Public Housing looks like a return to “classic” Wiseman in the mold of Welfare and Juvenile Court, after his turn to high culture in Ballet and La Comédie-Française. My sense though now is that the ostensible subject matter of these films, while important, matters less than what he does with them, and we shouldn’t decide much based on where his films are shot and what then the subject at hand might seem to be. What’s going to matter is what he does with it and one of the things we should realize by now is that a zoo or a ski resort can be as full of meaningful content as places where urgent social issues are close to the surface. When you hear “Public Housing” and Wiseman you may think you know what the movie is going to be. Like him, though, ridding ourselves of preconceived notions and expectations is a good place to begin. Easy to say maybe, but harder to put into practice. Here it means, let’s not expect a Titicut Follies, a muckraking expose of some sort, even if on at least one level that might be what we get. I’m telling this to myself as I figure out what I’ve just watched, but I hope this is worth mentioning, because time and again already I’ve been quite surprised to realize all the concerns and interesting ideas which come up in these films that their titles and subject matter don’t necessarily predict.
I thought early in here that I’d start counting how many white people were showing up, and by the end of the three plus hours I had my total - four. One was a woman Catholic charity worker, two were police (one only visible at a distance from behind), and the fourth a city functionary seated silently with a group of his colleagues at a meeting. Even though we make brief visits outside the Ida B. Wells housing project in Chicago, to a grocery store, a barber shop, a local college, this is a film about black people and black issues, quite specifically even rigorously so.
For a film called Public Housing, we see very little of where people actually live. I think we’re inside apartments exactly twice, once along with an exterminator and the other with a plumber. It made me realize he doesn’t like to hang out where people live, at least so far. It’s only Aspen (and this is now film number twenty-nine) where we were also inside any homes, and even there it was for a dinner party or a class. He wants the public meetings or the institutional settings, I’d guess for a few reasons. For one, despite the intense closeness we often feel with the subjects of his films, his is far from a voyeuristic film-making style. He’s not ingratiating himself with anyone so that he can capture private moments. The times when we might feel privacy is being invaded, say by a personal question, there’s somebody else doing the invading and we just happen to be there too. I think he’s also reacting against the kind of direct cinema that was big around when he started - filmmakers who would sit in the backs of cars and pretend they weren’t filming or who would move in with families in order to capture them in unguarded moments. While his films depend upon him not telling anyone what to do for the sake of being filmed, this is not filming at unguarded moments or surreptitiously.
Perhaps it’s time to look for the moment at various name possibilities for this kind of film, not that we must have one. It might only be needed just to be sure it’s understood that it’s neither conventional documentary nor a fictional method, and I’m tired of all the issues around “cinema verite” or “direct cinema” and I don’t really like Wiseman’s resorting to calling his films “reality fictions” - a tad too cute I’d say. So how about “observational cinema”, which I’ve seen used in lots of places, so I’m making no claim whatever to original coinage. But I think it’s pretty good. This would place the greatest emphasis upon the act of filming without interfering, and still leaves understood that point-of-view can be affected hugely by the observer - through how they film and especially in how they edit. I don’t think we see anything in these films where we’d claim Wiseman has hugely distorted anything - setting up situations for the sake of filming, telling people what to say, splicing together pieces of different scenes. The two big editing acts, both of which we need to discuss more along our way here, would be the regular compression of much longer filming periods, and then the ordering of those resulting scenes. Regarding compression, a ten or fifteen minute scene in his films can feel quite lengthy, except it’s probably all that’s left from a few hours of filming. We can call this compression or removing the dull parts or Wiseman selecting the pieces that he finds most interesting or most representative. Whatever it is, I think observational still describes it, better than anything with verite or direct or reality being attached. And the ordering of these scenes nonchronologically makes it even clearer that he has put considerable effort into a structure of ideas rather than the conventional sense of causality - this happens and that leads to this happening - the way regular movies ordinarily work. I don’t think I’m making this too clear, so I’ll likely try again at some point. But let’s see these as observational cinema - the records of his time spent somewhere arranged as he wants it, based on what he saw.
Back to Public Housing, those two apartment visits are each worth a look, as one is shocking and the other incredibly touching, a good sense of the range of feeling Wiseman’s films can provoke. In the first, an exterminator spraying for rats in a kitchen, this one scene tells us all we need to know about miserable living conditions in public housing. He’s a helpful fellow and the woman of the house is both humorous and careful with her cleaning, so the exchanges between them are pleasant but concerned. He’s there for rats, but they talk roaches too, and each pest raises their own problems. The rats were due to her back door having been broken into four times and she can’t get the door replaced. “I’m tired of filling out requisitions for the same dern thing” she says, a lament we will hear versions of more than once. The exterminator is extremely sympathetic, but says “I’m just here for the infestations.” He offers extensive tips about roaches, which she says haven’t been a problem. ("I try to keep this little raggedy house clean, as much as I can.") He mentions “Chinese chalk” which he says works, but it causes skin cancer, “so you have to be careful with that”. You can google Chinese chalk like I did and see that the stuff really exists and is seriously toxic. The things you can learn in documentaries. He also explains to her about spreading boric acid powder on her floor, and then "in the morning, get your dustpan and your broom and you sweep up the dead roaches. Put ‘em in the toilet so their eggs won't come off." They both treat all this as routine patter for public housing, the rats and the roaches just an expected part of life. Of course it makes watching this all the more horrifying, and I’m glad there weren’t more like this to experience, because this was more than enough. The exterminator finishes and we follow him to the next door, where presumably this starts all over, as he announces that “The Exterminator Man” has arrived. Wiseman mercifully cuts.
The other apartment visit is a small drama of its own, a vignette that would be worthy of a DeSica back in the day. An elderly woman sits at her kitchen table slowly tearing pieces of cabbage with a knife and placing them in a pot, while a plumber is mopping up water as part of repairing a broken pipe under her bathroom sink. He says he has to leave for a few minutes to get a part, and we stay in her apartment, watching quietly as she continues to work on a cabbage leaf. The plumber returns, and for a while we watch in some detail as he makes the necessary repair, putting cement around the new piece of pipe and carefully inserting it. Meanwhile, she’s answering a phone call from what sounds like her son, who she tells she “ain’t feeling so hot” and asks when he’s coming to visit. When the plumber is finished, of course there’s a form to sign, which she’s unable to do because of her advanced age. He acts completely accustomed to this sort of thing, and is polite and helpful. We leave her still at the table working on that leaf, part of a little view of old age in the projects, a rare moment inside.
Except for those two scenes, the film presents inventive variations of things the Wiseman institutional films gravitate towards - lots of meetings, frustrated pleading phone calls, police encounters. The phone calls are from Helen Finner (convenient nameplate on her desk), who’s been on the job for twenty years advocating for residents against the various bureaucracies ignoring them. She gets the film’s first line “But this is an emergency”, as she pleads on the phone for help, an announcement that applies well beyond her immediate concern, finding a place to stay from some unseen bureaucrat named Joy for the extremely young girl sitting in her office with her baby. “She’s a baby with a baby” Helen accurately describes, and she eventually just pleads for an appointment, even if it’s a month away, realizing that she’s getting nowhere with Joy. We find out in the course of the call from Helen that the Project has both a waiting list and a large number of vacancies, a contradiction she’s angry about and also familiar with. The best she can do is to get Joy to promise a phone call the following Monday, a promise yet to be fulfilled, like so many in this film. Finner returns in several later scenes, her last near the end where she’s seen making a similar effort, complaining about a toilet that hasn’t been repaired. She says to guy on phone "Booker, don't play with me. . . .Will someone please write the work order." Plus ça change, as they would have said in the previous film.
Public Housing has another of those amazing fifteen-minute scenes, the kind that show up just often enough in his films that we better pay more attention to Wiseman’s special talents for letting them happen. I think they are “set pieces” in his films every bit as much as Hitchcock had his, the shower scene and crop-duster scene equivalents. The big deal here is not just the length of these, but the process of what we can call “Delayed Discovery” or “Developing Complications”. It’s how drama often works, and it’s also necessary for conveying complex situations, so it’s an essential component of Wiseman’s observational cinema. What happens is we’re in a situation that starts out routinely, the kind of thing that might last thirty seconds before we move elsewhere. We are likely not entirely clear what’s going on when a scene like this starts, and we certainly have no idea that it will become a lengthy episode. As we start to figure out the situation, we think, we usually see that what at first seemed simple was anything but, that problems pile on top of problems, and we’re in the middle of a deep thicket of unresolvable issues. Our big Public Housing example of this is a scene of two guys at a desk, one of them some sort of official (we don’t know what kind) and a person he’s asking lots of questions to and then writing things in a lengthy multi-page form. We have no idea whether we’re in a job interview, a welfare application, a court, or a police station. Eventually it sounds drug related, as the interviewer brings up prescription meds with a welter of brand names. We also hear of extensive alcohol problems, family issues, and then serious crack cocaine problems, and yet we still don’t know why these two are in a room talking to each other. After five or ten minutes of this catalog of depressing problems, the interviewer asks a common Wiseman question: “Do you think you need treatment?” We already know the answer, and the guy certainly does too, saying earnestly that he “wants to regain control of my life”. I think at this point we’re hoping that we’ve been watching an entry interview for a drug rehab program, but we still don’t know - serious Delayed Discovery and Developing Complications. The interviewer is far from finished, however, and next asks if he’s ever been “the victim of violence and/or abuse”. The guy smiles, and the interviewer thinks he’s hit pay dirt: “Now we’re getting to the problem.” This is after ten minutes or so of screen time! The guy then recounts how he was hit in the head with a bat in a drug-related incident and was in a coma for two days, and was sliced in the back a year later in yet another drug situation. This leads the interviewer to go off into a rumination on the declining life expectancy of black males as a result of incidents like these, but then stops himself, saying “But that’s counseling. This is diagnosis.” Is it? We still don’t know what these two are here for, as he says “This assessment isn’t over.” It’s an assessment? Of what? We eventually find out that this meeting is part of a sentencing recommendation to be given to the judge who ordered it, and this guy has been found guilty of some serious drug charge. After hearing all this, the interviewer gives the mixed conclusion that “I have to find you ineligible, because the law says that if you are charged with delivery you’re ineligible for our program, but that’s up to the judge.” As a consolation, he’s still going to recommend him for drug treatment, but repeats again that he doesn’t decide this, a judge does. For us viewers, the outcome is important, but so is the journey that got us there, a detailed recounting of many things that arise out of a life born poor and black in public housing. We never hear of the judge’s decision, any more than we know if the problems Helen Finner fights every time we see her get taken care of. That’s Wiseman too - Delayed Discovery doesn’t lead to clear resolution. The problems are too large, affect too many, and don’t have quick fixes.
There’s a briefer but similar example of this in one of the several encounters with the police we see. Unlike Law and Order, the police here are mostly black and mostly pretty calm in their encounters. Their restraint is evident in the Delayed Discovery scene that starts with them frisking a man and finding questionable ID, evident because of the removable photo on one of them. This becomes another sad tale of lost licenses and eventually of an arrest for stealing cash and travelers checks. We think we know where this is going, to handcuffs and a trip to the station, but the cops decide instead to let him go, the sort of ending to this encounter that could have gone either way. Other police stops, like one involving a possibly stolen refrigerator, are this same kind of seeming serious and wanting just to throw your hands up in dismay over how deep the consequences of poverty and racism are. Wiseman certainly doesn’t short-change the mess of this world, and I haven’t even mentioned the regular appearance of young girls who are themselves mothers who appear throughout the film, “babies having babies”, another serious problem clearly evident.
Somehow, the last half hour or so still manages a hopeful upbeat tone to it, a series of motivational speakers, anti-drug and sex education messages being delivered to kids (once through a puppet show at a preschool program, another time through a crazy condom demonstration) and various educational situations - from the very young being taught reading, to college age kids learning about setting up their own businesses. The emphasis is upon self-help and not expecting much from government institutions, and we don’t know whether Wiseman entirely endorses this view, but there’s certainly a good deal of rhetoric available to the residents along these lines. Old age, like it did in La Comédie-Française, also gets some late respect, as Wiseman has found a group with a sign in front that calls them the “Grandmothers Sewing Circle”, a lovely group of women turning out clothes for themselves and their families, a scene likely in counterpoint to our earlier woman left pulling apart cabbage leaves. As depressing and muckraking as Wiseman’s films can get - we’ve already seen so much death, poverty, and scary government things - we come to appreciate humor and irony and the simple pleasures of seeing some neighborhood kids exuberantly dancing in the street to understand that Wiseman is after the varieties of human activity in all its contradictions, without in any way ignoring the seriousness of problems in places he’s exploring. This has been so since Titicut Follies, and doesn’t change here.