OK, it’s a chance to impress your friends with another Wiseman trivia question. Name the three movies that have singing telegram scenes. Answer later. More seriously, In Jackson Heights is another wonderful film, and I think we’re strongly in the period we’re not going to leave of major late Wisemans, films that show real development from earlier but already great works. I’ve taken a special liking to the “neighborhood” films, again not that there’s anything wrong with the more institution-based films (and I look forward to those still to come), but there’s just enough free movement in roaming about an area like this that we can really enjoy the variety of activities that get packed in. And a couple of new things happen here. For one, this is about as close as Wiseman has gotten to zeroing in on certain subjects - here it’s the circumstances of immigrants, gentrification, LGBTQ concerns, and aging. These subjects have a certain overlap in that this neighborhood is populated by many who might otherwise be considered marginal - the people who don’t quite fit and who are being taken advantage of. It’s clearly these groups that attracted Wiseman. And it’s now the seventh time he’s done a film in the New York area (and we’ll be back here for the next one too), which I think is less important for the geographic proximity of all these films than for the expansiveness of his interests. And those prepositions have meaning - “At Berkeley” and “In Jackson Heights” - both times I think suggesting more assertively that the films are Wiseman’s choices of what he wants to look at, not authoritative works about the locations in question.
Before we get to some of those big subjects, I’ve got another important Wiseman method that I want to give the capital letter treatment to, we’ll call it the No Dialog Vignette. He really has a special way of doing these. It’s not just that there’s no dialog, but he’s got a compressed manner of working out these short sequences so that they feel unusually complete - like he’s found ways to add a little look at a place that has made the trip worthwhile, without overstaying our welcome. It’s particularly bold in these three-hour films to have so many sequences that are maybe no more than a minute. Why I think they’re so good is that they become almost an art in itself - starting with these adding their stories without anyone speaking. There are a good number of scenes which can be short where maybe there is a single speech or a brief meeting, and I’m not talking about those. It’s the artful tidbits that can offer their observations in maybe four or five shots. I better reel off a number of examples here so you can see what I’m driving at.
1. Laundromat. The charm of this one is that there is a couple playing music on some cups at a small table for an audience that includes a bunch of kids, and even though there’s been a sign outside, it takes a while until we cut away from their performance and audience for us to see that we’re actually in a large coin-operated laundromat. A TV with soccer on and no sound is also visible, and once we see people tending to their laundry, we return to the performers to see they’re now playing small cymbals instead of the cups. A harpist sits next to them, but her turn is yet to come. We get an unusually high number of close-ups of faces in the audience, but that’s something we’ll talk about later.
2. Grocery store. We start outside, with close-ups of a display of some unusual produce, mostly South American vegetables I’d guess. There’s more variety inside, and then we get a look at some tanks of live fish. Only Wiseman would go in for three additional close-ups of the fish’s faces, cute little buggers on their way to be eaten. Time to head for a meat locker, this one holding a cartful of what look like skinned goat carcasses, on their way to getting hung on hooks, as were the carcasses in Meat. A box of processed chickens also gets its close-up. Again, these sequences are without dialog and around a minute or so long - contained glimpses into what’s on offer here - front of the store and behind the scenes.
3. Bodega window soccer. A group on a sidewalk mostly in Colombia soccer jerseys watches a game on a very big TV in a bodega window, which we only discover after a good bunch of slow portraits of the audience. When we do see the television, amazingly it’s a straight-on full screen image behind the store glass, which manages to show the audience watching without allowing for a reflection of the camera. I have no idea how this was accomplished. The only dialog is a person in the crowd calling out once “Colombia, Columbia” and the whole thing again lasts under a minute.
4. Nila’s Eyebrow Center. What sounds like an Indian song while women work with thread on the eyebrows of their customers. Quiet serious work.
5. Recycling Center Vending Machines. Generally a sign of poverty and homelessness. People are lined up with trash bags full of glass, plastic and cans at a row of automated machines meant to return to them cash. After someone loads a pile in and presses a button for their money, a sign lights up that says “Bin full. See attendant.” There’s no attendant in evidence, and along a wall we see huge piles of processed cans. We get the quick feeling that the refunds won’t be issuing as this sad little one-minute glimpse of what some residents do to attempt to get a little extra money comes to a quick end.
6. Sidewalk flower stall. This one is maybe 30 seconds at the most, close-ups of a series of very colorful and beautiful flowers. It’s complicated by the sound of a song from a car radio driving by with a song calling out “talk dirty to me” - an odd juxtaposition - all in a couple of shots.
7. Poultry processing. As soon as we see a sign that says “Live Poultry”, seasoned Wiseman viewers must know what’s in store. This is slightly longer than the usual No Dialog Vignette because we see a full process unfold, but it’s still pretty short and without dialog, except for short prayers before the killing of individual birds. We then see dead ducks cleaned in a big hot water drum and hosed down. Then all feathers are removed, and they’re spun around in another drum, probably to clean feathers further. Then more washing down, trimming by hand, and organs removed. The last step in the process is splitting the birds in half with a machine saw, and we’re done.
All his films have these No Dialog Vignettes, but I’d say that it’s by around this one that they reach a truly high level of both simplicity and refinement. They are also lessons in skillful editing, telling quick stories in a really economical way, the lack of dialog feeling like a deliberate constraint artfully surmounted. Unless someone starts speaking right away, we could be in for one of these little tales, marveling at how Wiseman can cruise a neighborhood and come up with so many variations. When there are people speaking, we’re watching “normal” Wiseman scenes, where we never know how long involved a discussion or meeting might go on. There are great ones of these as well, of course, but the No Dialog Vignettes deserve some attention and appreciation of their own, so basic a component of Wiseman’s mosaics.
Chance encounters and impromptu happenings are one of the great pleasures of observational cinema, and the sheer variety of activities in Jackson Heights and Wiseman’s patience and sharp eyes means that gold will eventually be struck. I still can’t believe there’s an actual scene where a woman on the way to visit her dying father in a hospital asks a small church group picking up sidewalk trash as a volunteer activity if they would offer him a prayer. They huddle together, and an impromptu and quite heartfelt prayer is delivered by one of the group. When the prayer is over, they go right back to picking up litter. Somehow, it’s very touching. And maybe it happens all the time, but it’s pretty amusing to see a small dog getting fitted for a Mexican soccer jersey in a soccer jersey store. The store variety in the film is fairly awesome in itself, everything from shops selling religious artifacts (get that plaster Baby Jesus repaired), beauty salons for several nationalities, tattoo parlors, farmers markets, groceries, and restaurants of all sorts. It makes quite palpable the several scenes devoted to discussions of how long-time shop owners are being driven out by high rents and misguided development plans. We’ve seen what will be lost, and while there are talks of protest and organizing, we don’t know if those will have any effect. The appearance of Gap and Starbucks stores later in the film and the “going out of business” signs and empty hallways in the Roosevelt Mini Mall suggest that they won’t.
We have to give a nod to education and culture as well, given that they are big Wiseman concerns. Pure gold is a wonderful scene of a taxi school with a sign out front saying “We speak Punjabi Urdu Hindi Bengali” and where the flamboyant teacher starts with “Class, you guys are here to study Brooklyn.” He says the word “neighborhood” in a bunch of different languages, and just as the teachers were encouraged at Berkeley, he seems to know everyone by name. His teaching of map reading using colorful mnemonics is priceless, he tells his students that counting out ten times is the way to practice learning directions, putting him squarely in the company of other Wiseman teachers who have emphasized the need for repetition. He’s great in exhorting them: “The best way to study, write it down, practice. Got it? Let’s move on.” At which point the great scene ends and the movie moves on too, stopping just long enough to show that sign outside again, where “TAXI TUTORS” has a “U” missing. Earlier, we could count on a dance class, not ballet this time, but belly dancing, taught to a group of seemingly very mixed nationalities. And it’s short, but students learning Arabic in a series of quick classroom scenes is also a glimpse of serious education, and another class is immigrants learning what’s on citizenship tests, so there’s as much variety to the education as there is to the food shops.
Meetings and a few conversations are the main arena for serious issues, and the biggest are immigration matters, most often discussed at an organization called Make the Road New York, and we hear extensive discussions there at least four times in the film. It’s pretty unusual for Wiseman to return so often to one site, and one has to marvel that these, like a bunch of others in the film, are entirely in Spanish. I don’t know if he personally speaks Spanish, but the diversity of the residents is reflected very clearly by the film’s varied languages. (The first line is Arabic, “In the name of Allah the Merciful” at a prayer meeting.) How you do observational cinema in multiple languages is quite a feat. The immigration meetings are mostly made up of long and moving speeches about the travails of getting to the U.S. and quite a lot about worker exploitation, not being paid for overtime, getting fired without cause, the struggles of minimum wage. Particularly in the age of Trump, it’s great to hear these stories told, and told so well.
We’ve seen AIDS quilts and gay rights marches already in Wiseman films, and we can even recall the transgender person who was the subject of the call to Miss Hightower way back in Hospital. This film has a good deal of concern for LGBTQ issues, and it’s interesting already to see a neighborhood both heavily immigrant and also strongly LGBTQ. The various overlaps between groups comes up often, even in an early scene of a meeting of the Queens Center for Gay Seniors. And it was the murder in 1990 of Julio Rivera, a gay Latino hate crime, that led to the annual Queens Pride Parade, which we see in the film, a co-founder of which is Daniel Dromm, the Council Member for Jackson Heights and another big figure in this film, showing up more regularly than is generally the custom in Wiseman films. It’s one of those astute but a little sneaky transitions that Wiseman pulls off when a group of older women talk about how movie stars in the old days were secretly gay (“Who knew back then?”) and from there we’re right into the Pride Parade, complete with a mayor’s speech and Dromm in the parade with a colorful boa around his neck, times having clearly changed. The most moving of such scenes is a support group where, like some of the immigrant meetings, the stories of a couple of transgender members are less optimistic and mostly of ill treatment, particularly about someone being punched in the face and killed in front of a police station. There’s also a protest at a restaurant for failing to serve a transgender person and a bit of a march over that later. And along the way we get visits into a gay bar or two, even one still sporting a disco ball. Like I said, this is clearly a subject Wiseman pays a great deal of attention to, more directly than is generally his wont.
We don’t have to lump his interest in Jews and in aging, but the two seem to overlap quite a bit. We get a Holocaust remembrance service, and one of the stars of our visits to the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights is a woman who announces herself as 98 years old and who contemplates, hopefully not so seriously, killing herself, because “What am I doing here? Nothing.” Not that she’s complaining, but "When you get old and you can't do things and you have people doing things for you, it's no good." Other women at her table try to speak with her, as she laments having no one to talk to. I already mentioned too another group of older women who are talking together in a coffee shop, the ones who were lamenting all those secretly gay actors in the old days. Before they got on that subject, they have a pretty wide-ranging discussion of cemeteries, from a nearby one that’s being neglected on to talking about other cemeteries they’ve encountered. One quite philosophically says “I’m sure there’s a human being buried somewhere just about any place on earth that’s inhabited. Most of our buildings are built on somebody’s grave, but nobody remembers.” Pretty serious stuff, and another reminder of the aging population that also makes up a serious part of Jackson Heights.
There’s a pretty noticeable stylistic change in this film which I think we can attribute partly to his previous one, recalling that we’ve just gone from National Gallery to here. I’d say it’s absolutely apparent in this film that Wiseman is doing portraits more - slow close-ups of many many faces - than he’s ever done. I’d dare say that thinking about all those Old Masters may have had a direct effect. And I’ve already mentioned his interest here in close-ups of flowers and grocery produce, and I could add to that an outdoor farmers market which is a riot of colorful shots of vegetables and fruits - tomatoes, beans, squash, cherries, and strawberries in a serious montage. These are Wiseman still lifes we might say, feeling very National Gallery-ish too.
I’ve been warning since Titicut Follies not to ignore endings and end credits, and In Jackson Heights that’s especially the case, right to the final frame. We’ve seen in a few films that whether sound continues over the end credits can even be important, as it is here. The way this goes is that the last meeting of the film is back in Make the Road New York, and we hear two especially bad accounts of workers being mistreated on their jobs. After the meeting, we see a man putting away chairs and it looks like things might be wrapped up, but a little group is still sitting there, one guy playing guitar and two women singing, one in an especially spirited fashion. Their song continues over some final night overhead shots of the street (matching the opening), and then a big surprise is fireworks in the sky, so it’s Fourth of July and I’d say the point is being made through the song continuing that In Jackson Heights, the immigrants, the LGBTQ community, the seniors, are all part of the American Experience. As the final credits start, the sound of the group continues, now singing “Cielito Lindo”. Even though the credits are pretty lengthy (including full song credits for the first time in his movies) the song is still going, and when the credits end, they’re still not quite finished, so on a black screen we hear the last maybe thirty seconds, the film not over until the song is done. I have to say this just knocked me out - the respect for the songs in not cutting them off seems so Wiseman - things get to play out as long as they need to be. And this final sequence is brilliantly constructed - continuing after the meeting to include the songs, cutting to final views of the neighborhood, the surprise of the fireworks, and then having the songs play in full. There’s thought behind every bit of sound and every shot, right to the last. Awesome.
Oops, and I almost forgot to answer that trivia question. Of course the one here comes during another senior citizens event, where Dromm presents a proclamation to the unofficial “Mayor of Jackson Heights”, who has run the Men and Women’s Clubs for 13 years. It’s that old routine of a woman dressed as a cop who does quite creditable versions of several songs, including the Marilyn Monroe way of singing happy birthday. Then the seniors do a chicken dance. Obviously Wiseman had to include this whole nutty thing. And those previous singing telegrams - of course they were in Model and The Store.
And last but not least, as they say, I’ve got to mention that there’s another great sermon in here somewhere, also in Spanish, in a resplendent Catholic church before an extremely large congregation. I’ve figured a little bit out about all the sermons, which I’ve mentioned before have sometimes left me befuddled, both by their frequency in Wiseman films and by their content. I do think their performative qualities are part of the interest, as he seems to have found priests and ministers who are fairly outsized personalities, so they turn in good performances. (And I should mention that the church here is another place where Wiseman goes portrait crazy - so many slow close-ups of congregants’ faces, including some sleeping.) What he also seems to go for are sermons that discuss issues that are not entirely religious in nature, that are more along the lines of social problems. Here it’s pretty explicit as the priest warns that “We are looking for happiness in the wrong places” and lays it out, that the two big problems for him are drugs and infidelity. Given what the rest of the film covers, I don’t know if we’d agree with him, and I get the feeling here as I have with some of the other sermons that they’re bringing up things that rather miss the mark. But it was inevitable with all the local churches that we had to pay at least one a visit.
I’m thinking now of this string of At Berkeley, National Gallery, and In Jackson Heights - that this is an incredible run of real ambition - films of great scope and challenging subject matter. It’s not just the beautiful digital color and skillful assembly that demonstrates a real change from some twenty or so films ago. The collective sense that Wiseman is a chronicler of our times is really strong now, a larger ambition than finding weakness in institutions or only charting social ills. He’s still doing that sometimes, but he’s after more. And one of those things is making great movies - filled with a unique style, often very funny, quite varied in content, and showing us life around us in so many surprising ways. There just aren’t any other movies like these, and they are so worthy of appreciation and celebration.