OK, I’ll admit this is the first time I’ve seen all of Belfast, Maine. I don’t know what I was doing in 1999 when it was on PBS, and maybe it was the combination of the title and the four-hour length and being involved in other things then that just led to me not seeing it. I was an idiot for doing that, and I’m only bringing this up to suggest that running times and titles shouldn’t dissuade you from watching anything, and if you let that happen, it can be your loss. I should have known better, because as I started watching this, I was completely transfixed. There’s really not a dull moment in the whole thing. Start watching and you’ll see what I mean.
The occasional shift from institution to location for Wiseman has been a really smart creative move. When he’s stuck to a hospital or a welfare office, the connections to other institutions have always been there and so many times larger questions have certainly arisen. But it’s a different approach as here to spend two minutes in an institution and then move somewhere else, and somewhere else after that. Belfast, Maine feels like a very expansive film. We can go from a movie theater to a bakery to gorgeous nature shots and still see lots of ways it all links up. It’s one of Wiseman’s particular talents to find logic in all the pieces - it’s far from just a random assemblage. But once again, it’s on us viewers to see associations and parallels and ponder what it all means. We can also note how Wiseman likes to take sharp and unpredictable turns. Going from public housing in Chicago to a small seaside town in Maine is as sharp a turn as getting to Chicago after Paris.
Two very different things about this film are how many homes he visits and how brief the episodes can be, especially given the film’s length. When a film like Juvenile Court or Near Death was long, it was because certain stories took on a life of their own, became so complex that they demanded a twenty minute or so segment. The length here is of an entirely different sort. Nothing stretches out. It’s like we’re always on the move and won’t stay in any one place long. I kept feeling that there was expansion-potential all over the place - really interesting people and activities that I would have been happy to follow for much longer. But that’s for other films. This time, I’d say the organizing principle is the vignette. That means the brief portrait or sketch that will contribute to the larger picture. The film goes the “Our Town” route - glimpses into lives that give us a larger picture. I’m amused at myself that I just spoke about how Public Housing made me realize that Wiseman almost never went inside people’s houses. I clearly spoke too soon (after only twenty-nine films). He’s not rigid or formulaic about something like this, and I drew too quick a conclusion. For a place of such beautiful outdoor environs, and the film gives us generous glimpses of these, it’s surprising how much of Belfast, Maine happens indoors - in trailers, very old houses, factories, and shops. We’re in and out of them with considerable economy and deft portraiture.
One type of vignette we get regularly is the social worker visit. We should consider this one kind of institution - the old and the sick and the troubled being visited by someone wanting to help them. It’s almost the opposite of the urban institution where people have to go in and try to get assistance. Here the assistance generously comes to them, and to a fault, these look like people who are much better off as a result. Having a social worker visit is also a great opportunity to get a glimpse into lives and personalities - what kinds of help they receive and the information about them that comes out in the process. We see the effects of aging, the consequences of smoking, alcohol, and drugs, domestic problems, obesity, eating disorders - always in the context of personal stories and quick histories. There’s a visual component to this as well - seeing a lonely old man against the backdrop of walls filled with family photos from earlier times, another man’s feet being washed by his visitor as he tells of a pair of suspenders discarded because they “weren’t working”, a frail but charmingly talkative and philosophical woman in her nineties who’s knowledgeable about the blood clots that killed Bonanza’s Dan Blocker. There’s poetry and drama enhanced by these isolated but somehow picturesque locations that keeps these encounters riveting.
Along with vignettes, Belfast, Maine is big on processing, something we’ve already discussed a few times, watching things being made, transformed, or created in a series of steps that the film follows closely. Sometimes this has been repetitive difficult factory labor. Here, that labor comes to feel almost artisan, although there is still the occasional cringe-inducing moment. Foxes fare especially badly, and I wasn’t looking forward to seeing how to skin one and harvest its fur. (Earlier, one caught in a trap is clubbed to death.) Most of the processes are much easier to watch, and suggest more the dignity and creativity of food production, even when there are factory assembly lines involved. The amount of food that gets made from raw materials is really beautifully done in the film. Wiseman feels like a classic documentarian in these sections - celebrating humanity’s ability to extract items of value from the land and sea and transform them into food. From the start of the film to the end, it’s a cornucopia of potatoes, baked goods, fudge, sardines and salmon, not just picked or caught, but turned into something for sale. It feels more homemade and craft-like than mass produced, even when it’s potatoes that get turned into frozen baked stuffed potatoes. (That one might feel like the guy with the scheme for packaging eggs that we met in Meat, but even here, as one who really likes to eat those potato things, I’m glad they know how to make them.)
There’s three especially beautiful parts showing food production processes, as good as anything I’ve ever seen from documentaries devoted to showing this sort of stuff. The sardine processing plant takes us through all their steps with admirable economy. What could have been an hour or so is presented in about five minutes, and it’s remarkable how many manual activities, people carefully doing things with their hands, are involved in moving whole sardines into canned fillets. Even more fastidious, and so visually enticing it could be an ad for the company, is the look into the Ducktrap River Fish Farm. We see a series of their products in a grocery store earlier in the film, and when we get to their plant, we don’t know it’s the same place until the sequence is over, when we see the side of one of their trucks as boxes are placed in it. Inside, we view a largely human-handled process - salmon halves layered on wired racks, sliced pieces placed in trays after cooking, pin bones removed with pliers, sealing packages by hand. I felt closer to watching chefs than machines - a celebration of plucky entrepreneurship instead of muckraking low-wage worker exploitation. Another really well executed food process starts in town while the sun is just coming up, as a baker dumps flour into a large mixer. We don’t know it, but we’re on the way to seeing fifty cent chocolate sugar donuts being made, a routine likely repeated every morning. We see every step along the way again, making the dough, rolling it out, cutting it, rerolling the remainder, frying them, icing them - like I said, the whole carefully documented and clearly admired process. When the donuts are placed in a display case we get a series of close-ups of a host of other bakery products, and then we realize that each of them was made in this same manner. Every one of these fairly short sequences is wordless - their stories told in the movements of these makers. We should even throw in here our visit to Perry’s Nut House, a local tourist stop that’s apparently still there, which at the time of this film still had a Mounted Animal Museum upstairs to entertain the kiddies. While there, we go Behind the Scenes to see fudge made on a regular kitchen stove and plain baking trays, entirely by hand. In Belfast, Maine, it’s the combination of the quirky and the New England work ethic that Wiseman captures with acuity.
When Wiseman is in a place rather than an institution, when we do stop in at something he’s already looked at in other films, it feels like we’re witnessing a larger mosaic in process. While we might say each individual film of his is mosaic in structure, the episodic pieces fitting into a larger whole that is the entire film, so too the films can themselves be looked at as pieces in an even larger mosaic, the films full of cross connections that bring us to a portrait of life in America during this time, of communities, of society, whatever sense we have of a bigger picture. When we get thirty seconds of a ballet studio in Belfast, even if the dancing of the students isn’t on a par with the American Ballet Theater, how can we not see this as Wiseman reminding us that we’ve seen that too? This film really makes us feel as if we’ve been watching one big film begun in 1967, one that regularly weaves threads started earlier and likely to return later. I better give some other examples of this, so I’m not just puffing smoke. We return to the classroom in Belfast, Maine, as we’ve done frequently in earlier films. Here we get a beautifully specific account of Herman Melville, why Moby Dick is great, and what The Confidence Man tells us about American society. This feels very appropriate to Belfast’s connections to the sea, and also to all the other times going back to High School where we’ve seen literature of one sort or another get considered. This teacher does an impassioned and smart job of it, although with a bit of that Maine quirkiness tossed in. That when we see it we may also think about the role of education in our lives is more possible because we’ve seen it as a continuing interest in this One Big Film we’re now in Part 30 of viewing. When we go into the courtroom in Maine District Court, while it’s for a few brief simple cases where everyone pleads guilty (speeding, an aggressive dog, marijuana, stealing some wood), we can’t help but match up the minor penalties (return that wood plus a hundred dollar fine) to what went on in Juvenile Court. And believe it or not, remember that skeet shooting in Canal Zone? Well here it seems to go nicely with all the hunting and outdoor recreation that only the upper echelons got to enjoy the last time we saw it. And the short single take of a Death of a Salesman rehearsal, while again not up to the theater we’ve seen earlier, still has a director doing his best to whip it into shape and is shot with the same respect for the process. And of course we’ve got to stop by the local hospital one evening, and even when the stories there sound interesting, we’re not in this movie for the long developed episodes, instead it’s brief visits with a whole bunch of patients, and quick glimpses of tales of obesity, pain, and anti-depressants. Still, we feel the community and connections between all these institutions, within the community, and within the world of like institutions we’ve seen in other movies. And don’t forget a couple of more sermons for good measure, and I’ve made no mention of weighing a dead deer. Wiseman will show it all, not shying away from the gruesome, but often finding the oddly individualistic and the unexpected. Like I said, it’s continually interesting and full of a feeling of connection to other communities and institutions, the problems here variations often on things we’ve seen elsewhere. And there’s a Wiseman signature move that’s done so repeatedly and beautifully, marking the vignettes with a rigorous punctuation. It’s the exterior shot of a trailer or a processing plant, a church or a hospital, matched at the end each time with another shot outside, often from a slightly different camera position. They announce the start of a new experience, and they tell us it’s time to move on to the next. What’s unusual in this film, again, is how brief these segments are, short condensed views rather than ever extended sequences, even though those segments accumulate to provide a broad and generous vision of the community.
There are two other quick things I want to mention just because I feel like it and because there are some more Wiseman signature things I’m glad I caught. Way back in Central Park I marveled at how perfectly a sound transition between two completely different pieces of music in two separate places were matched, the sound of one flowing into the other. There’s a really good one like that here as well, from a live version of the Stevie Ray Vaughan song “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at a blues club flowing perfectly into a drum circle group pounding away in a separate scene, the sound so matched you’d think they were playing together. This must be what months in an editing room can do to a person - they start listening for these things. So the trivia question for your next Wiseman contest is to name the two movies with matching transitions between songs. Impress your documentary loving friends. The other fun thing to notice is another version of Wiseman’s kind of noting a celebrity without giving him much attention. Stephen King lives within an hour of Belfast and is surely a local Maine celebrity. Wiseman acknowledges this by showing a cardboard cutout of King in the lobby of the local movie theater playing one of the worst adaptations of King’s work, that forgettable movie “Thinner”, which at least within this film is a nod to the rampant obesity problem. (As IMDB recounts the plot: “An obese attorney is cursed by a gypsy to rapidly and uncontrollably lose weight”). At least John Denver showed up in Aspen, even if he wasn’t mentioned by name. Wiseman just doesn’t want to be caught paying much attention to celebrities.
Times are changing in Belfast, as our near final look at the gleamingly modern offices and call center for the credit card company MBNA is in considerable contrast to the folksy enterprises seen elsewhere in town. No Mounted Animal Museum here, just a huge room of office cubicles of phone workers making calls about unpaid balances. Times are changing, in jobs and in architecture. There’s much in Belfast, Maine of aging, and of occupations and practices sure to be on their way out. Wiseman’s great panorama of controlled dramatic vignettes ends in an appropriate place - final shots of a ramshackle local cemetery. This is a deeply humanistic work with a sense of history and an appreciation for the special qualities of this generous slice of American life.