‘It’s a good sign when a movie sends us out wanting to know more, and feeling that there is more to know.’ That was Pauline Kael, writing on Frederick Wiseman’s High School in 1969. Her rave review in the New Yorker burnished the young documentarian’s reputation as an emerging force in a field increasingly preoccupied with questions of representation and authenticity. The direct cinema movement was being sold by critics and practitioners alike as a bulwark against the myriad manipulations of the form; handheld technological advancement, synced to more stringent methodology and ideology, suggested a dawning enlightenment, or perhaps the cavalry coming in. Yet in retrospect, Kael’s thesis that Wiseman’s films functioned fundamentally like novels – as evocations of common experience – drew a truer bead on his intentions. Over the course of his nearly sixty-year career, Wiseman, who died last month at the age of 96, rarely missed the chance dismiss cinema vérité as a ‘pompous term’ or question the premises of so-called direct cinema. Despite being framed as a kind of patron saint of observation, he preferred to see to himself as a dramatist, his films as ‘reality fictions’.

There is no shortage of commonplaces about Wiseman’s films: their frequent focus on institutional structures and strictures; their sometimes sprawling running times; the various controversies left churning in their wake. The most expendable may be that he eschewed ‘talking heads’ – such a claim, while technically correct, belies the pile-up of monologues, sotto voce asides and expert testimonies in his canon. Wiseman was American cinema’s reigning master of loose chatter, with the best ear for dialogue this side of Billy Wilder. He liked to cultivate cacophony: classrooms and playgrounds as echo chambers; hospitals and missile silos as makeshift soundstages; prisons and city halls as towers of babble.

Exhibit A in this array would be High School (1968), in which Wiseman and his skeleton crew of three – camera, sound and assistant director, all honouring a shared mandate for invisibility – set themselves down in a Pennsylvania public secondary educational facility. What they encountered was a free-standing microcosm of late-60s culture clash and longstanding systemic indifference, a drab warren of classrooms and corridors populated by confused and contentious students and presided over-slash-policed by teachers less interested in or capable of inspiration than in maintaining the limits of control. The collision in High School between the earnest inarticulacy of the kids and the disseminating doubletalk of the adults makes syntax itself into spectacle; the film presents teenage growing pains and grown-up capitulations with equal clarity. The justly famous passage when a well-meaning English teacher tries to engage her sullen charges by quoting a selection of Simon and Garfunkel lyrics exists on its own sweetly cringey terms while serving succinctly as a metonym: coming-of-age as a series of dangling conversations.

Such perfectly apposite moments were Wiseman’s strength: he specialized in synecdoche, in selecting and arranging jagged fragments so that they stood in for some larger whole. Knowing exactly how and where to place these set pieces, like the startling opening of Hospital (1970), with its faceless female patient spread-eagled on the operating table in a crucifix position, is what places his work in the twilight zone between capturing and conjuring, or unveiling and inveigling. After all, for both High School and its predecessor and spiritual sibling Titicut Follies (1967), the filmmakers were invited in through the front door. Access is a double-edged proposition for documentarians, insofar as it often assumes (and cinches) deference. Wiseman, to his credit, rarely if ever got trapped. Is it possible to be a fly on the wall and in the ointment at the same time?

Certainly, the administrators at North East High and Bridgewater State Hospital felt stung, threatening legal action against the director on the grounds of peddling disinformation (and, in the case of Titicut Follies, ‘obscenity’, a charge that stuck for thirty years). Had they expected flattery? The turning of a blind eye? Wiseman’s powers of perception and persuasion were only deceptively self-effacing. The absence of the director, whether as a voice on the soundtrack or a physical presence, belies the palpable intentionality of the framing and cutting. These techniques made Wiseman’s movies as expressive as art-house psychodramas or as pressurized as a good thriller. ‘The editing is highly manipulative and the shooting is highly manipulative’, Wiseman insisted in 2003. ‘What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it… all of those things… represent subjective choices that you have to make.’

Errol Morris once wrote that Wiseman was ‘the undisputed king of misanthropic cinema’, which – beyond being a case of the pot calling the kettle black – obscures the radical empathy of his aesthetic. The rhetoric of the image in Titicut Follies is so pointed and gleaming that it disassembles any pretence of objectivity. The film’s expose of neglect and abuse is explicitly structured as an atrocity exhibition, a series of ‘star turns’ by mentally or emotionally damaged prisoners beneath a concrete proscenium; the structure reflects the choice by Bridgewater’s braintrust to parade its inmates as part of an in-house musical comedy revue. (‘Aren’t they terrific?’ queries the warden after the grand finale, patronizing and vaguely demonic beneath the stage lighting). Titicut Follies’ infamous, deeply unsettling cross-cutting between a hunger-striking patient force fed through a tube and then prepared posthumously for burial brazenly violates certain ‘rules’ of vérité, but only to interrogate the nature of violation itself. Cruel, but not inhumane; disciplined and punishing in equal measure.

Titicut’s undisguisedly righteous attack on petty despotism and authoritarian overreach – identified as a shared commodity between strip-searching orderlies and power-tripping psychiatrists at the higher end of the pay scale – makes it a tonal outlier in a filmography that grew less strident as it went along. The litigious legacies of Titicut Follies and High School meant that fewer open invitations were forthcoming from places with something to hide. Still, when Wiseman said he didn’t make exposés, he meant it, and the lack of overt self-aggrandizement in the films themselves backs up the claim. In a Wiseman film, it is not the filmmaker’s heart that bleeds at injustice, but reality itself, spilling its guts as a sustained and incredulous confessional.

Much has been made of Wiseman’s background as a law school student turned clerk and court reporter, which gave him an instinct for the ins-and-outs of opening statements and cross-examinations. But even when he was not specifically poking through the nooks and crannies of the legal system – as in Juvenile Court (1973), Welfare (1975), or both parts of the magisterial Domestic Violence (2001-2002) diptych – he practiced non-fiction filmmaking as a form of discovery, conveying states of guilt and innocence under the sign of reasonable doubt. Left to their own devices in front of Wiseman’s lens, his subjects have ways of making themselves talk; taken collectively, his films limn existence as a sort of collective filibuster.

Because Wiseman was so prolific and varied in his interests, it can seem like an exercise in futility (or critical projection) to hierarchize, categorize or subdivide his output. There are a few undeniable throughlines, including and especially the application of state power; Titicut Follies and High School were followed by the Emmy-winning Law and Order (1969), which walks the beat with a group of Kansas City Police Department officers oscillating between fits and starts of boredom and brutality. ‘I started a few weeks after the Democratic convention in Chicago and I saw it as a chance to do in the pigs’, Wiseman recalled in 2017. But ‘after about two days of riding around in police cars, I realized my little stereotype was far from the truth.’ One reason Wiseman was able to successfully map so much experiential territory is because he was quite willing to be led; he never backed himself or his arguments into a corner. 

A good place to start working through such a monumental filmography is the Wiseman Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden; another is the writing of perhaps the keenest observer of Wiseman’s themes and approach, the critic Barry Keith Grant, whose indispensable book Voyages of Discovery (first published in 1972 and updated most recently in 2023) draws stylistic, thematic and subtextual parallels between its subject’s output and Hollywood fiction films. The approach is a cinephile’s delight, and we can all choose our own adventures comparison-wise; for me, the clinical, horrifying imagery of Primate (1974), set at a research facility housing a vast (and expendable) roster of apes and monkeys, could be juxtaposed equally with Franju or Kubrick – the latter seemingly transposed entire sequences from Wiseman’s Basic Training (1971) into Full Metal Jacket. Meanwhile, Wiseman’s later immersions in the Paris Opera Ballet in La Danse (2009) and its cross-arrondisement, lowbrow strip-show doppelganger Crazy Horse (2011) evoke Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1970).

In the 21st century, Wiseman gravitated towards marquee-name strongholds of artistic, intellectual and cultural life; while The Garden (2005), shot at Madison Square Garden, saw its release tangled up in legal issues, National Gallery (2014) and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) were art-house hits, sandwiched around the rapturous civic portraiture of In Jackson Heights (2015). Wiseman’s New York story, shot and released after the first and second waves of Obama triumphalism and just before the birth of MAGA (no red hats in sight) presents a miraculous vision of lower-case, made-in-USA greatness. In Jackson Heights is an amazing piece of craftsmanship, flitting so agilely between scenes – street protests, city council meetings, park hangs, farmers’ markets – that its 190 minutes feel not only pleasurable but weightless.

In 2002, I interviewed Wiseman for a Toronto alt-weekly about Domestic Violence, for my money the most emotionally devastating of his films about social work. It was filmed in a Tampa Bay shelter offering housing and counselling to female victims of physical and emotional abuse. The harrowing nature of the material is complicated (though not ameliorated) by Wiseman’s emphasis on instances of solidarity. In contrast to the bureaucratic labyrinths of Welfare, in Domestic Violence, the institution humanizes its users instead of alienating them; the shelter’s nickname, The Spring, underlines its directive for regeneration.

I remember only scattered details of our conversation, and I cannot find the transcript. I know I was flustered at the prospect of trying to ask an old master something new about his approach. Wiseman would have been seventy-one then, long since inured to critical shibboleths around his work; happily on that occasion, his sharpness, though palpable, was not pointed in my direction. I don’t pretend, nearly twenty-five years later, to have gleaned any deeper insights into Wiseman work, except maybe that its contradictions ring truer. The scene in Belfast, Maine (1999) in which a literature professor holds forth on the glories of Herman Melville comes to mind; after celebrating Moby Dick as a working-class epic about a fisherman named for a Biblical king, he comes to The Confidence-Man, a book positing suggestibility and grift as twin pillars of the American experience. ‘It must call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of conception and those of life’, wrote Melville, nodding slyly towards his own practice. The highest compliment I can give to Wiseman – the most novelistic of filmmakers, and – is that he not only refused to so discriminate but recognized the folly in doing so. His work endures in its commitment to life’s myriad inconsistencies. We’re wiser, as per Kael, for being reminded of how little we know, and also how much we want to.

Read on: Erika Balsom, ‘Filming the Ebb Tide’, NLR 150.