Having been a fan of filmmaker Frederick Wiseman for years, it is gratifying and somewhat astonishing to witness the success of his latest documentary La Danse, a portrait of the Paris Ballet that recently played for weeks at the Film Forum.
It’s usually a chore to find Wiseman screenings. Even a one-week-long run is rare; PBS airs his films, but rarely repeats them. Wiseman has also resisted home video formats, his documentaries remain primarily not available commercially. All this makes the year-long Wiseman retrospective at MOMA truly a celebration of the artist’s 40+ years of work.
Since screenings are rare people tend to know the Wiseman methods better than the documentaries themselves. Known primarily as the cinema verite guy his films are considered to be life unfiltered. With minimal crew, he films, fly-on-the-wall style, selected moments related to his topic, generally institutions. Titles like High School, Hospital and Public Housing help you get the picture. He edits his raw footage into films that paint a picture and may even tell a story, but without common narrative threads. The films also eschew common contextual aides that help shape a point of view. There’s no voice over, no interviews, the viewer is left to interpret the footage on his own.
When I initially became an admirer of Frederick Wisemean, I found his method to be without a shred of audience manipulation. Now, I understand that although he avoids common crutches, his artistry is evident in how he relies on juxtaposition to provide a point of view or narrative that gets a strong audience reaction. He goes into each film as a learning experience and his films are the platform with which he imparts his findings. His first film, Titicut Follies, the study of a mental institution—the title comes from a cabaret-style show–remains his best-known.
The MOMA retrospective will be showing everything between Titicut Follies and La Danse, many of these works have rarely been screened and some have not played in New York for decades, including Blind, Zoo and Belfast, Maine. The latter is one of my favorite Wiseman works. An exploration into an American town, it’s a perfect example of Wiseman’s brilliance in juxtaposing his footage into a complete work. A very memorable moment of a teacher extolling the virtues of Herman Melville’s dark American classic novel The Confidence Man is also exemplary in its contextualizing and commenting on the film’s subject without hammering home in a direct address.
The series has already been kicked off. Next up: Titicut Follies, tonight, Friday, January 29, 2010, 7:00 PM High School, Saturday, January 30, 2:00 PM Basic Training, Saturday, January 31, 5:00 PM Juvenile Court, Monday, February 1, 3:30