Frederick Wiseman brought a uniquely empowering scale to his immersive documents of ordinary life

"The documentary form is often thought to be governed by a manageable feature-length high concept: the story of a person, an institution, an historical episode. The subject itself and the film's attitude towards it, its editorial slant, are habitually plain enough and the procedure is metonymic: the camera focuses on a part, and the whole is illuminated by implication. Often they have a sexed-up, quirky story to tell, which might mean a selective and sneakily tendentious approach to editing the material."

"But that is not quite the case with the films of Frederick Wiseman. His colossal, immersive movies about ordinary people and ordinary lives enclosed in some kind of institution, and characterised by the absence of voiceovers, intertitles or the off-camera directorial presence of the interviewing voice, are not amenable to the elevator pitch; they are the entire elevator shaft itself, and the whole building that houses it."

"Whereas epic-length films might be generally held to be appropriate for big and distinctively historical subjects, such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah or Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, Wiseman applies the maximal approach to static cross-section studies of sometimes less obviously momentous topics such as Paris's Crazy Horse nightclub or the French restaurant Le Bois Sans Feuilles."

Frederick Wiseman creates colossal, immersive documentaries that focus on ordinary people and lives within institutions. His films omit voiceovers, intertitles, and off-camera interviewers, favoring observational, architectural cinematic structures. The works reject elevator-pitch concepts and instead present exhaustive cross-section studies, treating films as edifices mirroring institutional complexity. Wiseman applies epic-length form to topics ranging from psychiatric hospitals to nightclubs and restaurants, and especially to public institutions, producing top-to-bottom body-politic portraits. Many films were funded by PBS, reinforcing public-institutional ties. Notable projects include Titicut Follies (Bridgewater State Hospital) and Essene (a Benedictine monastery).

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