The Impressionist

Frederick Wiseman has been called a muckraker, a realist, an absurdist, a lyrical expressionist, a trenchant critic of American consumerism and imperialism, a hedonist, a champion of civic virtue, and, by Errol Morris, “the king of misanthropic cinema.” Wiseman himself has been consistently reluctant to define his documentaries. He and they, he has suggested, are too elusive: “I am not sure I understand the films and I know that I do not understand myself.”

Still, Wiseman doesn’t begrudge critics the freedom to come up with theories. That’s their job. And he has a deep respect for all sorts of labor. He’s a workaholic who often pulls twelve-to-fifteen-hour days because “it’s the only way I know how to get the work done,” and he fills his films with footage of people doing their jobs: politicians, doctors, nurses, salespeople, actors, circus performers, fashion models, ballerinas, garbagemen, janitors, line cooks, construction workers, zookeepers, jockeys, teachers, social workers, sardine canners, art preservationists, prop and set designers, erotic dancers, activists, sommeliers, monks, soldiers, cops, tattoo artists, vacation-area landscape painters, the board members of various institutions planning for their futures, and the sole gardener who is responsible for mowing the entire UC Berkeley campus.

Wiseman’s critics, like his subjects, tend to reveal themselves in unintentional ways. Because his forty-four documentaries are so varied in tone—from the subversive wit of a street photographer to the dutifulness of a congressional hearing on C-SPAN—critics often grab hold of whatever aspects are most appealing to them. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that in writing about him, they’re really writing about themselves. As Thomas Benson and Carolyn Anderson wrote in their 1989 study, Reality Fictions, “Looking through Wiseman’s window on the world, we discover a mirror.” Or as Wiseman put it when asked about Morris’s characterization of his work, “I’ve told Errol several times: sheer projection.”

Wiseman turned ninety-five on New Year’s Day, and theaters across North America and in France are celebrating the occasion. This winter Lincoln Center in New York City and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago are screening new restorations of the thirty-two films he shot on 16mm and one feature he shot on 35mm, The Last Letter (2002), a dramatic monologue adapted from Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate. (Wiseman reluctantly switched to digital in the late Aughts.) Retrospectives have also been planned for Paris, LA, Cleveland, Santa Fe, St. Louis, Boston, and Vancouver; Austin and Portland, Maine, hosted series this past autumn.

The festivities give us another chance not only to see Wiseman’s work but to ask what to make of it all. Describing his process to The Paris Review in 2018, he said his “overall goal” is “to create an impressionistic account of contemporary life through institutions.” His choice of subject is “a roll of the dice. Whatever interests me.” During four to twelve weeks on location, he and his cinematographers (the most frequent have been William Brayne and John Davey) decide what to shoot and, using hand signals, how to shoot it. (Wiseman records sound while filming.) Most of the work takes place during editing:

The first phase is to review all of the material…. I then start to edit the sequences that I might use…. It takes me six months to select and edit those sequences. It’s only when I’ve edited those so-called candidate sequences that I begin to work on structure. I have no idea, in advance, of the film’s structure or what its point of view will be. It evolves from studying the material. Then I try to figure out how they might fit together.

Creating the structure “is a process that combines the rational and the nonrational…. My [unconscious] associations are often as valuable as my attempts at deductive logic.”

Wiseman mostly avoids putting forth his own views about his work, instead offering cryptic hints: he forms “theories” as he edits footage, he has said, but “it’s not necessary that anyone reconstructs that theory.” To impose a fixed meaning would amount to a kind of authoritarianism: “I personally have a horror of producing propaganda to fit any kind of ideology, other than my own view of what this material should be…. I like the material to speak for itself.”

Critics always impose their own views on artists to some degree, but it’s a rare artist who gives them no other choice. Wiseman’s films contain no voice-overs and have practically no explanatory text or added soundtracks.¹ They don’t have clear narratives but are vast assemblages of scenes and cutaways. Sometimes a person will state what could be Wiseman’s thesis, but his intentions can only be guessed at based on the events on-screen and their placement within the film. In effect he turns all of his viewers into critics: they “have to fight the film, they have to say, ‘What the hell’s he trying to say with this?’” He claims that his films’ meanings exist halfway between the screen and the mind of the viewer.

Strange things sometimes occur in that space, which is perhaps to be expected when clarity is held to be tantamount to propaganda. In Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman, originally published in 1992 and recently released in a revised and expanded edition, Barry Keith Grant recognizes a central truth about his subject: “Wiseman refuses to condescend to the viewer by assuming an authorial superiority.” Yet many of Grant’s interpretations in his closely observed, erudite book strike me as distinctly un-Wiseman-like. (He admits in this edition that “whether my readings coincide with the filmmaker’s intention has not been my concern.”) For instance, he argues that Model (1980) and The Store (1983), about the Zoli Agency in New York City and the Neiman Marcus flagship in Dallas, respectively, are condemnations of “the culture of the simulacrum” and of “how we have achieved for ourselves the ‘packaged soul’ that Vance Packard predicted back in 1957.”

Is that really how Wiseman wants us to respond to these films—as if we were media studies professors? Grant neglects Wiseman’s worldliness, evident in the copious shots of food being meticulously prepared in his most recent film, Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, about a three-Michelin-star restaurant outside Roanne, France, and the family who runs it. Surely there’s ambivalence in his depiction of fashion and retail: a recognition of the allure of beautiful people and things, a sense of fun in the fantasies the industries create, a reluctance to malign people’s decisions to work in them, along with a desire to demystify their deceptions. This is, after all, a man who said that while filming Meat (1976), which shows in gory detail the industrial processing of cows and lambs, he ate steak every night.

But even my conviction about Wiseman’s ambivalence is just a guess, really, one that I hope will please this po-faced sphinx. Aren’t I merely projecting my own neurotic, conciliatory impulses?

Wiseman’s avoidance of clear messages reflects a recurrent theme in his work concerning education and individuality: he likes to show people being given the tools to figure things out on their own. In an essay for the catalog accompanying a retrospective at MoMA in 2010, Andrew Delbanco wrote:

Wiseman is not primarily a social commentator or an investigator of this or that institution, as he is often said to be. He is a portraitist, and his favorite genre is the double portrait. A visiting nurse washes the feet of a diabetic old man. A woman picks lice from another woman’s hair. In most such scenes…one person occupies the subsidiary position (student, patient, novice, recruit) while the other (teacher, doctor, drill sergeant, nurse) holds the authority…. In the early films, there can be cruelty in this relation, but in the later work Wiseman seems more interested in unarticulated tenderness, or what is sometimes called tough love.²

Specifically, he’s interested in tough love that leads to self-understanding and independence.

Wiseman’s earliest documentaries showed the stifling inhumanity of hidebound bureaucracy and capricious authority. His first film, Titicut Follies (1967), depicted the guards and doctors at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts as sadistic overseers unmoved by reason or suffering. Back then he was less cautious around (or less bored by) interviewers, and he revealed that the argument he was trying to convey in High School (1968) could be summed up in the film’s final scene. The principal of Northeast High School in Philadelphia reads aloud a letter from a former student who has been deployed to Vietnam and wants to name the school as his life insurance beneficiary. The student writes that he’s “only a body doing a job” in the service of his country. “Now when you get a letter like this,” the principal says, “to me it means that we are very successful at Northeast High School.”

While much of Wiseman’s footage could be described as “bodies doing jobs,” in High School the phrase suggests the coerced, unthinking labor of drafted soldiers—compared implicitly to the tasks students are subjected to, and explored more explicitly in Basic Training (1971). The opening shots of High School depict the school as a hulking brick building that Wiseman thought looked “like a General Motors assembly plant.” His point was that the school manufactured its students into conforming, compliant citizens.

Beginning with the four films Wiseman shot at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind in the mid-1980s, a countervailing idea of education appeared. In Blind, Deaf, Adjustment and Work, and Multi-Handicapped (all 1986), we see students learn how to make their way on their own. Instructors discuss the best ways to teach “things we do every day,” such as feeding themselves, dressing, grooming, and making purchases. The blind students are taught to navigate by using canes, physical landmarks, and their senses. A single-shot sequence in which a blind boy goes down a long corridor and a flight of stairs to show a teacher his math assignment is one of the most suspenseful and triumphant in all of Wiseman’s work. The care these teachers have for their students is evident: they’re not only showing the kids how to do discrete tasks; they’re instilling dignity.

High School II (1994) provides an even more direct rebuttal to High School than the Alabama films do. It was shot at Central Park East Secondary School, a public school in Harlem that, as one of the coprincipals explains, tries to teach its students “five habits of mind”:

From whose perspective is something being presented?… What’s your evidence?… How is the thing that’s being presented connected to other things? What if things were different?… And who cares?

(The coprincipal proudly adds that a journalist and a lawyer both told him that the “habits of mind” are essentially what they were taught in college and graduate school.)

Throughout High School II we see teachers trying to inculcate these habits in students, demanding evidence and prodding them to explore the bases of their beliefs. Rather than punish students for disobedience or poor work, the school attempts to show them the importance of education to achieving their goals. “We’re going to try very hard not to…make demands on you that are impossible for you,” the coprincipal tells a twelve-year-old named Killiss. “But we’re going to push you very hard so that you can give us and give yourself your personal best.”

Scenes of this sort—call it assisted self-reliance—occur again and again throughout Wiseman’s subsequent work. In Public Housing (1997), residents of the Ida B. Wells Homes in Chicago encourage one another to get involved with cleanup efforts and other support activities to alleviate the misery caused by years of government neglect. In Domestic Violence (2001), women in a Tampa shelter are made to explain and explore the abuse they endured in order to take some measure of control over it. In Ex Libris (2017), the New York Public Library provides many services to help patrons learn about and make their way through the world, from lectures on the relationship between American slavery and capitalism to information about municipal jobs.

Wiseman’s politics, like much about him, are hard to pin down, though one constant is a disdain for authority. “You want to know something about my politics?” he said in 1973. “Well, they’re kind of anarchic. As the saying goes, the Marx is more Groucho than Karl.” It’s tempting to argue that he views successful civic institutions as sites of large-scale mutual aid, and failed institutions as ones that refuse to acknowledge the needs and autonomy of the people they’re supposed to help. (The clearest villains of the second half of his career may be the radical Idaho Republicans in 2006’s State Legislature who believe that government has no responsibility for helping citizens.) He has also been critical of “middle-class professionals” who conceive of reforms without sufficient input from those actually experiencing poverty, unemployment, or lack of access to adequate housing and health care: “It’s not for me to say what the change should be…. I’m not a pharmacist.”

Individuals must make their own decisions, and Wiseman seems to have tremendous belief in individuals—including himself. In the MoMA catalog, he wrote that he did enough work at Yale Law School to figure out how not to do much work, preferring to read novels and poetry. He taught himself filmmaking while working on Titicut Follies, which was shot when he was thirty-six; his only previous film experience had been producing The Cool World (1963), directed by Shirley Clarke. “What I took away from it,” he told Mark Binelli of The New York Times Magazine in 2020, “was if Shirley could make a movie, I could, too.”

Wiseman extends this faith to his viewers. Like many obsessive workers, he seems to think there’s nothing special about himself, just a willingness to spend the time getting things right. In another act of tough love, he asks us to join him in making sense of what we’re seeing. The point of his ambiguity isn’t to leave us in doubt but to prompt us to speak up. By forcing us to form opinions about his work, he’s inviting us to disagree with him and one another, as if he were staging one of the long, contentious meetings he loves to film.

But it’s foolish to watch Wiseman’s films for lessons about autonomy or civics. Instead, watch them because they’re immensely entertaining. His eye for detail—for the telling action or artifact—is astounding. Much of this detail is comic, as Dan Armstrong argued nearly forty years ago in a brilliant essay: “Wiseman’s is fundamentally a cinema of the absurd in which the political messages are often oddly inflected through an absurdist mélange of irony, parody, black humor, and burlesque.”³ He’s drawn to moments when the mask falls off, when people are revealed in all their confusion, bumbling idiocy, and false pride.

Listing favorite moments in Wiseman’s films has become a critical cliché, but one worth indulging. Binelli asked Wiseman what he felt after filming a man in Welfare (1975)—a claustrophobic, bleakly funny documentary about a Manhattan government office whose workers repeatedly tell their desperate clients to come back another day for assistance—soliloquizing about “the story of Godot.” Wiseman replied, “I felt I’d led a clean, moral life and God was rewarding me.” There are many such scenes in his films, rarely as apt as the one in Welfare but no less memorable or suggestive. In Sinai Field Mission (1978), a group of American men—soldiers, military contractors, or both—hold a party in their desert compound. They pass around someone’s cowboy boot, filling it up with beer and drinking from it (“Texas tradition here”), then later washing the leather with beer (“Texas shine job here”).

In The Store a woman named Margaret who works in the back office of Neiman Marcus receives a singing telegram as a birthday present from her colleagues. The singer is dressed in a pink chicken costume, makes dirty jokes (Margaret, between uncontrollable bursts of laughter, shows off her quick wit in response to them), and ends his act with a striptease, revealing a pair of fuzzy pink briefs. At a cat show in The Garden (2005), a woman demonstrates the art of “cat massage” before a rapt audience of hundreds, explaining terms of art (grand effleurage, or long stroke) and her own neologisms (no-mo, or no motion) while working on a fluffy orange feline that, she assures the spectators, she met only ten minutes earlier.⁴

In High School II upperclassmen mediate a dispute between two students named Lev and Ethan, who are probably in seventh or eighth grade. The younger boys are repeatedly asked to recount why they got into a fight, but they’re too embarrassed or worked up, and the mediators are out of their depth. Finally Lev manages an explanation:

We were in the classroom, right? And I was talking into the fan, right, to make my voi—you know how the fan, if you talk into it, it makes your voice…. And you know that song “You’re Never Gonna Get It”? Never, never? You know?… And I was just singing to myself. I wasn’t singing to anybody. He’s like, “You’re never gonna get it, Lev.” You know, I was like, I was like, I was like—“Oh well.” And—and then he was like, and he said something about my mother…. He said, I—and then he said, so I was just like, “At least I have a mother.” And he was like, “Well, so do I.” And I said, “No you don’t.” He said, “Then how did I get born?” And I said, “Your father had artificial insemination.”

We never find out what Lev thinks artificial insemination is.

There are plenty of darker moments, some approaching gallows humor or Grand Guignol. In Aspen (1991)—a film that, unexpectedly, spends as much time in churches as in the pleasure grounds of the rich—a woman at a dinner party in a mansion talks about attending the Nuremberg trials as a twenty-three-year-old. She recalls that the women she stayed with during the trials conducted a poll: “Which of the defendants, if they had to sleep with one, who would they sleep with?” Göring won. The British man she tells this to is unsurprised: “He won everything…. He was the hero of the trial.”

A lonely, depressed ninety-eight-year-old woman in In Jackson Heights (2015) lists her physical ailments and asks herself, “What else have I got that’s gone?” A doctor in Near Death (1989), trying to persuade an ailing patient not to be intubated because there’s no chance of recovery, acknowledges that the prognosis is “a hard thing to swallow.” A young art student in Hospital (1970) believes—with pitiful drug-induced sincerity—that he’s dying from what someone told him was mescaline. He’s cogent and articulate, however; clearly he’s just having a bad trip. The doctor gives him an emetic (calling out to a nurse, “Ten ccs of ipecac. Make it twenty”) and tells him that everything will be all right. The student repeatedly moans, “I don’t want to die.” Then the medicine kicks in. Immediately after producing Rabelaisian quantities of vomit, he asks the guards watching over him whether they can play music or sing for him. He reflects on his life with the cold logic of someone coming down:

It’s pretty hard making it here on my own. Trying to go to school, get an education…. But you can’t do anything with art. You can’t do anything with anything in life. Just get a job someplace. That’s about it.

Wiseman films people talking on the phone, he once said, as if it were “an old Shelley Berman routine.” There’s the five-minute-long conversation in Hospital—reduced from about ninety minutes of footage—of a doctor trying to get a sex worker who just attempted suicide onto the welfare rolls, putting the case to an unseen, unheard, and implacable official: “Miss Hightower, I don’t wish to direct any conversation towards his mother. I’m asking for the assistance of welfare. This is an emergency situation.” Hightower hangs up on him. (Eerily, Hightower turns up, on camera, in Welfare.) A salesman in Meat, looking like a Waspy yuppie in his Lacoste cardigan, repeatedly chides a pushy client named Solly: “That’s it, bubbe…. That’s all I can tell you, sweetness.” (Another salesman, this one with a western twang, is also fond of Yiddish: “Anybody that’s looking at prime is looking up a dead horse’s tuchus.”) An employee fielding calls for an NYPL hotline, trying hard to remain professional, kindly informs a patron that “a unicorn is actually an imaginary animal.”

Machines in Wiseman’s films are as alien as in Tati’s. You can never tell whether they’re ingenious, sinister, or pointless: there’s the training module kit in Adjustment and Work with the words “SIMULATED ASSEMBLY” on it; the robot in At Berkeley (2013) that struggles to fold a towel (a task that the Alabama students are taught to master); the automated conveyor belt in Ex Libris that scans and sorts returned library books; the Boston garbage truck in City Hall (2020) that compacts a discarded sofa as if it were made of Styrofoam. In the cafeteria of the Paris Opera Ballet, the subject of La Danse (2009), an oblong tube attached to a wall slices baguettes into inch-thick pieces. Who else would think to show us that—and also show us the apiary on the roof and the fish swimming in the sewers beneath the building?

Even if, as Errol Morris maintains, there’s misanthropy in Wiseman’s work, he’s still willing to be convinced that human goodness exists. His films are full of people whose care and competence give them a saintlike aura: the infinitely patient Dr. Taylor in Near Death, explaining again and again to distraught family members that their loved ones’ suffering will only be prolonged by keeping them on life support, or the social worker in Public Housing who interviews a man seeking help for crack addiction, managing to get a full picture of his life through nonjudgmental questioning and an impressive knowledge of slang terms for drugs—a stark contrast to the caseworkers in Welfare who can comprehend their clients only through flattening bureaucratic language.

Wiseman makes keen intelligence seem like a miracle, as when a nurse in Near Death recounts every detail from her conversations with a patient and her family members to the patient’s doctors, or when a professor in At Berkeley summarizes her graduate students’ confused, meandering, stammer-filled discussion about inequality in the smoothest extemporaneous English I’ve ever heard.

Sometimes, watching Wiseman’s films, I wonder whether he includes economic and political issues as covers for voyeurism. The big societal questions he raises, in this sense, may be his versions of a MacGuffin, that which provides an excuse for the action. Yet the truth is that Wiseman is interested in all of it; he just recognizes that he can’t in good faith provide any answers.

He’s a miniaturist who works at an epic scale, an ironist who treats ideas with sincerity. (The discussion of inequality in At Berkeley is immediately followed by a shot of a man playing fetch with his dog on a campus lawn, as if the professor and her students had been engaged in a similarly repetitive game.) Yes, some stretches can be tedious; sometimes you squirm and wonder why Wiseman is paying so much attention to this or that. But the movement between humor and seriousness, the mundane and the abstract, gives his films artistic weight and turns them into something more than moments strung together. In his way, he has made about as many boring films as Hitchcock did.

Wiseman told The Paris Review that while editing, “I have to constantly ask myself the question, Why?” Another way of putting this is “Who cares?”—as the coprincipal of Central Park East instructs his students to ask themselves. That question has kept Wiseman alert and open to the world over ninety-five years and 115 hours of film.