Seeing Hospital again makes me especially glad I’m doing this. In some ways - its human drama, its richness of incident - this an obviously great film. In others, the film has to be thought about a little bit in terms of how it’s put together, how things are presented, in order to start to understand what makes Wiseman’s work so great. It superficially resembles any conventional documentary about a hospital, but that’s like saying De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves resembles a movie about being careful with your property. It feels more like a neorealist classic, so unconventional are its methods.
The film starts shockingly. Wordlessly a surgeon scrubs up and a patient is readied for surgery, the only sound a rather scary and loud breathing machine. But before the first (surgical) cut, the sequence ends and we start moving through the hospital. I think this is Wiseman’s way of saying he’s about to perform his own sort of surgery - a cinematic probing that is going to be direct and unflinching. While some sights in Hospital might be familiar or expected, that is rarely so. The surprises are many and stereotypes are contradicted at every turn. The biggest surprise, and the most important issue to deal with, are two related changes that are both departures from the first two films - we’ll now on occasion follow someone from one episode into another, and sometimes episodes are quite lengthy - in one case something like ten minutes, which is a lot for an 84 minute film. In Wiseman films, length is especially important, because it signals complexity and reversal - problems that get more complicated, issues that spin in some way out of control or into areas we never expected. The films themselves and some parts of them will get much longer in later decades, but even here, quite early on, we can be surprised by his strategies of taking what seems to be straightforward and brief, and now allowing things to extend.
The big example of this is the time spent with a Dr. Schwartz and his possibly overdosing patient, an art student who we see mostly throwing up and repeating over and over that he doesn’t want to die, which the doctor repeatedly assures him he’s in no danger of. This scene is probably as funny as Hospital gets, but even here it’s that particular Wiseman humor, the Waiting for Godot kind, the humor that’s hand in hand with deep pathos. With this art student (we don’t find that’s what he is out until almost the end of his segment), the deepening comes in his final moments, when he not only contemplates return to Minnesota but also despairs that anything he will ever do might not amount to much. Having experienced a long period of his feeling like he’s going to die, he’s earned his despair. This extended episode clearly takes on a life of its own, and isn’t just here to tell us something about this hospital. It’s a rich vignette that gets more interesting the longer it goes on, and Wiseman is ahead of us on this, knowing how long it has to be for additional payoff.
Dr. Schwartz is wonderfully even-tempered during this episode, reassuring the kid over and over that he’s not going to die. He has earlier been great as well is one of the film’s first scenes. He does a Wiseman phone monolog to another hospital complaining about a patient being transferred because she couldn’t pay, not expecting any result from the call but doing it out of a clear sense of responsibility. And then unusually for these films, he makes a third appearance late in the film, speaking to a man who he tells is too old to live alone, and that a social worker is trying to find him a place to stay. “The hospital is not the place now.” Schwartz is very patient as he tells him about many people being placed in nursing homes, and that the man shouldn’t be worried. That a scene in Hospital tells us “The hospital is not the place now” is a smart Wiseman move. Another film-maker might imagine that a film about a hospital should only show us things where the hospital IS “the place”, in that you would think most things shown should be informative about the location we’re in and which is the ostensible subject (and the title). But Wiseman is showing us many times when problems that are not strictly medical are coming into view here, and where solutions will not be found by doctors treating patients. This interest (and boldness) in letting scenes go on until we get a larger picture is part of what makes his films so rewarding and complex.
Another pretty long and quite moving situation involves a small boy who has been allowed to fall out a window by the inattentive drunken grandmother meant to be watching him. We see the boy being looked at by a nurse, as we gradually pick up pieces of what happened to him. Things move up a level when the nurse tries to get the boy admitted to the hospital just for a night, to keep him from having to return to his clearly sad and dangerous home environment, even though he’s not physically hurt. Her first pleading is on the phone with another part of the hospital, trying to procure him a bed. (“I know the old goat is there, so you can answer yes or no. Do you have a bed on the ward. Answer yes or no. I can hear her breathing down your back” - she just tries to get a bed for the kid for the night. “There’s no disease, but I need a bed.” - we keep learning more as the scene goes on.) When that fails, she discusses whether she might take the young boy home herself for a night, just to keep him safe, in the hope that a social worker can intercede. (Another nurse says to her, “Don’t you get involved with something like that, dear.”) It’s a hopelessly unsolvable situation with the wonderful nurse going above and beyond, but to no avail. When these efforts fail, in resignation she asks if she can go get the boy something to eat from the kitchen. Hospital is full of people trying hard to do the right thing, but in circumstances where the problems are well beyond just taking a sick or injured person and making them better.
An additional great phone monolog by a psychiatrist shows these strategies at work too. First, we have to see him with the person he’s going to be pleading for in the next scene - his interview with a gay man who is clearly in bad straits, working as a prostitute and rejected by his family. The psychiatrist is expert and caring in trying to see what might be done for him, a sad man who calls himself “a freak of nature” and the doctor determines that his real need is for a safe place to stay and help with getting a job. We might think this episode is over, and the doctor’s concern for his patient has been made clear while still getting nowhere. But when we think the episode is over, we see the psychiatrist on the phone, talking to an unseen woman at a welfare office, names Miss Hightower whose name he repeats over and over as he pleads with her to arrange welfare for the man. He’s determined and just keeps requesting over and over for her to do something (“I wish a commitment”), until, in a rare moment of direct address to the film-makers since he’s been alone in his office, he announces “She hung up on me.” This is another extended sequence with no solution, where someone in the hospital who cared at lot tried to do something about a problem that wasn’t medical, and where we see larger social problems at work, people who aren’t being helped.
So this cinematic strategy is a pretty unusual one. I don’t know of another film-maker doing anything like it. The lengths of segments can expand drastically, and the succeeding segment may have some continuity by having the same person appear, or it well may not. Whether a segment is contained or complete, or it requires some linkage we make ourselves as we watch is also an open strategy. The repetitious language - a psychiatrist pleading with a social worker over and over again, the drugged up student asking if he’s going to die, the nurse desperate for a solution that won’t come to help a young boy - these are so far from your ordinary presentations of social issues. This is unique and great cinema.
If we were to look for problems, I guess they are here in abundance, even if they don’t seem to be asserted themes. That this New York public hospital mainly deals with the poor, minorities, the aged, the victims of violence, is surely in evidence. Forty years before the Affordable Care Act we can hear about patients being denied coverage by their insurance company for pre-existing conditions. Alcohol and drugs have ravaged many. But what shows through overwhelmingly is humanity - people trying to do good, being kind, doing much more than we might expect in an overburdened public institution. The many police we see, having brought either crime victims or the sick to the hospital, are unfailingly sympathetic. In covid times, we might not need another reminder, but we’ve always owed a lot to doctors and nurses. Seeing a nurse go bed to bed dispensing medicine with care and a kind word is somehow incredibly moving. I don’t think we ever see a doctor as callous as what Titicut Follies sometimes puts on display. Wiseman is showing us what he found there, I guess, not trying to make an argument.
There is likely the usual amount of calculation here in how scenes are ordered - family problems pile up together, alcohol and drugs for a while, a few lecture-demonstrations involving interns, but these films have a great feeling of both structure and randomness at the same time, if that’s not too much of a contradiction. We can feel ideas carry over without being beaten over the head with them. It’s quite the balancing act which I’ll likely try to talk about more if I can get a better handle on it. Mention should also be made that this is the first of eight films photographed by William Brayne, another Canadian cinematographer who worked with Allan King (like High School’s Richard Leiterman did) on Warrendale, an excellent film about treating emotionally disturbed children. With Wiseman right from the start, you can see a special quality to the filming. No joking positions, no nervous wandering, no ostentatious movements (except for one I’ll finish with, as does the film). I think it takes a special talent in a movie still shot back in those days with fairly heavy hand-held cameras, just to be willing to stay fairly still in order to watch and listen. In Hospital, it feels often like visual respect for the trials of the patients and the noble efforts of the doctors and nurses.
The film ends in a pretty audacious manner. As a religious service in the hospital continues, the camera cuts to outside. It’s our first and only view of the outside of the hospital, while we dimly hear a hymn continue. (Wiseman is skillful with sound often as a transition between scenes.) Once outside, in a single shot, the camera zooms back and back. As the hospital recedes, we see that our position is well away from it, on the opposite side of a highway. The sound from inside is quickly drowned out by the noise of the rushing cars. The hospital becomes a nondescript building in an urban setting, its complexities and nobilities hidden inside. As Hospital began daringly with the wordless surgery starting our trip in, we now recede, in a reminder that the problems we’ve seen don’t belong just to the hospital, they connect so often to the world outside.