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<\/p>\nThere was an admirably straightforward and unmediated quality to Frederick Wiseman\u2019s documentary film-making. Refusing to intrude or editorialise, he eschewed background music and voiceovers as vulgar tools designed to manipulate the viewer\u2019s response and there were no interviews with his subjects. <\/p>\n
Instead, he simply set up his cameras to chronicle the routines of daily life as unobtrusively as possible, spending weeks and often months in situ until his subjects forgot they were being filmed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was tired of seeing narrated documentaries telling me what to think. I thought it would be interesting to make a movie where you didn\u2019t know in advance what the themes were going to be,\u201d he explained. \u201cI don\u2019t use narration and I try to cut sequences in a way that is self-explanatory and not didactic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet the observational, non-interventionist style of his v\u00e9rit\u00e9 documentaries packed a hugely powerful punch that held up a mirror to American society and its institutions including hospitals, high schools, military bases, welfare centres and police precincts. The picture was often not pretty but his films posed profound and existential questions about the American dream and its capacity at times to turn into something more nightmarish.<\/p>\n
Some saw his films as mere agit-prop but he insisted his intention was never political and that he was not a campaigner but an observer. Nevertheless, by tackling troubling social and economic subjects, his films often provoked controversy and raised important questions that politicians and legislators could not ignore.<\/p>\n
Over a career lasting more than half a century and starting with Titicut Follies (1967), Wiseman made documentaries at more or less the rate of one a year until his final film Menus-Plaisirs \u2014 Les Troisgros, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s kept me going is it\u2019s fun and an adventure,\u201d he said. \u201cConstantly working keeps me off the streets \u2014 or at least on the streets that I like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps none generated more controversy than Titicut Follies. Taking its title from a talent show put on by the staff at Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the film exposed appalling brutality at a Massachusetts correctional facility, including scenes of inmates being stripped naked, force feeding and vicious bullying.<\/p>\n
Titicut Follies won prizes at German and Italian film festivals but was less well received in America, where it was banned until 1991. The film aired on PBS the next year and in 2022 was belatedly selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being \u201cculturally, historically, or aesthetically significant\u201d. <\/p>\n
By then the Bridgewater facility had been reformed and a number of similar institutions around the country had been investigated and closed over allegations of \u201ccruel, inhuman, and barbarous treatment\u201d.<\/p>\n
The film became the template for Wiseman\u2019s subsequent unflinching films that dealt with control, authority and sometimes abuse. Edited down from hundreds of hours of black and white footage, they became known as his \u201cinstitutional\u201d series. High School (1968) depicted a typical day at a school in Pennsylvania where pupils at the height of the Vietnam War were trained to \u201cbe a man and take orders\u201d and led The New Yorker\u2019s film critic Pauline Kael to describe Wiseman as \u201cthe most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in years\u201d. <\/p>\n
Law and Order (1969) was a dispassionate view of the friction between cops and crooks filmed from in the Kansas City police department. Hospital (1970) filmed overworked doctors and a waiting room of alcoholics and hippies strung out on drugs in Harlem and was so harrowing it could only be shown on TV after the watershed. Welfare (1975) showed the struggles of benefit claimants and those administering an unsympathetic system. <\/p>\n
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Law and Order, 1969<\/p>\n
FREDERICK WISEMAN COLLECTION\/ALAMY<\/p>\n
Later notable films shot in colour included Public Housing (1997) and Domestic Violence (2001). Like most of his documentaries, the titles were self-explanatory and, once aired on American television by PBS, prompted widespread debate. <\/p>\n
Taken together the films formed an unparalleled social history of late 20th-century America that earned him an honorary Academy Award at the 2016 Oscars ceremony. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m trying to create dramatic structures out of ordinary experience so the cumulative effect will be a series of thematically interrelated films that record how people thought and lived and worked, how that behaviour is in part reflected in institutions and how institutions are microcosms for a larger society,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
However, he was at pains to play down suggestions that his work had helped to bring about improvements in the institutions and systems he examined, let alone in the wider world.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what causes social change but I don\u2019t think it is documentary film-making,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to start out with a pious wish that that would be the case, but ultimately it\u2019s a naive and presumptuous view.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is survived by his sons, David and Eric, from his marriage to Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, whom he met at Yale law school. They married in 1955 and she predeceased him in 2021 after a distinguished legal career.<\/p>\n
Frederick Wiseman was born on New Year\u2019s Day 1930 in Boston, the son of Gertrude (n\u00e9e Kotzen), a hospital administrator, and Jacob Wiseman, a lawyer who assisted Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9s fleeing from the Nazis to apply for American visas.<\/p>\n
Although he admitted having \u201cdaydreamed my way through high school\u201d, he won a place at Williams College and then Yale, where with a distinct lack of enthusiasm he followed in his father\u2019s footsteps, \u201cbecause I didn\u2019t know what else to do\u201d. <\/p>\n
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Basic Training, 1971<\/p>\n
SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL<\/p>\n
In fact, there was another reason because he was desperate not to be drafted to fight in Korea. \u201cEven law school seemed to be, to my keen analytical mind, a better alternative than going to war,\u201d he wrote in an autobiographical essay to accompanied a retrospective of his films at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art in 2010.<\/p>\n
The ruse worked, because by the time he graduated in 1954 the war was over and, when he was drafted, he was given a typewriter rather than a gun and served as a clerk in the legal office of the US army base at Fort Benning, Georgia. On his discharge he moved to Paris and was admitted to the Sorbonne, where he furthered his studies of the law funded by the GI Bill.<\/p>\n
Back in America he took up a teaching position at Boston University School of Law. As part of the course he was teaching, he took students on field trips to places \u201cwhere defendants would end up if they were poorly represented or overzealously prosecuted\u201d, which was how he got to see the horrors taking place at Bridgewater hospital. <\/p>\n
His later films suggested a mellowing in his choice of subject matter as gritty views of the powerless struggling against a dehumanising system gave way to more wholesome and uplifting documentaries about hallowed cultural institutions. La Danse (2009) took him inside the Paris ballet and he followed with a stay in London to make National Gallery (2014). <\/p>\n