Frederick Wiseman, superstar

Boston Globe

28-02-2025

'That's amazing,' said Wiseman when informed of Google's description. 'Not that I don't think my films are funny. There are some sad, funny sequences in that one.'
'Hospital' is one of nearly two dozen highlights from Wiseman's colossal filmography that will be screened over the next two months at a consortium of venues, including the Brattle, Somerville, and Coolidge Corner theaters and the Museum of Fine Arts. The retrospective kicks off Saturday, March 1, with a rare screening at the MFA of Wiseman's feature-length debut, 'Titicut Follies' (1968), a disturbing glimpse inside the old Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, which helped spark a national debate about healthcare reform. Screenings of the film in Massachusetts were banned until 1991.
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Since then, the Cambridge-based filmmaker has completed more than 40 observational films, averaging a new one every year and a half. From his early focus on institutional settings ('High School,' 1968; 'Basic Training,' 1971; 'Welfare,' 1975), Wiseman has expanded both his scope of interest ('Aspen,' 1991; 'La Comédie-Française ou l'Amour joué,' 1996) and the length of his films. 'At Berkeley' (2013) and 'City Hall,' his 2020 opus on Boston's city government under the Walsh administration, are two of several that clock in at more than four hours.
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"City Hall."
Courtesy of Zipporah Films, Inc.
Wiseman, who was born in Boston in 1930, released his last film in 2023, and he's not sure he'll make another. Reached by phone at his second home, in Paris, he explained that he's been fighting a cold.
'Doing one of these films requires a lot of energy, and at the moment I don't have a lot,' he said. 'I'd like to go on forever, but I have to recognize that I'm 95.'
'I feel like he has one of the most important filmographies, in documentary and indeed in filmmaking in general,' said Ned Hinkle, the Brattle's creative director. 'He's so expert at painting a portrait of a place and a time.
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'I know Fred doesn't like to think of these movies as the 'truth' of a situation. It seems like a real fly-on-the-wall thing, but he admits that camera placement, editing, all these things come with some kind of bias. In the editing process, he tries to find
a
truth.'
In an essay about Wiseman's work, his friend and fellow filmmaker Errol Morris once wrote that Wiseman's films — all those scenes of bureaucrats and educators and attendants — excel at 'showing a disconnection between what people
think
they are doing and what they
are
doing. Irony abounds in Wiseman's films. No one, absolutely no one, really knows what he is doing.'
"National Gallery."
Zipporah Films
In conversation, Wiseman disagrees, as he often does.
'I don't think Errol really believes that,' he said. 'I have a theory about what I'm doing. You don't make the films by throwing the rushes [raw footage] down the stairs and splicing them together in the order they fall.'
When it comes to the people in front of his camera, however, he concedes the point.
'If you're talking about what people do in their daily lives, absolutely. In many situations, we have no idea the effect we're creating by what we're doing.'
The subjects of Wiseman's films are typically institutions of some sort — a boxing gym in Austin, Texas; a public housing complex in Chicago; London's National Gallery. Wiseman said he finds the second Trump administration's recent purge of many of America's institutions 'extremely depressing.'
'I think they don't know what they're doing,' he said. 'Trump is a man who has no education, no experience. It's cliche to say, but he's a classic narcissist.'
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The impact of the administration's drastic cuts to institutional staffing and budgets will affect the sort of people Wiseman has been watching in his films for 60 years, he said, 'both the workers and the clients. And they have no awareness of how destructive their policies are.'
"Hospital."
His films — he prefers that term to 'documentaries' — feature no talking heads, no voice-over narrative, no sense that there is a director behind the camera. As unassuming as his technique, Wiseman speaks plainly about the legacy his films will leave.
'I hope that people continue to watch them,' he said. 'I think there might be, in 50 years, somebody who wants to know something about the institutions that existed during the time that I lived, and they'll be able to look at a police department or a high school.
'People a hundred years ago couldn't have done that. People a hundred years from now will be able to do that, assuming the world still exists.'
The Boston retrospective follows a similar program that ran earlier this year at New York's Lincoln Center. Hinkle said the collaboration among the city's theaters has reached a level he has not experienced in his years at the Brattle.
'I'm hesitant to use the word 'unprecedented,' but I think this is verging on that.' The reason is simple: Wiseman, he said, is one of a kind.
There are talks underway to schedule local screenings of even more Wiseman films later this year, Hinkle said, perhaps with more venues involved. Wiseman and his team have restored 33 of his films in Ultra HD.
To the filmmaker, they're all of a piece.
'I don't have any list of favorites in my head,' he said. 'Strangely enough, I like them all.'
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