Frederick Wiseman

Filmmaker

• Born: January 1, 1930
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

ACTIVIST AND DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER

A former law professor, Wiseman turned to documentary filmmaking to expose the ills he observed in society. After coming to national attention with his influential, disturbing documentary Titicut Follies(1967), Wiseman created a series of uncompromising films that sought to encourage social reform.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Activism; journalism; law

Early Life

Frederick Wiseman was born on January 1, 1980, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Jacob and Gertrude Wiseman. Frederick Wiseman received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College in 1951 before studying law at Yale, where he earned a degree in 1954. While a student at Yale, he met Zipporah Batshaw, whom he married in 1955. They had two sons, David and Eric. Wiseman spent two years in the US Army, and in 1956 he traveled to France and studied law at the University of Paris. In 1958, he began teaching law at Boston University, and he was appointed to the faculty of Boston University Law School in 1959.

Life’s Work

After taking his students to visit various Massachusetts state institutions, including correctional facilities, Wiseman became familiar with the Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane, which would be the subject of Titicut Follies in 1967. The film offered a shocking, uncompromising look at the brutal conditions within the asylum. The title came from an annual musical revue put on by the hospital, featuring performances by its inmates, footage of which Wiseman intercuts with scenes of brutal force-feedings and interrogations. The state of Massachusetts sued Wiseman for allegedly violating the inmates’ privacy, on the grounds that he had agreed verbally to show only a few of the inmates; the state obtained an injunction to bar the film from being screened. It was the first case of a film being banned in the United States on grounds other than national security or obscenity. The injunction was not lifted until 1991, when a Superior Court judge approved Titicut Follies for general release.

Other notable Wiseman documentaries include High School (1968), which examined a suburban Philadelphia school; Law and Order (1969), which presented the daily routine of Kansas City police officers; Juvenile Court (1973), filmed in Memphis, Tennessee, which followed juvenile criminal offenders through the legal process; and Domestic Violence (2001). Wiseman has made several fictional motion pictures, including his first effort, The Cool World (1964); however, his documentaries are his most influential films. From 1966 to 1970 Wiseman took part in the meetings of the nonprofit Organization for Social and Technical Innovation; however, he later claimed that the organization was ineffective in precipitating change.

Most of Wiseman’s documentaries have aired on the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), one of his primary sponsors. Wiseman’s relationship with PBS has been fractious. A pair of five-year contracts with the New York PBS station WNET funded a film a year from Wiseman, without stipulation of subject or length, but Wiseman fought bitterly with the network when it wanted to edit out parts of Law and Order, Hospital (1970), and Basic Training (1971). In the last case, sequences were cut for the television broadcast. Beginning in 1981, Wiseman had provided the initial funding for his projects (largely with money awarded by a MacArthur Foundation grant) until he could show dailies to PBS as proof of concept and receive full financing from the network.

Wiseman uses a small crew and attempts to be as unobtrusive as possible in his films, which avoid the use of voice-over. Unusually, he records the sound himself and communicates instructions to his cameraman through hand signals; he claims that this allows him to better observe his surroundings and pick out points of interest.

Wiseman employs “direct cinema” or “fly-on-the-wall,” a cinematic style often attributed to the American documentarian Richard Leacock, who claimed that directors should try to remove themselves from the documentaries they make. Wiseman differs from Leacock in Wiseman’s insistence on the creator’s influence on the documentary form. The editing and structure of Wiseman films are unapologetically essayistic, although he attempts to avoid staginess within scenes. In 1974, Wiseman began to refer to his films as “reality fictions,” emphasizing his creative role in interpreting and organizing the real scenes he captures on film.

By 2016, despite advancing age, Wiseman had continued producing a documentary film at least once per year, seeking out institutions and places of significance to capture and represent in his own artistic way. These films included The Garden (2005), which explores the inner workings of the popular entertainment venue in New York, Crazy Horse (2011), which documents the daily routines of a famous erotic revue in Paris, France, and National Gallery (2014), which provides an analysis of the art that characterizes the National Gallery museum in London's Trafalgar Square. Well into his eighties and indicating to the media that he did not have any intentions of retiring, Wiseman returned to New York for his next subject, releasing In Jackson Heights in 2015. Despite failing to gain funding from a Kickstarter campaign that he was reluctant to get involved with in the first place, Wiseman shot the film over nine weeks, striving to capture the diverse social, political, and economic facets of the neighborhood. He continued to produce films in his late eighties and nineties. They included Monrovia, Indiana (2018), City Hall (2020), and Menus-Plaisirs--Les Troisgros (2023). He also acted in Other People's Children in 2022. He also co-wrote and directed The Couple in 2022, which is a one-woman show about the wife of the famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who was twice her age.

Significance

Wiseman’s films have earned many accolades, including three Emmy Awards, and he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982, a Dan David Prize in 2003, and a George Polk Career Award in 2006. Eight years later, he became one of the recipients of a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. Critic Pauline Kael, writing for the New Yorker, called Wiseman “the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in recent years.” Though his films have been well reviewed, Wiseman has claimed, since 1984, that he does not believe his films have precipitated any significant change. Specific change is not his goal, however; he wants only to present information to the public about the role of institutions in society.

Bibliography

Benson, Thomas W., and Carolyn Anderson. Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. Print.

Binelli, Mark. "What If the Great American Novelist Doesn't Write Novels?" The New York Times, 15 Dec. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/magazine/frederick-wiseman-documentaries.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Grant, Barry. Five Films by Frederick Wiseman. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Print.

Grant, Barry. Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. Print.

Kenigsberg, Ben. "'A Couple' Review: Tolstoy Story." The New York Times, 10 Nov. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/movies/a-couple-review.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Robey, Tim. "Frederick Wiseman: 'One Common Misconception Is That I'm a Muckraker. My Films Are More Complicated Than That.'" Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 10 Jan. 2015. Web. 9 Mar. 2016.

Semple, Kirk. "Jackson Heights Through the Eyes of Frederick Wiseman." New York Times. New York Times, 30 Oct. 2015. Web. 9 Mar. 2016.