Frederick Wiseman

Largely considered the most important living documentary filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, now in his 80s, was honored at this year’s RIDM with a ten-film retrospective, and although he wasn’t able to attend in person, he did participate in a master class via skype, still a coup for RIDM (Montreal’s International Documentary Festival) considering Wiseman’s hectic work schedule (much of which is taken up in the editing room, as he edits all his own films).

The retrospective also marked a rare opportunity to see Wiseman’s films, not just on the big screen, but period. For many years they were unavailable outside of their PBS airings and university libraries (where they often have to be viewed on-site) and were cost-prohibitive to purchase or rent from Wiseman’s Zipporah Films directly.  When I was in my 20s I had friends who would chip in together to rent them from Wiseman’s company for $200, which was how I first saw Meat, Blind, Near Death and others; now the DVDs sell more reasonably, from $30-$50 each. But seeing http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/2021/02/high-quality-cialis/ them in 16mm was a treat. The reviews below don’t cover all the films in the retrospective, just the ones I managed to catch.

Titicut Follies

Since his debut with 1967’s Titicut Follies (a groundbreaking and controversial film about the conditions in a Massachusetts mental hospital), Wiseman’s interest is in observing and documenting how institutions work, and how humans operate within the confines of those institutions.  It’s almost difficult to review Wiseman’s films separately as they all share this obsession with institutional structures and functions (although ‘obsession’ may be too charged a word to describe Wiseman’s dispassionate camera), but one thing that can be said is that while Wiseman ‘shows’ and never ‘tells’, his early, shorter films flit from one subject to another with less context than the 6 hour epics like Near Death and Domestic Violence 1 + 2 (when viewed together).  His films allow for specificity concerning various social problems (if you take films like Law and Order, Juvenile Court, Domestic Violence, Welfare and Public Housing together they are essentially building on a discussion about the same issues), but his choice of subjects also provides a comparison between those structures that we define as limiting and oppressive and those we consider elevating (Model, Ballet and La Danse, for instance).

Law and Order

Pre-dating COPS by several decades, Law and Order (1969, 81mins) follows Kansas City Missouri (or ‘KC-MO’) police as they attend to various crime scenes, domestic disputes, interrogations, precinct meetings and roadside moments of leisurely conversation between officers. Wiseman’s neutral camera allows us to glimpse the frustrations that exist on both sides of the legal line – although given the film’s setting and era, black suspects are physically manhandled on camera more than their white counterparts. Although we never get the sense that the cops are overtly hateful towards blacks in general, there are prejudices viagra and three day delivery clearly playing into their confrontations.

In true verite fashion (although he prefers the term ‘reality fiction’), there’s no narrative or context provided; the film’s structure of jumping from one scenario to another mimics the chaotic pace of a job built around navigating crisis situations. Likewise, the film ends abruptly and unceremoniously.

Basic Training

Basic Training (1971, 89mins) was filmed at Fort Knox, Kentucky over canadian online pharmacy no prescription needed nine weeks of preparation for service in Vietnam, but there is no debate over US involvement in the war other than what the subjects provide themselves. The film’s focus is on the physical and mental training required to turn ordinary men into soldiers and government-sanctioned killers.  Other than one Army superior who seems to have provided the inspiration for R. Lee Ermey’s character in Full Metal Jacket, most of the superiors are surprisingly sympathetic; they recognize the difficulty in transitioning from civilian life to one based on conformity and survival instinct, the loss of identity in favour of becoming part of a larger machine (their number assignments, head-shaving and uniform fittings are done in assembly-line fashion, supporting this analogy). Most of them do not want to be there, including the superiors who assert that it’s just something they have to get used to, and get over with; nonetheless many of them take to the training easily, and respond enthusiastically when they get to use weapons. The camera treats most of the characters equally save for its frequent re-visitation with viagra to order one struggling soldier who is smaller and more awkward than the others, and who is sent to counselling for suicidal depression. Punishments are meted out when the recruits rebel against the system, leading some to despair and despondency, but all is in the service of the greater whole, which is emphasized by beautiful shots of them marching so cohesively that it almost becomes an abstract image of a wave rippling.

Juvenile Court

Juvenile Court (1973, 144mins) is my favourite of Wiseman’s films. Devastating and enlightening, it also has some of the most charismatic characters of Wiseman’s catalogue. The film follows youngsters from admittance into temporary holding while they await trial through to the decisions of the court, but also shows the youth counsellors dealing with parents whose abuse or negligence is directly responsible for their children’s behaviour (including one woman whose children have been taken away from her multiple times and a child prostitute who picked up her habits from her mother) as well as protecting children who are in custody for safety reasons (a small, terrified child whose uncle burned him with hot grease), but also takes us into private chambers with the Judge and levitra mit rezept 10 mg preise counsellors as they make deals for pleas and punishments that will be played out in public moments later.

Judge Turner

The court is presided over by Kenneth A. Turner, who was Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee’s juvenile court judge for more than 40 years by the time he retired in 2005. Turner is stern but compassionate (and very busy, having tried an estimated 71,000 juvenile cases per year[i]) and has the memorable face of a character actor. Of the cases addressed in the film there is strangely little investigation by the court into innocence or guilt (and in fact most defendants are assumed to be guilty). Instead, it becomes about how to respond to their guilt. How to offer up a punishment that will be meaningful without contributing to the trauma that has likely led the juvenile into delinquency in the first place?

While questions concerning privacy accompany viewings of any Wiseman film, in Juvenile Court this becomes especially sketchy given that juveniles are usually protected from having their identities disclosed or information about their cases becoming public. One case in particular, involving a 15 year old male who is accused of molesting the little girl he was babysitting, shows interviews with him as well as with the mother of the allegedly molested child, the latter of whom appears plainly on camera. The reports of molestation allegedly came from this child herself, but she does not speak on camera, nor does she look old enough to speak with any complexity; we only have the mother detailing how the little girl told her all about the alleged incident. The psychiatrist’s admittance interview with the boy also brings out one of the film’s only moments of humour (tragic humour nonetheless). When asked during a survey if he had ever failed a grade, and then asked “which grade?” when he responds in the affirmative, he says “I don’t want to talk about that grade”. The officer assures him he doesn’t have to talk about it, he just has to say which grade it was. “Kindergarten.”

After the film’s first public screening in October 1973, litigation prompted by this young man took the film out of circulation for some time[ii]. But it is also through the interviews regarding this case that Wiseman’s disinterest in guilt or innocence becomes apparent: the outcome of this case was resolved long before the film was released, but Wiseman makes no attempt to share that outcome with the audience[iii].

Model

When Wiseman premiered Model in 1980 (129mins) he disappointed some critics who felt he had somehow betrayed his calling by making a film about such an ‘unimportant’ or superfluous topic as fashion modelling. And while the film may seem inherently light-hearted compared to some of its bleaker antecedents, there is still a very strictly defined structure that facilitates the onscreen action: appointments and interviews, the exchange of advice, the creation and examination of portfolios, the rotating receptacle of models’ stat cards around which a busy office of agents rotates in turn, the repetitive filming of pantyhose commercials (I actually remember this commercial playing on television), models being hired out as human statues at cocktail parties and finally, the runway. Documentation of these activities not only falls in line with Wiseman’s interest in how institutions function and at what cost to ‘humanity’ (what, for instance, is the difference between the assembly line in Meat and the models’ runway here?), but the humorous contrast between his style of seeing and photographing and that which he documents in Model makes him possibly the perfect person to make such a film. While his earlier films often examine class relations and commodity production, Model in particular has been described by critic Dan Armstrong as depicting the minutiae of “cultural production”[iv], the veneer that we create to convince ourselves that there is a better, more beautiful place.

Domestic Violence

Domestic Violence – Part One (2001, 196mins) was my most highly-anticipated film of the Wiseman retrospective, as I hadn’t seen it before and as my preference for subject matter goes, the bleaker the better (my only wish is that they could have played both parts, ideally back to back). I love being destroyed by movies, and Wiseman’s films do it again and again. The film takes place over an indeterminate amount of time in Tampa Florida, primarily at The Spring, a shelter for battered women and children. But the way the film is edited could make the events appear as though they happen over the course of a single day, and also recalls the cyclical nature of abuse: it begins in the morning with a woman being picked up by an ambulance after being brutally beaten, and ends at night with another woman possibly about to be beaten – due in part to her own unwillingness to leave a dangerous situation when the police are called. While Domestic Violence 2 deals more with the court system, Domestic Violence 1 deals with the initial police reports, the intake process at the women’s shelter, the establishment of residency and a plan for future goals, group therapy, staff meetings, volunteer orientation and casual conversations between the women in the shelter as they learn to trust each other. The women in the shelter come from a variety of financial and cultural backgrounds, dispelling any notions that this sort of cycle only affects women in a certain tax bracket: one subject has a doctorate, another is a friendly octogenarian who has been putting up with abuse for over 50 years and only decided to leave her husband after he set the house on fire with her in it.

Interestingly, group therapy brings out both empathy and competition: the women sometimes try to outdo each other with their stories of abuse. But when a person has been stripped of everything – property, identity, self-esteem – they will sometimes grasp fiercely onto the one thing they have.  But the therapy sessions are invaluable because in many cases it is the first time these women recognize the commonality of their problem – that their abuse isn’t unique to them as punishment for their own perceived ‘failures’. They are able to recognize that underneath the physical abuse there is systematic abuse that utilizes brainwashing and emotional torture to make the victim concede to her own victimization. Wiseman shows the ways these women have been broken down, and how the shelter strives to build them back up, one small piece at a time. It is an incredibly difficult film to watch, but ultimately one that does not view its situation as hopeless.

Crazy Horse

Despite Wiseman’s demonstrated concern for women’s physical and emotional health, apparently selecting his latest film Crazy Horse (2011, 134mins) was a controversial move for RIDM. Wiseman was denounced by a handful of protesters during RIDM for having made a sensationalist film that was allegedly demeaning to women, and RIDM, by extension, was castigated for becoming a partner in this sexist denigration by showcasing it.

I think anyone familiar with Wiseman’s oeuvre can tell you that he does not make sensationalist films, despite the fact that this particular film happens to document the daily operations of a legendary erotic cabaret in Paris called The Crazy Horse. As mentioned earlier, Wiseman’s interest is in observing and documenting how institutions work, and how humans operate within the confines of those institutions. The Crazy Horse – now in its 60th year of operation – is an institution, and its relevance to Wiseman’s anthropological trajectory makes perfect sense when you consider films like Model (1980), documenting the now-defunct Zoli agency, and more recently, La Danse (2009), about the Paris Opera Ballet. Both of these earlier films could also be seen as documenting structures that are potentially exploitive or damaging to our cultural perception of women. But what is compelling to Wiseman in Crazy Horse (as elsewhere in his canon) is the work; the minutiae of casting, costume fitting and rehearsal, the considerations that come into play in planning the season’s calendar, and the inevitable undercurrent of relationships that play into each performer’s sense of place within this glittery microcosm. The film’s roomy length allows for many of the club’s elaborate and spectacular performances to be seen in full.

Wiseman’s position is simultaneously distant and close-up, because he goes to great lengths to be in the middle of the action without displaying overt judgement or contrivance (although, as with any documentary, editing has its own tricks). That said, there is distinctly more colour and joie de vivre in this than many of Wiseman’s previous films, which are often devastatingly depressing. Despite Wiseman’s dispassionate lens, Crazy Horse can’t help but come off as a celebration of the undeniable talent of both its subjects and the filmmaker himself.[v]

– Kier-La Janisse

See HERE for another review of Wiseman’s Crazy Horse by Melissa Howard.

More information on Frederick Wiseman’s films on his website www.zipporah.com

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).