By now, it’s a commonplace that the eighty-one-year-old documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman is the cinema’s master analyst of institutions—and his 1975 film “Welfare,” which I discuss in the clip above, is a prime example of his X-ray-like artistry. But that generalization, though accurate, dashes past the actual experience of watching his movies: Wiseman films people, as they work, play, study, or live in institutions. His meticulous, intensely curious view of these people captures the myriad contemplations, calculations, decisions, negotiations—in general, the actions and the thoughts they reflect—that, all told, in virtually overwhelming and seemingly infinite intersections and overlaps, are what defines these institutions. And that’s where Wiseman’s art turns analytical: from the bewildering multiplicity of phenomena, he keenly and patiently focusses in on, and, from his vast amount of footage (often a hundred or more hours), distills the action such that, far from seeming reductive or limited, it seems to be the very essence of an institution. Wiseman’s art is concrete, but his mental power and his visual sensibility are astonishingly analytical. What makes it not merely smart but profoundly moving is his alertness to the tension between the order of institutions—which, after all, is a key form of social glue—and the unruly, passionate, authentic needs and desires of individuals.
Last week, writing here about “The Long, Long Trailer,” and, a little earlier, discussing “Designing Woman,” I called Vincente Minnelli the Frederick Wiseman of Hollywood directors due to the great stylist’s surprising interest in the doings within institutions. But, considering Minnelli’s intense sensitivity to the pain of the despised and the rejected, as well as his sympathy for the pressurized lives of insiders, it wouldn’t be wrong either to call Wiseman the Minnelli of the documentary realm.
P.S. Wiseman’s fortieth feature, “Crazy Horse,” will open at Film Forum in January,
