Why Frederick Wiseman Was the Greatest Documentary Filmmaker Ever
His work depended on access. He filmed in hospital rooms where patients and families faced incommensurable agonies with the aid of the medical staff (“Near Death”); he filmed in administrative offices (“At Berkeley,” “Ex Libris”), in businesses (“The Store,” “Model”), in government buildings (“City Hall”). Yet people tended to speak uninhibitedly in his presence. He told me that they simply forgot he was filming there. It helps that Wiseman was slight of stature and calm of manner. It’s hard to imagine him passing unnoticed if he’d had the height and the bearing of Charlton Heston.
It’s also hard to imagine Wiseman having started a similar career a decade sooner, because his films depended, to a significant extent, on a new technology that had begun to reveal its power—a system that allowed a lightweight tape recorder and a relatively lightweight movie camera to synch up, with no cable connecting them. Such equipment proved its artistic importance in 1960, with Robert Drew’s “Primary” and, in France, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Summer”—the early generation of films in the format called cinéma vérité, or direct cinema. Wiseman said he was inspired by Drew’s 1961 documentary “Mooney vs. Fowle,” a chronicle of a high-school-football championship game. When Wiseman got started, it was in a new field that, although burgeoning, seemed both wide open and unformed. He took hold of a still-young format and, guided from the start by an unyielding sense of principle, made a body of work so original, idea rich, and unified that it seems foreordained—a historic fusion of investigation and the inner life.
Wiseman brought intellectual form to nonfiction through the single word “institutions,” a concept that carried the philosophical heft of the contemporaneous work of Michel Foucault; Wiseman similarly probed the intersections of systems of knowledge and power, and drew attention to the physical authority that ultimately backs up the abstract determinations of administrative rules. Where Foucault exhumed a hidden historical archive, Wiseman created a new one, in real time. He also created an institution of his own, Zipporah Films, to distribute his work. (Founded in 1971, it was named for his wife, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, who was also a law professor; she died in 2021.)
He was a true independent whose method was as rigorous and as singular as his intellectual focus. On location, he worked with a spare crew comprising a cinematographer (from 1980 to 2020, John Davey) and a camera assistant; Wiseman himself carried the tape recorder and wielded the microphone until, for his last documentary, “Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros,” from 2023, he could no longer do so.
As the literal bearer and the first hearer of his films’ sound, Wiseman was also the immediate receiver of the subjects’ discourse in its most concentrated form, on headphones, and his material relationship to these voices is embodied in the work. Much of the action is in the form of talking, which the incisively analytical images parse with the emotional precision of dramatic stagings, lending the talk a sort of emphatic onscreen incarnation. Filming with his ears and listening visually, Wiseman constructed mighty grids of connections and implications, long-term dramas on vast architectural frameworks as if they were cinematic operas. “Welfare” feels both colossal and brisk at two and three-quarter hours; “Central Park” is nearly three; “La Comédie-Française” approaches four; “Menus-Plaisirs” hits four; “Belfast, Maine,” “At Berkeley,” and “City Hall” exceed four. “Near Death” (which I consider a supreme masterwork, alongside “Welfare” and “In Jackson Heights” and the early, more journalistic “Hospital” and “Law and Order”) runs two minutes short of six hours.
