Dioramas in Celluloid

One review of Titicut Follies described the film as a “nightmare of ghoulish obscenities.” It was a hyperbolic but fair assessment: the 1967 documentary about wretched conditions in a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane showed naked inmates, loutish guards and cigarette ashes falling into a feeding-tube slop bucket. But this critic was no grousing cinemaphile—he was a state judge. Besides issuing a blurb better fit for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he ruled that the film violated privacy rights and demanded its negatives be destroyed. It took 24 years of appeals, legal wrangling and Kafka-esque screening requirements before Titicut Follies made it into theaters. And that was Frederick Wiseman’s introduction into the world of directing films.

Now 79, the former law professor is hailed as one of our greatest living documentarians. Over the last four decades Wiseman has created films with subjects and settings that slice America across its axis. We’ve seen recipients of public assistance crushed by the bureaucracy of a New York City welfare office, a prostitute choked by Kansas City police officers, and sycophantic saleswomen waiting on luxury shoppers in a Dallas Neiman-Marcus department store. Wiseman’s examinations of contemporary institutions—from authoritarian high schools to exclusive ski lodges—have produced haunting scenes of desperation, tenderness and pain. “I’m trying to make a series of films which gives an impressionistic account of American life during the period in which I’m working and living,” he says via phone from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And as a result, I’m trying to make films about people in different classes with different life experience. There are so many good subjects–even if I could work 24-hours a day for another 150 years, you could never begin to cover them all.” It’s not because he hasn’t made an effort: Wiseman has won three Emmys and awards from Dupont, MacArthur, Guggenheim and Peabody for 37 full-length films that he has directed, edited and produced.

Wiseman dismisses “observational cinema” and cinéma vérité as imprecise or useless terms, but his name is usually brought up in any discussion of these genres. This is a school of starkness, where narration, musical scoring and other elements that reveal the presence of a filmmaker are stripped away to leave the camera as a silent eyewitness. Instead of disembodied voices asking questions or subjects delivering testimonial monologues, the fly-on-the-wall footage shows people pleading for food stamps, spraying their kitchens for roaches, skiing the slopes, preening in fur coats and doing whatever else they do on a regular basis. “Great movies have been made with narrators or with people asking questions,” Wiseman says. “But I don’t like it for me. I think it’s a barrier between the viewer and the material because the narrator is telling you what to think. And when the technique I use works, it works because the viewer is put in the middle of the events and asked to think through their own relationship to what they see and hear.”

After accumulating around 100 hours of raw footage over a month-long immersion process, Wiseman typically spends a year chopping and screwing his material into a movie that includes tension and rhythm. He describes his editing approach as “novelistic,” but his films rarely include a traditional story arc, identifiable protagonists or a simple message. And unlike documentarians who indulge in agitprop or use films as personal missives, he’s uninterested in presenting any easily-decipherable argument. Once, at a Q&A session following a screening of Welfare, a member of the audience asked Wiseman what the film was about. “About three hours long,” was his chagrined response. “All my films have a point of view,” he says, “But I like to think it’s a complex point of view. I dislike thesis films, even if I agree with the thesis—they mainly preach to the converted. I don’t like didacticism in the movies.”

Wiseman appreciates complexity and ambiguity in film, but simplicity in their creation. His subjects have been drawn from the ranks of America’s most vulnerable and understandably suspicious citizens—drug addicts, battered wives, and impoverished residents of public housing projects—and making them comfortable enough to act naturally is critical to the effectiveness of Wiseman’s work. “If I have a technique at all, it’s to be straightforward,” he says. “No bullshit. It’s a situation where strategy and ethics coincide.” He explains to his subjects how the film is being made, how it will be edited, and where it will be screened. He shows people how the camera and tape recorder work. “I try to demystify the process of filmmaking because the people from whom I’m asking permission, their bullshit-meters are just as good as mine,” he says.

Photo by Kevin Trageser

Still, even Wiseman is often stunned by the deep recesses of personal suffering and humiliation into which people are willing to submerge themselves on film. When shooting Domestic Violence at a women’s shelter in Tampa, he assumed most of the inhabitants would refuse to participate—and not a single victim did. Despite having endured gruesome violence that included beatings, throttlings, cigarette burns to the arm, and attempts on their lives, these women hoped sharing their experiences could help other people in similarly dire situations. “I thought it was extraordinarily generous,” Wiseman says, “given that what had happened to most of these women was completely horrendous—and they talked about it quite openly.”

“I don’t really know what it is—but from what I’ve been told, I hope it’s not what I do. When people are brought together on an island or a TV studio, it’s an artificial situation. The situations that I’m in are not artificial. Life in Bridgewater or in the welfare center on 14th Street is going on whether I’m there or not.”

We know the Massachusetts mental hospital in Bridgewater had no such goals of revelation when it opened its doors to Wiseman. Considering the controversy surrounding Titicut Follies, one might assume the institutions he documented afterwards were wary about giving him and his camera unfettered access. But permission has usually been easy to come by. He attributes his success to a human inclination for self-deception and our reluctance to see perspective. “Most of us—not just the people in the movies—think what we do is okay,” says Wiseman, who makes copies of previous films available to subjects he approaches. “If you were to ask a psychiatrist who was in the Follies, about their behavior as shown in the film, they would not see the same implications in their actions, in their words and behavior, that someone watching the film might see or hear. It’s true of all of us. What someone else might conclude as rude or arrogant or insensitive, we might see as reasonable behavior.”

In the decades since Wiseman emerged as a documentarian, video cameras have become an inescapable part of modern life: we’re recorded via cell phones, from bank surveillance, at sporting events and on holidays when unwrapping an ill-fitting cardigan from an aunt. Reality TV, a genre that frequently traffics in stultifying idiocy, has taken the idea of observational cinema and turned it into entertainment. Are shows about Sacramento strippers and the dwarves who adore them a contemporary equivalent to Wiseman’s work? “Someone once said to me that I was the godfather of reality television,” he says. This doesn’t please him. “I don’t really know what it is—but from what I’ve been told, I hope it’s not what I do. When people are brought together on an island or a TV studio, it’s an artificial situation. The situations that I’m in are not artificial. Life in Bridgewater or in the welfare center on 14th Street is going on whether I’m there or not.”