FREDERICK WISEMAN: FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN
Frederick Wiseman, who died Monday (16 February) aged 96, was one the great documentary film-makers; indeed, I put him at the top of a Top Five list which I did for the Daily Telegraph some 25 years ago. In 2000 I had written this interview for them, in short form. I then expanded it for Headpress magazine and I have altered that only slightly now. The hook was Wiseman’s appearance at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, to give a masterclass around the debut of his film Belfast, Maine, for which I retain a great deal of admiration.
I offer the interview now, along with a review I wrote of his 2013 documentary, At Berkeley, which seemed then, as another dive deep into the heart of America as seen through its education system, as with his two High School films, it demonstrates the way, although he insisted he was not political, he says things about our communities that need to be said. The review doesn’t appear to have been published: I see it was intended for Irresistible Targets, but it didn’t make it. I’m glad to have an excuse to be reminded of it now. RIP.
FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN
Thirty-three years ago, when Frederick Wiseman started making the documentary films which shaped our understanding of cinema verite, no one imagined we’d be living in world where fly-on-the-wall filming would engulf us from any and every screen we chose. Reality television, everything from police car chases to the pseudo-reality of Big Brother, captivates viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Does Wiseman see these programmes as his legacy?
“Actually, I’ve never seen them at all,” he says. “I guess that’s a comment right there. I’m too busy working. But I would hope that I’m in no way responsible. I think these programmes arise simply from the advances in lightweight equipment. The new technology demands to be used for new purposes.”
I spoke with Wiseman twice. First by phone from Paris, where he was directing a play at the Comedie Francaise, and thenlive at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, where he presented a masterclass being interviewed by the Guardian’s Derek Malcom. This was followed by a retrospective of his films at London’s National Film Theatre. Such a show was long overdue, because for more than thirty years no one has shone as consistently sharp a light on American institutions as Wiseman. After 31 films, he has become something of an American institution himself.
His first film, Titicut Folies (1967), set at Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane, was banned for 24 years in Wiseman’s home state of Massachusetts. “Actually, it put me in a good position,” he says, “because lots of people had heard good things about the film, but for a long time no one had actually seen it!”
Educated at Williams College and Yale Law School, Wiseman says his legal background is a ‘bit of a gloss. I never went to class, I read novels for three years. I’d been a clerk/typist in the Judge Advocates office when I was in the service.’ He was teaching a course in legal medicine at Boston University Law School, and began taking his students on field trips, from which grew the notion to film at Bridgewater.
Titicut Follies, so-called for the variety show in which inmates perform for the staff, and with which Wiseman bookends the film, breaks down our definitions of sane and insane. I was tempted to couple it with Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade, particularly when the prison doctor, who chain-smokes throughout, asks patients, in an almost-comic accent, about their sexual preferences. You check to see what he’s doing with his hands. When an inmate complains about the doctor to the board, they decide the inmate is “falling apart”.
“The film was originally banned because an inmate was shown naked,” Wiseman explains, “and then because they claimed I’d given the superintendent and the attorney general control of the film. I never had, but they claimed it was an oral contract. Eventually the State Supreme Court stopped them from destroying the film, but until 1991, when another court overturned the decision, it could only be shown to scholarly film groups. “The banning, of course, was for political reasons. It embarrassed them, because they got the point I was making.”
Today Wiseman’s backed by America’s Public Broadcasting System, which allows him to deliver films for network broadcast at whatever length he chooses. Yet in Paris he directed a theatrical monologue based on a chapter of a Russian novel, Life and Fate, by Vasili Grossman. It takes the form of a Russian woman doctor who is Jewish, and about to be executed by the Germans, writing a letter to her son.
“I made a film about the Comedie Francaise, which they liked, so they invited me to direct a play,” Wiseman says. “I’d done that play once before, at the American Rep Theatre, because the subject fascinated me. I learned a lot from my mistakes and thought I could do it better this time.”
It reflects his attitude towards his films, which often seem to veer back towards the same subjects. “All my work is about learning something,” he says. “The subjects interest me, but I don’t know much before I start, and I try to approach them without preconceptions.” Directing a monologue also seems appropriate, because the essence of his documentary technique has been letting people talk. For Comedie Francaise Wiseman shot 126 hours of footage, and spent a year editing it down to a three hour forty minute film. Like all his films, it had no narration, captions, or music. One American reviewer complained viewers “had to do way too much of the work”.
“Well, that’s show-biz,” Wiseman laughs. “I try to provide the audience with information obliquely, through the structure, so they can draw their own conclusions. You can fall into the Hollywood trap, dilute your material to reach the lowest common denominator, but I’d rather not reach an audience at all than reach them by treating them like morons.”
In his 1991 film Aspen, for example, Wiseman lingers on scenic views of the Colorado resort town, letting the viewer grow familiar with its natural beauty. As scenes build up, you sense the dichotomy between those who live and work in Aspen and those who come there to play. The editing makes these points subtly, but relentlessly, and you feel a sympathy building for the town’s natives. The rich are simply set against them, not with animosity, but with an eye toward spotting the differences.The key to it all is Wiseman’s own sensibility, showing great compassion, but intensely aware of pretence and hypocrisy. It’s very much a “New Deal” liberalism, tempered with American idealism. Many audiences might disagree with the points he tries to make, but far more seem, in the same way as the subjects he films, to miss the point entirely.
“I try not to approach with ideological blinders,” he says. “When I made Cops, right after the 1968 Chicago riots, the cliché was all cops were pigs. After 20 seconds in a cruiser, I realised piggery wasn’t restricted to the police. So we show see what people do to each other, why they need the police. Which isn’t to say the police never acted like pigs.”
Wiseman’s camera becomes amazingly unobtrusive; people forget its presence and behave naturally. “I work with a cameraman, and do sound myself. If I have a question, I won’t ask it,” he says. “I look for other situations that will answer it for me. Sometimes people do play to the camera, but if I think they are, I won’t include those scenes.
“The gym scene in TITTICUT FOLLIES, which many people find disturbing, actually happened three times, and I filmed it the third time,” he says. “The first two times I was filming other stuff, and the worst thing you can do is stop and start within a sequence. In 34 years, I’ve only exercised self-censorship once. In Hospital (1970), I cut out footage of a guy who’d touched a third rail — but from the point of view of the film I now regret it.
“I’m not suggesting it’s a style everyone has to work in,” he says. I ask if a film like Erroll Morris’ Mr. Death, which uses many feature film techniques, gets the same result. “Yes, he let Fred Leuchter talk and lots of audiences just didn’t get it,” he says. I mention Morris told me Mr. Death “would be the first film about The Holocaust not to win an Oscar” and Wiseman laughs. “The changes in the process of choosing documentary Oscars were long overdue,” he explains. “They’ve opened the doors to a wider range of films, but I have very little experience with the situation, because my own films can’t seem to get qualified for consideration.” (Oscar nomination is not open to films shown first on television, and Wiseman’s are made first for America’s Public Broadcasting System.)
It’s hard to believe the regularity with which Wiseman’s subjects hoist themselves on their own petards. “Never underestimate the power of vanity,” he laughs, “and I don’t mean that cruelly. All of us like what we’re doing, and we’d like to share our experiences People running institutions are usually trying to do the best job they can.
“Their awareness of the camera lasts about five seconds,” he says. “Very rarely do people act for the camera, and very rarely do they object to being shot.”
The rush to share experience defines the avalanche of so-called ‘reality television’. Programmes like Big Brother purport to show ordinary people; but cast all young and attractive exhibitionists, camera-wise as they play-act game-show challenges and soap-opera scenes created by the producers. Wiseman’s camera shows something far more sympathetic; it’s the difference between watching rats being trained in a maze and watching lions in their own environment. And society’s institutions, the environment in which people live, has always been his theme.
During the masterclass, a clip was shown from Welfare (1975), in which a pair of ne’er do wells attempt to wheedle money and accommodation for which they likely don’t qualify from the department. “I wanted to show the complexities,” says Wiseman. “The lies, the class closeness between the workers and the clients, the lack of intelligence which permeates the system, the places where ethics and tactics coincide, or don’t.
“Ordinary life is my subject,” he says. “I start with the assumption that people’s daily life provides as much tragedy, comedy, as great drama. I think of my films as dramatic movies, not archival material.”
There is a pattern in Wiseman’s return to subjects. High School (1967) my favourite of his films, perhaps because it’s where I was at that time, deals movingly with social conditioning kids received in the days of the Vietnam war. The school’s microcosm of the adult world outside is seen preparing young people for war, jobs, obedience. The moments when ideals of free speech or human rights pop up are shattered quickly. It catches the mood of disillusionment with the American Dream as well as any film I’ve seen, in large part because it shows the willingness, indeed, the eagerness of the young to accept that dream as reality. 1994’s High School 2 showed an educational pendulum swung 180 degrees. Wiseman shows us a world far more sensitive to social diversity, to individual freedom, but at the same time one which appears to pass on far less actual knowledge.
Wiseman made Primate (1974) about Atlanta researchers into primate behaviour, and Zoo (1993) where the ‘inmates’ are contrasted with the visitors. Comedie Francaise could be seen as another view of Ballet (1995), about the American Ballet Theatre. “It’s not intentional, but it’s a reasonable retroactive comment,” Wiseman tells me. “For High School 2, for example, I just was interested in seeing what another kind of high school would be like, a quarter of century later.”
His latest film, Belfast, Maine, is a study of a small working town, which encompasses many of the institutions that have engaged Wiseman over the years. Did he see Belfast as somehow old-fashioned, off the mainstream of America? “No, not at all,” he says. “I know the area well because I summer near there, it’s where I retreat to do my editing. There are lots of blue-collar workers, a good deal of rural poverty; it’s the essence of America.
“The film is about the nature of daily life and work”, he says, “and the work is defined by one sequence in a fish cannery, where we took four hours of rushes and edited it into one nine minute sequence. It’s got 270 cuts, which might be a record for a documentary.”
Despite the dramatic nature of the cutting, the rhythm of work on a production line soon takes hold of the viewer, and the feeling of monotony and boredom soon follows. “I feel an obligation to present what went on,” Wiseman says. “Not just cut to the most profound, most humorous, or even most obtuse sound bite.
“My original view was that films could change things,” he recollects. “That seems naïve and pretentious now. It’s rare for any document to be that powerful.” How about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I suggest? “The exception that proves the rule.”
In the end, the essence of Wiseman’s America is defined the same way his films are defined, by the sensibility which knits so many ordinary scenes together. This is a virtue, and it can be a liability, especially for those to whom such a sensibility is alien, in the sense of what makes us human, not what makes us nationals. The French, who despite inventing chauvinism, appreciate such things; they would call it a concern for the human condition. For Wiseman, it is American life. There is no difference.
WISEMAN’S AT BERKELEY AT LONDON
Frederick Wiseman returned is 2013 to the London Film Festival, aged 83, with one of his most challenging, if most pastoral, works. At Berkeley is his portrait, from the inside, of the flagship university in the California state educational system, a place synonymous in the American lexicon with campus activism. Even the title is a giveaway of sorts, because At Berekely implies that the university exists as much as a state of mind as a place of learning.
Wiseman has looked at education before, in High School (1968) and High School II (1994), and as I point out above, he often returns for second looks at what might be thought to be his crucial concerns. His films examine America through its institutions,and through its quotidien concerns: work, housing, food, living. The first High School film had a close affinity to his Basic Training (1971), in that high school was shown as being a kind of basic training for a life of low promise, conditioning for a society that offered no hope. The sequel showed a system far more attuned to students’ sensitivities, but in many ways worse at presenting its students with what we would call knowledge.
Berkeley is different. Wiseman presents the campus, in leisurely shots, as a literal ‘city on a hill’. The buildings, in fall splendour, resemble classic temples, the atmosphere is peaceful and thoughtful, often presented like a monastery, and almost every other sequence in the film suggests reflection, intelligent discussion. The point is clear: it is a place for contemplation above life’s messy realities. When Wiseman takes us inside classes, we become like students, enjoying the learning experience. It then sinks in slowly, as it always does in his films, that what we are experiencing ourselves, throughout the film, is a different kind of learning experience, in which the evidence has been marshalled carefully waiting for us to draw the conclusions.
The thread holding all this together is the severe cutting of the support the university receives from the state budget, forcing Berkeley to behave very much like the top private universities against which it competes for students, charging higher and higher tuition fees and making cuts to offset the realities when they simply cannot raise prices. Against this backdrop a many-faceted story plays out, as the administration struggles to find ways to keep the university’s reputation intact, retain faculty, and still serve its function of providing the people of the state with quality affordable education.
We sit in on meetings, many of them run by or observed by the university’s chancellor Robert Birgeneau (neither he, nor any of the participants, is identified by Wiseman), in which budgetary affairs take precedence. Birgeneau, who came to Berkeley from the University of Toronto, often appears torn, a figure of reason in an irrational system whose pressures are huge. Tuition is rising, and we see students being advised on their loans: ‘consider not buying a new car when you graduate, but settle for a used car’. We see discussions of faculty offered double or triple their salaries to move to private colleges, and how little of a bump these profs might entice these profs to stay.
Moving through the university are the students. It’s not quite a rainbow coalition, though there are many orientals, and a smattering of blacks. Regardless of race, it is a group that seems remarkably homogenous: clean-cut, well-dressed, well-scrubbed, neat, attentive. Even those who explain their financial struggles seem affluent — unlike the occasional campus workers who pop up in the transition shots, who are overwhelmingly black, less well-dressed or scrubbed. Even when we see students off-campus, they seem like tourists as they move through the counter-cultural markets that have sprung up around the campus ever since the Sixties days of protest and radicalism. The student’s entertainments seem remarkably traditional, middle of the road — Wiseman shows us musical comedy, not rock or rap. The message is clear — Berkeley is intended to serve the best minds California schools produce, but this is a group that comes from an economic elite. And it is a group that is receiving exactly the same sort of preparation for life that the students received in High School: an education designed to prepare them for a life of market place conformity, rather than a challenge to extend their knowledge, their world-view, for the sake of learning itself.
And what of the dissent? Ironically, the students in class appear to be receiving teaching that matches the right-wing stereotypes of Berkeley’s left-wing faculty. Irony is what Wiseman is shooting for, as comfortable professors preach economic equality to comfortable students in a comfortable setting being made uncomfortable only by the realities of American politics at the time. The most inspiring lecture comes from Robert Reich, formerly Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor.
There is a subtext too: these budget cuts are the direct result of the California tax-payer revolt which was one of the cornerstones of Reaganomics — the idea that government in all its forms is the problem, not the solution. It was Reagan who was elected governor during Berekley’s radical days of protest, almost in response to the seeming failure of the university’s then-president Clark Kerr. It was Reagan who championed the economics of taxpayers refusing to subsidize the education of other people’s children. The changes those old enough to remember hear echoing through the lecture halls and meeting rooms of Wiseman’s film reveal its undertow: the city on a hill is not just a beacon; it can become a fortress cut off from the society it serves.
FOOTNOTE (2026): Looking back at this film today, I am struck by how prescient is is. The Robert Reich referenced as a professor has now retired, and is one of the leading voices speaking out in resistance to Trumpism. Donald Trump’s assault on other universities has been relentless, an effort to pre-emptively create acceptance of his ideology. Berkeley hasn’t faced that, but many of the institutions sued by the Trump administration, or deprived of federal funding, have surrendered in advance; some, like UCLA have fought, and won, which teaches its own lesson. It makes me realise what an amazing subject the second Trump presidency might have been for Wiseman, and wonder how the subtleties of Wiseman’s films would be bludgeoned beyond comprehension by the direct assault of Trumpism on his America. I’d suggest Primates II as a title.
