what he saw in Central Park.
The substance of Wiseman’s cinema, playfully ironic and counter to his often monosyllabic and definitive-sounding titles, is its specificity. One of the most evocative scenes in his body of work is a short passage from Public Housing, where he finds an elderly woman, Ms. Cheatham, sitting at her kitchen table while a plumber comes in and out of her bathroom. She steadily picks apart a head of cabbage, receives a brief phone call and signs a paper for the plumber. That’s the entire scene, yet there’s something in this portrait of isolation, old age and steely resolve that suggest an entire lifetime.
An early scene in Blind, the first film in Wiseman’s tetralogy set at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind (AIDB), spontaneously follows a young blind student named Jason as he navigates his way down a set of stairs, from one classroom to another to show off an A+ paper. It’s something so simple and yet feels like seeing cinema reborn, stripped to its core to expose its pure power. At the risk of hyperbole, it’s the closest I think we can get to understanding what it must’ve been like to have been seated for the Lumiere Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
Scenes like these — and there’s a pantheon moment in nearly each film — work because of their specificity (as opposed to broad generalization), as well as how they’re arranged within their respective patchwork. How Ms. Cheatham expresses herself on the phone or focuses on the cabbage is more important to Wiseman than any statistic about public housing in Chicago, ca. 1995.
When I see cinephiles start to explore Wiseman’s films, they inevitably cherry pick their choices based on length, bopping around across his shortest docs. I get it. But the secret is that the mode he largely settled into by the late-80s, regularly producing three-hour films, is where his process thrives. Not because they’re arduous tasks that have some great payoff, but because duration allows him to showcase one of the fundamental elements of his project: people talking.
His films are filled with people expressing themselves in board meetings, classrooms, community gatherings, public performances … any number of scenarios and to a variety of audiences. And these scenes require length in order to achieve any semblance of their real-life complexity.
There’s a scene in Deaf set in the AIDB principal's office shared between a young deaf student, his mother and the school principal, who moderates an emotional conversation between the two. The scene lasts 52 minutes and unravels layer after layer, each one subverting our understanding of what we thought we were watching. It might be the best discrete passage in Wiseman’s nearly six decades of work, but it wouldn’t be if the filmmaker didn’t give us the time and space to think our way through what’s being said.
And the scene isn’t great because it tells us something grand about deaf children, parents of deaf children or deafness, more generally. It’s a beautiful scene because of what it expresses, over nearly an hour, about these two specific people.
“Once you realize that a cut isn’t necessarily in the offing … you watch differently,” Eric Hynes said about a lengthy scene in In Jackson Heights. “By not shaping every bit of dialogue, every volley of conversation, into an easily identifiable point within the narrative, Wiseman makes being present in that moment, in that place, the point.”
The unique pleasure of Wiseman’s cinema is being present and allowing the fruits of his curiosities to allow you to watch differently.
Come join us for Frederick Wiseman’s Model on March 17th at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. Tickets are on sale now. Use promo code BLEEDING25 for a discount.
You can listen to Wiseman Podcast on multiple platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.