Frederick Wiseman
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About This Person
From All Movie Guide: Documentarian Frederick Wiseman
has been noted for his ability to capture the nuances of life in
American institutions such as prisons, hospitals, welfare offices, and
high schools. He started out in 1963 by producing a fictional feature
film, The Cool World, an examination of the lives of Harlem teenagers.
In the beginning, Wiseman was a staunch social reformist, and his films
were calls for change. Titicut Follies,
his first documentary, is an exposé of life in a prison for the
criminally insane in Bridgewater, MA. It was controversial and left
Wiseman with the reputation of being a muckraker. His four subsequent
documentaries were all exposés of other tax-supported institutions
designed to show the ineffectiveness of the bureaucracy that not only
threatens to destroy them, but also dehumanizes the people they were
meant to serve. Wiseman toned down his message and began focusing more
on American culture to point out the symbolism of daily activities in
his film Primate
(1974). In the '80s, he began examining institutions as they relate to
ideology. Unlike other documentaries, Wiseman's work does not progress
chronologically; rather, the segments are arranged thematically, like an
essay, and are linked via rhetorical devices such as comparison and
contrast to create a patterned structure. His films are never narrated,
thereby forcing viewers to make connections between the sequences
themselves. Wiseman has occasionally returned to fictional films, albeit
in a non-fiction performance style, as with Seraphita's Diary (1982)
and La Derniere Lettre (2002). ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
Frederick Wiseman Filmography:
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