I was just going to end this with the City Hall entry, because I don’t think Wiseman’s films require some kind of concluding closure, a tying together into a neat little package. But there are some things that have surprised me over these last few months that I want to make note of, maybe of some use.
I had planned to make a list of my Top Ten, or a Ten Wisemans to Start With, and maybe a list of disappointments. I’m more than ready to say when I don’t connect with a film or get little from it, but time after time, films I wasn’t looking forward to turned out to be fascinating experiences. I hope my comments reflect that. One way to look at all these films as a single work is to get out of deciding each one needs some ranking on its own. The way to see them is the way I did, really. Maybe they don’t have to be in order and you can certainly take a lot longer, but any single one you miss is your own loss. My experience was one of being disappointed with myself for not having seen each of these when they were first available. Not a one let me down. Quite the contrary. Each time I started a new one, it felt like a continuation of a way of looking at the world that I was already very much attuned to. I’m through being preachy, but every single one of these films is worth serious attention.
Something to emphasize is not to pigeonhole these solely as documentaries. Appreciate them as movies, with an original method and style. That they are a form of observational cinema, real people doing real things, adds to their complexity and accomplishment. But you’ll find as much performance, as much humor, as much engaging activity, as in any bunch of fiction films you’d care to name. Wiseman is a great film-maker, and if you watch any of these, hopefully you’ll see why you’ll want to keep at it.
I’m still sounding preachy, so let me make some overall observations instead. Let’s look at the whole body of work for a bit. I think my sense of Wiseman before I started this was that he was mainly interested in institutions, with an occasional variation. My view now is that there are three general groups of his films, with considerable overlaps between them. Along with institutions, there are the town/neighborhood films, and the culture films. But as I was figuring out, an institutional film like Ex Libris isn’t just about the New York Public Library, it’s an opportunity to go all over three boroughs as we visit so many branches, and it’s a culture film too, given all the interest in poetry and literature and the value of knowledge found in books. So the general categories are useful in order to break out of a rigid sense of institutions as his sole focus and to see there are major goals beyond judging if some particular place is good or bad.
I do want to say something about the whole body of work, which is that I think there’s been an over-emphasis on the early and late ones, at the expense of the excellent middle. I think especially Domestic Violence II, Zoo, High School II, and Public Housing don’t get the attention they deserve, but it’s my honest reaction that there’s really not a clinker in the whole bunch. The importance of seeing them all as part of the same larger enterprise makes every one an important contributor, so each can be seen more as something like a new chapter, full of both unexpected developments and also lots more of that Wisemanesque stuff you've already found so interesting. Why wouldn’t you then want more of it? And just for the proverbial record, I’ll put the film count currently at forty-three. I’ll include City Hall because it was just on PBS in December, even though it’s not yet on Kanopy. And we’ll leave off Seraphita’s Diary and The Garden, as they are not currently available.
One element that can keep lots of us going for a long time is exploring how meaning is developed through the unusual structure of his films. I think it’s a close to inexhaustible subject, given the possibilities of how sequences are ordered and what makes up the individual segments themselves, and the wealth of material these films now offer. There are many great films by other film-makers that I deeply love, where I feel though that I pretty thoroughly understand them and could provide you from memory a fairly detailed sequence of events. Wiseman’s films are constructed almost to keep that from happening. It’s not just the refusal to provide a direct line of continuity from scene to scene. It’s more the leaving it to us to consider what kinds of connection we’ve actually got. The films are absolutely not strung together randomly. The possibilities of connection are definitely there, of seeing meanings develop out of how scenes are ordered. And it’s bold to leave threads hanging which might not be picked up immediately. But nobody is going to hand you a road map. The work is ours to do.
I think one thing I’m pretty strong on, given my last couple of weeks, is in seeing a definite “late Wiseman” period, which I would put as beginning with At Berkeley and then not stopping, even though I’ve already made my modest claim for giving middle Wisemans their just due. The ambitions of these last six just seem more expansive, and the level of cross-references even stronger than before. On the level of cinema, if there is such a thing, the films seem unusually inventive, experimental in how scenes are constructed and in their visual impact, and completely assured with regard to how they work on multiple levels as ambitious and poetic works of art. I think it’s often been the case that “late” works of film-makers can be the great ones (Ford, Buñuel), although late has a new definition with Wiseman because of how wonderfully prolific he’s been. I guess a simpler way to put it is that even though his general working approach was established early in his film-making career, he’s still progressed in his talents, especially in his most recent work. And it’s remarkable to recall that he was 37 when the first film he directed was released.
Seeing all of these in 2021, it has to be said that these films don’t date. Even though the technology has changed considerably, and maybe black-and-white analog now-narrow screen film seems old fashioned, there’s hardly anything about the films that seems old. I’d suggest a few reasons for this. Wiseman has never been a film-maker dealing with topical issues. He’s not historical in that sense. The institutions are necessary ones, so hospitals, police, welfare, state legislatures and the rest are still around. And when you deal with some that have been around for centuries, like La Comédie-Française, additional things will certainly happen since the films were made, but when you’ve got 3,000 plays in your repertoire, the 25 years since Wiseman made this film doesn’t seem like that big of an interval. And the same goes for films about dance, art, and books. Also, a number of Wiseman’s films, as we’ve discussed, have dealt with points of change, so if anything, those changes might only by now be magnified and extended. Berkeley still has lessened state aid, immigration is still an issue in Jackson Heights, domestic violence and welfare are worsened issues, and so on. And if we don’t have Viet Nam as a backdrop for Basic Training or other of the military films, we can substitute Iraq or Afghanistan and still see the films as unfortunately relevant. I don’t have to go through each film to make this argument, but you can ask it with each one, and I don’t think you’ll find a single one where you’d say it’s dealing with topical issues that no longer matter as much. Also, you might see more recent Wiseman films as returning to old questions as a means of updating them, as I mentioned with how phone inquiries are treated as one example of that. About all that’s changed are the size of computer and video monitors, people smoke a lot less, and of course the fashions and haircuts have changed. But these are not films that today look old. Perhaps in a hundred years they will be a vital historical record of what life in our times was like, but right now, every one of the films is fresh and alive.
I’d also like to note how full of signature stylistic elements his films are. Maybe I never paid tribute to the rigor of sequences beginning outside of a building, and then returning to the exterior of that same building when the episode inside is complete - moments of silence to bracket each unit. And the largely interior films which will go outside long enough to show the city we’re in, before moving on to another episode, separated in time from what just preceded it but by no means in chronological order. There’s a kind of syntax to these films that we understand right off, but which we can come to appreciate for its ingenuity the more of his films we see. And I hope I’ve paid enough attention to the surprising appearance of so many songs, often heard at great length, so notice that Wiseman hasn’t shirked from thinking how those might be integrated - surprising because of course except for Otis Redding at the start of High School, he only had the music that happened while he was there to work with.
And I want to put in a last appreciation of how much humor there is in his films, and that an ironic, sometimes sly sensibility comes through regularly, even when the subject matter is as serious as it gets. You get in tune with Wiseman humor as you watch these films, and it’s one of their great pleasures, a complex view of life that isn’t afraid to laugh at absurdities or even just comic little things that happen to come along.
Something I was slow in realizing or also appreciating is how often we are afforded “behind the scenes” looks at things, as well as full examinations of detailed processes that we don’t usually get to see, along with so many smaller but worthwhile processes along the way. If we choose to narrowly look at Wiseman as principally a documentarian, he still more than delivers the goods. If it’s a whole film about how animals are slaughtered for our food, a look at salmon smoking in Maine, or a horse being operated on, he’s going to be there up close and in full detail. One comes away from his films marveling at all the things he’s gained access to and looked at straight on - the good, the bad, and the ugly - all in great profusion. We’ve also seen performances of the highest caliber, not just by great actors and dancers, although of course we’ve had those too, but also from ordinary people in the course of their regular activities, surprising us so often with remarks or actions at a high cinematic level. And I’d say too how much I’ve enjoyed being disoriented in his films - the many times scenes are constructed so that it’s up to us to figure out what’s going on, taking the high road of assuming we are intelligent viewers who can make some sense of what we’re watching and avoid overly simplistic responses.
Mention must be made here too of Wiseman’s great sensitivity to how events and dialog in his films can reverberate beyond their immediate situations. He has an ear for the philosophical, the rueful, the reflective, and often just the smart, that make us realize how selective he is - choosing things not just because they happened, but because there are things for us to think about, usually on several levels, and at the same time are often delivered by people who in some manner or other perform well in a cinematic sense, whether they’re teachers, welfare recipients, patients, or the myriad professions we see in his films.
This little checklist wouldn’t be complete for me without praising again the assured length of many of these films, and the boldness too of the length of some episodes, always in service of the complexity of issues, the simple situation taking twists we wouldn’t expect and revealing that there’s a lot more going on here than we might have first thought. And I think it’s really a great thing in his films how little we might know about what is to happen, even whether we’re in a thirty-second or a thirty-minute episode. And that the films have their own necessary running times, varying quite a lot, determined only by what Wiseman deems appropriate, is another measure of the integrity of his methods. And I still don’t see where you can find any of these as too long. As I’ve said a few times, somehow they feel more condensed than stretched out. I was worried a couple of weeks ago whether the recent longer films would be hard to see at the same pace I’ve been watching all of these. of one every other day. If anything, they were easier viewing, because the style of the films now feels so comfortable, even when the issues are challenging or the stories we hear often painful. The emphasis upon the viewer doing their share of the work keeps the films from ever being dull. There’s always a lot to notice and to think about.
As one last thing, I just want to return yet again to the idea of considering all these films as a single work, or just what the rewards are of looking beyond individual films. With Wiseman, as I’ve said often, it’s both a major pleasure and an essential task. I don’t doubt that as he’s made each film, he’s been aware of his work to that point, and if there are situations, even dialog, that echo, he knows it before we do. Let me give a small example or two to add to the many we’ve already discussed. I didn’t mention it at the time in Model, but I love it when we see a restaurant marquee titled “MONASTERY RESTAURANT”, an obvious shout-out to Essene, maybe here just as a way to remind us of the breadth of his interests, that this is the same guy now making a film about a glamorous profession who also hung out with the Benedictines not that many years before. And if you think I’m over the top with that possibly obscure one, how about scenes that either begin or end with someone saying “Any questions?” We first heard the typing teacher start out with that in High School, and we last heard it in City Hall at the start of the meeting about computer scammers, echoes maybe of technology changes along with a reminder that teachers often ask that, and that maybe some things haven’t changed that much over the decades. And “any questions” is likely directed at the viewer too, with the film never providing a direct reply but giving us multiple possibilities for seeing what might interest us. Another game you might play with yourself is to ask as you start a new Wiseman film, how long would it take you to recognize who the film-maker is. I’d say the title cards might even tell you immediately, as they often playfully imitate fonts from the places they’re visiting. Or would it be the first shot outside a building, with maybe a sign for the place before we head inside. Or the first line of dialog, rarely randomly chosen and often full of extra import. Wherever in the world we might be, in a neighborhood or a strange institution, we know quickly who the film-maker is. I’d say this isn’t just some auteurist game, but more a recognition that there’s a unique way these films communicate and offer us great cinematic experiences.
So, thank you, Fred. I feel like I understand both cinema and the world much better because of your films. I hope any readers of this will excuse my effusiveness, which I really didn’t expect to be this extreme at the end here, as I had intended measured judgement and restrained evaluation. But these films are just too great. Go watch for yourself if you haven’t already, and if you have, I’m sure you must agree with me.