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Life studies
The cinema of Frederick Wiseman at the MFA

by Steve Vineberg


" The Films of Frederick Wiseman "
At the Museum of Fine Arts, August 22 through April 14.

No filmmaker in history has done as much to make us conscious, in such acute, even-handed detail, of the institutions we interact with and the environments we inhabit as the documentarian Frederick Wiseman. The subject of a six-month retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts that begins this Wednesday, Wiseman was a Boston attorney and law professor who turned director in 1967 with the notorious Titicut Follies (January 8 at 8 p.m. and January 26 at 10 a.m.), an investigation of the treatment of inmates at Bridgewater State Hospital, a home officially (but not completely) for the criminally insane. The resulting movie was a muckraker of a highly unorthodox variety, part Chekhov, part Gogol, with a tone of horrified compassion. But a court order kept it out of theaters for a preposterous two and a half decades (the alleged issues were a scene where the patients are shown naked, and then the bogus claim that Wiseman hadn’t received the permission of his subjects), and by the time the film could be seen, the Titicut cause célèbre had pretty much faded out. Moreover, when the picture was finally released, it was so poorly publicized that no one registered it as a major event; in Boston, Titicut closed after a week.

That’s one example of the irony that the greatest documentary filmmaker America has ever produced is unknown to most moviegoers, even in his native Boston. (He still lives in Cambridge.) Wiseman has made an astonishing number of movies, all of them (except his single fiction film, Seraphita’s Diary, which won’t be included in the MFA series) under contract to PBS, which shows them only once. You can’t rent them on video; if you’ve seen one anywhere other than on public television, it’s likely been in a college class (probably sociology) or at a rare art-house revival. A few years ago the Brattle screened the 1969 High School (the MFA will show it this Wednesday, August 22, at 7:45 p.m., with the director present), his appallingly accurate depiction of the commonplace humiliations and general deadening of students in a large Northeastern urban school, and in 1993 the Harvard Film Archive mounted a wonderful festival of his early pictures, such as Law and Order (1969; August 29 at 7:45 p.m.), Hospital (1969; September 22 at 10:30 a.m.), Basic Training (1971; November 3 at 10:30 a.m.), Juvenile Court (1973; September 15 at 10:30 a.m.) and Welfare (1975; September 8 at 10:30 a.m.). These films coincided with the renaissance period in American movies during the Vietnam years, and they were as radiant an example of it as the work of Robert Altman or Francis Ford Coppola. Having missed most of them in their PBS showings, I rushed to catch them then. The series got pitifully little attention from the press; I hope the new, comprehensive retrospective — which played in New York last year — will be heralded as it deserves to be.

Certainly this seems to be a happy time in Wiseman’s career. He’s completed a new picture, Domestic Violence (2001; October 18 at 6:30 p.m. and October 20 at 10:30 a.m.). High School will be shown on PBS for the first time in more than 30 years, as part of the weekly P.O.V. series, at the end of this month. Earlier this summer, the Market Theater in Harvard Square was home to The Last Letter, the one-woman piece on which Wiseman collaborated with the Comédie-Française actress Catherine Samie — an extraordinary evening in which Samie gave a devastating performance shaped by the muted expressionism of Wiseman’s direction. (Her intensity suggested Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc.)

Wiseman’s early masterpieces have an unprecedented combination of moral fervor and non-judgmental open-heartedness. He chooses to explore areas where there’s no possibility of resolution, and where the tangle of conflicting motives and often the rotted layers of bureaucratic confusion have placed the administrators and the clients or victims in an adversarial relationship. Even when they’re not in opposition to each other, the efforts of well-meaning social workers (in Welfare), lawyers (in Juvenile Court) and doctors (in Hospital) to ease the suffering of those who’ve been tossed willy-nilly into their care keep meeting the obstacles of procedures no one can decipher, situations no one can fix, systems no one can penetrate. The surprise of these movies is how few of the workers we see fail to attempt, at least, to behave decently. The worst charge you can make against the few you encounter who drive you crazy is that of a kind of blind superficiality, such as the judge in Juvenile Court who dispenses facile psychiatric advice to his defendants. It’s really only in High School that you run across a profusion of adults who appear so caught up in the misbegotten traditions of American secondary education that they’re in dire need of a reality check. (High School is also the one film among these early Wisemans that chronicles experiences that almost every one of us, to a greater or lesser degree, has had at first hand.)

The director’s openness to the lives of his subjects permits him to discover compassion and complexity in the most unexpected places. Vietnam-era audiences could only have been astonished to find so much humanity among the cops in Law and Order (about the Kansas City police force) and the sergeants struggling to prepare young men for combat in Basic Training. The tensions in Law and Order between a young black man who feels unattended to and the white middle-aged cop he screams at are hopelessly complicated; they’re provoked by everything unspoken between these two, beginning with race and class and the offended dignity of one man who feels disenfranchised and one who feels disrespected. But on the whole it’s the women and men hurled into scary and embarrassing and puzzling situations that you’re haunted by: the suicidal recruit in Basic Training who is clearly way beyond the reach of the chaplain; the destitute woman in Welfare with nowhere to go.

In the mid ’70s — after making Welfare, my personal favorite among his pictures — Wiseman’s movies began to change. His basic approach remained the same: he amasses a formidable amount of detail of character and process, using it rather than voiceover narration or crawls (i.e., on-screen text) to orient us. It’s respect for both his subjects and his audience that motivates this refusal to rely on explanatory material, as well as his desire to bring us into the sphere of a movie rather than tell us how to react to it. He wants us to have a version of his own experience with these people in this place — to move into it and learn how to navigate our way around it. (The elegance of his filmmaking is in its way of shaping the material for us, making it coherent and layered, without ever imposing itself on us — a challenging task.) But at this point the gritty intimacy of the visual style gave way to a more classically beautiful look; the editing (he’s always served as his own editor) became more musical, with certain recurring images — like the wildlife in Central Park — acting as motifs or refrains. And his subject matter broadened to include places — Central Park (1989; March 9 at 10:30 a.m.), Aspen (1991; November 10 at 10:30 a.m.), The Store (1983; November 24 at 10:30 a.m.), Canal Zone (1977; February 23 at 10:30 a.m.), La Comédie-Française (1996; March 30 at 10:30 a.m.) — as well as institutions. What’s most interesting is how he developed a fascination with communities, with the way they operate and with the hope implicit in their battle against coming apart despite the multiplying factors that militate against their maintaining their integrity. That hope is the anthem of Public Housing (1997; October 6 at 10:30 a.m.), which is about a government-subsidized Chicago housing development that serves almost entirely people of color. The even more recent Belfast, Maine (1999; January 19 at 10:30) offers a portrait of a place that, for once, isn’t under siege — a sleepy fishing village that, on close examination, turns out to be anything but dull.

What’s compelling in the lyrical Belfast, Maine — or in Central Park, which describes a community in constant flux — is the revelation that the everyday isn’t ordinary at all, that the activities most people engage in on a regular basis have not only moral and emotional dimensions but often a poetic quality as well. But Wiseman knows that these aspects can’t be grasped by a casual observer. You have to make a commitment to a Wiseman picture: many of them come in at two and half, three, even four hours. (Belfast, Maine is an enthralling 248 minutes.) What you get in return is a whole new way of looking at some corner of the world most of us have taken for granted.

Issue Date: August 16-23, 2001