Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Nonfictions) [revised and expanded] 0231206224, 9780231206228

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V OYA G E S O F D I S C O V E R Y

N ON F I C T I ON S

NO NFI CTI O NS

Nonfictions is dedicated to expanding and deepening the range of contemporary documentary studies. It aims to engage in the theoretical conversation about documentaries, open new areas of scholarship, and recover lost or marginalized histories Other titles in the Nonfictions series:

Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties, Dave Saunders Vision On: Film, Television, and the Arts in Britain, John Wyver The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture, edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch, edited by Joram ten Brink Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television, Timothy Boon Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice, edited by Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video, Keith Beattie Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—A Case Study of Politics and the Media, Rod Stoneman The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, Laura Rascoroli Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema, Thomas Cohen The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, edited by Alisa Lebow Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence, edited by Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film, Iván Villarmea Álvarez Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary, Paolo Magagnoli Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration, Steffen Köhn Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights, and Documentary Film, Stephen Charbonneau The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, edited by Elizabeth Papazian and Caroline Eades I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary, edited by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary, Raya Morag Filming History from Below: Microhistorical Documentaries, Efren Cuevas

VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY THE CINEMA OF FREDERICK WISEMAN Revised and Expanded Edition

BARRY KEITH GRANT

Wallflower New York

Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grant, Barry Keith, 1947- author. Title: Voyages of discovery : the cinema of Frederick Wiseman / Barry Keith Grant. Description: Revised and expanded edition. | New York : Columbia University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022041547 | ISBN 9780231206228 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231206235 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231556378 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Wiseman, Frederick—Criticism and interpretation. | Documentary films—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.W57 G73 2023 | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23/eng/20221206 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041547

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns Cover images: Courtesy of Zipporah Films, Inc. Further information about Frederick Wiseman and his films can be found at www.zipporah.com.

FO R Z AC H E RY B LU E A N D G A B R I E L L E A M B E R .   .   . A N D N OW F O R M AC K A L E X A N D E R TO O

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We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher laws of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

All truths wait in all things. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi Preface xv Introduction xix

1. MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA1 2. AMERICAN MADNESS: TITICUT FOLLIES (1967), HIGH SCHOOL (1968), LAW AND ORDER (1969), HOSPITAL (1970), JUVENILE COURT (1973), WELFARE (1975)28 3. THE BIG PARADE: BASIC TRAINING (1971), MANOEUVRE (1979), MISSILE (1988)64 4. BLOOD OF THE BEASTS: PRIMATE (1974), MEAT (1976), RACETRACK (1985), ZOO (1993)86 5. WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE: CANAL ZONE (1977), SINAI FIELD MISSION (1978), MODEL (1980), THE STORE (1983)115

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6. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL: THE COOL WORLD (1963), SERAPHITA’S DIARY (1982)143 7. YOU AND ME: ESSENE (1972), BLIND (1986), DEAF (1986), ADJUSTMENT AND WORK (1986), MULTI-HANDICAPPED (1986), ASPEN (1991)163 8. LOVE AND DEATH: NEAR DEATH (1989)195 9. THE NEVER-ENDING STORY: HIGH SCHOOL II (1994), PUBLIC HOUSING (1997), DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (2001), DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 2 (2002)213 10. PLAYTIME: BALLET (1995), LA COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE, OU L’AMOUR JOUÉ (1996), THE LAST LETTER (2002), LA DANSE—LE BALLET DE L’OPÉRA DE PARIS (2009), BOXING GYM (2010), CRAZY HORSE (2011), NATIONAL GALLERY (2014), UN COUPLE (2022)238 11. OUR TOWN: CENTRAL PARK (1989), BELFAST, MAINE (1999), STATE LEGISLATURE (2006), AT BERKELEY (2013), IN JACKSON HEIGHTS (2015), EX-LIBRIS: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (2017), MONROVIA, INDIANA (2018), CITY HALL (2020)266

Filmography 293 Individual Awards 303 Retrospective Screenings 305 Notes 309 Bibliography 335 Index 355

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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everal people provided me with invaluable assistance while working on the first edition of this book. I am indebted to Ernest Callenbach, Terrance Cox, Deborah Harrison, and Jeannette Sloniowski for their careful reading of and insightful response to various parts of the manuscript. Bruce Jackson, James Agee Professor of American Culture, SUNY/Buffalo, offered me much practical advice. Professor Barry Joe at Brock University helped me to become computer literate. Divino Mucciante produced the frame enlargements, for which permission was generously granted by Frederick Wiseman and Zipporah Films. Joyce DeForest, administrative assistant in the Department of Film Studies, Dramatic and Visual Arts, Brock University; Al Ciceran and his staff at Brock’s Language Lab; and Karen Konicek and Bonnie Parsons Marxer of Zipporah Films all provided indispensable technical and clerical assistance. My former student, Chris Byford, helped with the bibliography. Dr. Cecil Abrahams, dean of humanities at Brock, enthusiastically supported my work from the beginning. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) provided the financial support without which the book would not have been possible. Jim Welch, editor of Film/Literature Quarterly, graciously allowed me to use passages from my essay, “When Worlds Collide: The Cool World,” which first appeared in vol. 18, no. 3 (1990), 179–187, of that journal; and Jeanne Hall, editor of Wide Angle, allowed me to include material from the

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essay, “Point of View and Spectator Position in Frederick Wiseman’s Meat and Primate” which appeared originally in Wide Angle 13, no. 2 (April 1991), 56–67. Since the publication of the first edition, a shorter version of chapter 1 appeared as “American Madness: The Early Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman” in the online journal La Furia Umana (France), special number on Frederick Wiseman (Fall 2022); and parts of chapter 8 appeared as “Documenting the American Way of Dying: The Near Death Experience,” in The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, ed. Lester Friedman and Tess Jones (New York: Routledge, 2022), 245–257. I am grateful for the opportunities over the years to present several invited talks about Wiseman’s work, all of which helped in sharpening my interpretations. I spoke on “The Films of Frederick Wiseman” at the Elam School of the Arts, University of Auckland, New Zealand, in June 1989. In November 1990, I chaired a panel on “The Documentary Films of Frederick Wiseman” at the Twelfth Annual Ohio University Film Conference in Athens, Ohio, and presented a version of what is now chapter 4. Dr. Christine Ramsay of the Department of Film at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, invited me to speak there on “The Two Frederick Wisemans” in September 2001. Dr. Seth Feldman, dean of humanities at York University, Toronto, Ontario, invited me to speak on “The Spiritual Alternative in the Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman” as the James A. Beveridge Guest Lecturer sponsored by the Department of Film Studies in November 1991. In May 2002, I interviewed Wiseman onstage as part of the Ninth Annual HotDocs Documentary Film Festival in Toronto, and along with Wiseman, I participated in a panel on Juvenile Court as part of the Roving Eye Documentary Film Festival at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, April 2011, organized by Professor Frank DiCataldo. “ ‘This Great Democratic Society of Ours’: Frederick Wiseman, Documentary Truth and Social Justice” was the plenary lecture of the symposium on “Performance and Justice: Representing Dangerous Truth” at John Jay College, CUNY, New York, March 2013, organized by Dr. Seth Baumrin. Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden invited me to discuss Hospital for an episode of their ambitious podcast on Wiseman’s films, recorded in July 2021 (https://wiseman -podcast.captivate.fm/episode/hospital-with-barry-keith-grant). Finally, I served as a consultant for the Frederick Wiseman tribute video, directed by Davis Guggenheim, on the occasion of the presentation of

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his Honorary Oscar at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2016 Awards Ceremony. For help with this second edition, many thanks to Anthony Kinik, professor of film studies at Brock University, for his several discussions about Wiseman and documentary film, and for his insightful comments on a draft version of what is chapter 11. Ian Gordon of the Brock University library staff has been invaluable, as always, in tracking down sources and references. Arlin Golden and Shawn Glinis came to the rescue and produced the new frame grabs. Once again, Karen Konicek at Zipporah Films has facilitated my research in several ways, as has office manager Erica Hill. Thanks to Columbia University Press for publishing this second edition, including my editor, Ryan Groendyk, for his enthusiastic support, Kat Jorge for project oversight, Ben Kolstad at KGL for project management, and Karen Oemler for her careful copyediting. And last but hardly least, again I am grateful to Frederick Wiseman for his consistent accessibility and cooperation, and for making the films that inspired me to write this book and years later to return to it.

PREFACE

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he first edition of Voyages of Discovery was written in 1990 and published in 1992. At that time, Wiseman had made twenty-five feature-length documentaries, produced one fiction film (The Cool World), and directed another (Seraphita’s Diary)—already a formidable output by any standard. Since then, Wiseman has made an astonishing twenty more films, his work deepening thematically and emotionally even as he has explored new directions. (At the time of this writing, his most recent film has been Un couple, released in the fall of 2022.) At the same time, there has emerged a more discernable trajectory in the films, as Wiseman has moved from muckraking to meditation, with respect, even love, for the people he films becoming more pronounced. One sees this dramatic shift in sensibility emerging in the 1980s with the Deaf and Blind films and Near Death. Discussion of Near Death, released as I was finishing the first edition, seemed then an appropriate way to end the book, but with time and the benefit of hindsight, it now seems more of a turning point. Further, Wiseman’s cultural status has shifted considerably since Voyages of Discovery was first published. At that time, because his films did not show in commercial venues, they were known primarily to film scholars, students, and professionals in the various fields (for example, education, medicine, social work, law) that they address. Now, however, they have been shown in film festivals around the world, and many museums

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and galleries have devoted retrospectives to Wiseman’s work, including the year-long series at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010. In 2016, he received an Honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (given “to honor extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement” and for “exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences”). As well, some of Wiseman’s films have become available on the Kanopy streaming platform, making them somewhat more accessible. In short, Wiseman has become a recognizable and widely embraced cultural figure, himself an institution. For these reasons, a second edition of Voyages of Discovery, the only book that covers all of Wiseman’s films, seems necessary. For the first edition, I rejected as too mechanical the simplest approach of discussing the films individually in the order of their release. Indeed, even the films themselves avoid a chronological structure. But many other possibilities readily presented themselves. For example, High School and Basic Training could easily be discussed in the same chapter, and several critics have already pointed out the considerable connections between these two films. Then again, High School could just as profitably be compared to the Deaf and Blind films and, of course, High School II. Canal Zone and Sinai Field Mission, to take another example, might have been included in the chapter on the military films. For that matter, a category such as “military films” might have been avoided altogether, on the grounds that such a heading places undue emphasis on content, in favor of a stylistic rubric like “self-reflexivity,” a grouping that might include, for instance, Welfare, Manoeuvre, Model, The Store, and National Gallery. The groupings I finally settled upon seemed, to me, the best given the arguments I present, but this should in no way be understood to preclude the possibility of other critical schemas given the films’ provocative richness. As I write now, thirty years and twenty Wiseman films later, other possible groupings than those I have chosen here present themselves. Nevertheless, I have retained my original organization, expanding on the chapters where it seemed logical and adding three new chapters. In this way, I have managed to incorporate discussion of all of Wiseman’s films at the time of this writing. All of the original chapters (1–8) have been revised to some extent, but their basic arguments have remained. Some

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of what was originally chapter 1, “Man with a Movie Camera,” is now part of the introduction. However one chooses to organize an analysis of these films, though, what holds them together is that they all reveal an impressive richness as cinematic texts. I have also retained my original opening argument regarding the relation between documentary film and authorship, for it seems to me still an important and necessary argument to make despite the intervening years. Although I do refer to Wiseman’s own comments about his work, whether my readings coincide with the filmmaker’s intentions has not been my concern. Their positioning of the spectator, mise-en-scène, and cinematic allusion is both impressively controlled and powerfully expressive, rivaling the best fiction films. My many points of comparison or contrast with fiction films (including the chapter titles) are deliberate, a measure of the rich design of Wiseman’s films as texts. This, then, is primarily a book of film criticism rather than theory. In these pages, theory is employed in the service of criticism—my aim throughout being to provide readings of the films that demonstrate their remarkable complexity as aesthetic works. Since, as I argue, Wiseman’s films depend to such a great extent on their address to the spectator, in writing this book, I have sought to become the kind of viewer that Dudley Andrew, in his Concepts in Film Theory, calls “a new, or renewed spectator,” one who understands the films as signifying systems yet, at the same time, negotiates with them. Indeed, as I ultimately argue, this is precisely the ideal spectator addressed by these films. Hence, the subtitle of this book refers to “the cinema” and not “the films” of Frederick Wiseman, for I treat these films as dynamic works that exist in relation to the viewer rather than approach them simply as textual objects. As I explain, Wiseman has referred to his films as “voyages of discovery.” My work as a critic has taken me on a similar journey of discovery; I have traveled along with these films for years, regarding them as works that I believe to be of major importance, eager to explore what each reveals to me. For Wiseman’s films are, in Roland Barthes’s distinction, more writerly than readerly. They are about institutions, power, knowledge, religion, community, democracy, sexuality, technology, ideology, race, and cinema itself, and no single voyage could claim to chart such vast seas.

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All of the quoted dialogue is taken from the Zipporah transcripts, although I have made silent corrections as necessary. The comments attributed to Wiseman for which sources are not provided are taken from a lengthy interview I conducted with the filmmaker in his Cambridge studio in January 1989, several follow-up conversations by telephone, and a 2022 exchange via email.

INTRODUCTION

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iven the consistent production of documentaries in the history of film, its relative neglect within film criticism is surprising. In a sense, documentary has been marginalized by scholarship similar to the way it has been marginalized by commercial cinema. Granted that there has been more work on documentary published in recent years, the tendency has been to discuss documentary films as documentaries rather than closely read as film texts. By contrast, the fiction film has been scrutinized by the full range of critical approaches—semiotics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, formalism, feminism, reception theory, and cognitive theory. Genres, styles, and movements have all been subjected to intense and repeated critical examination. And if film criticism seemed for a while to have favored experimental or avant-garde cinema, the interest in narrative has been renewed to the point that it has for decades now monopolized academic film writing. The existing work on the documentary has tended to focus on historical, ethical, and political issues rather than close textual analysis of specific films. When documentaries are the subject, attention is too frequently given to the conditions of production. The result is that technology, the physical apparatus, has been unduly emphasized to the point that, as Annette Kuhn has observed, it displaces the aesthetic dimension and becomes the “determining feature of documentary film texts.”1 So, for example, in their otherwise admirable study of American cinema verité,

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Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery describe the aesthetics of the form as consisting of “sync-sound location shooting of uncontrolled situations, minimal narration, [and] the ‘objectivity’ of the filmmaker in editing.”2 Because technology is so privileged in the critical discourse on documentary, the cameraperson (and even the editor) rather than the director, is sometimes seen as the shaping artist.3 For example, because their influence exceeded the technical, the cinematographer Richard Leiterman is credited as codirector with Allan King of A Married Couple (1969), while editor Charlotte Zwerin received the same credit with Albert and David Maysles for Gimme Shelter (1970). Alan Rosenthal suggests that for this reason, “one could almost say that the best documentaries are characterized by a multiple authorship, as opposed to the lone auteur theory in commercial features.”4 Thus, one noteworthy symptom of this critical neglect is that documentary filmmakers are seldom discussed as auteurs, even as critics are quick (sometimes too quick) to raise fiction film directors to such status. It is likely that auteurist analyses of the documentary have been discouraged, at least in part, because documentaries are understood as seeking to capture a profilmic reality to which they somehow must remain faithful. While this, of course, is not the result of naively viewing them as being objective or neutral, consideration of style nevertheless tends to be deemphasized since it is often presumed that in documentary, the maker’s vision is, or should be, subservient to the film’s ethical purpose or to the integrity of the profilmic events. But only a naive empiricism sees the world as readily yielding an objective meaning and order and the camera as an unproblematic means of photographing it, especially in this era of digital fakes. And it is a commonplace in film analysis that because of such stylistic choices (whether deliberate or not) as camera position and movement, editing, and film stock, every documentary reveals a tension between profilmic reality and interpretation. As Raymond Carney succinctly puts it in his discussion of cinema verité, “its verité is necessarily and inevitably arranged by its cinema.”5 Another problem in viewing the documentary director as an auteur is embedded in the very articulation of classic auteurism. In 1962, even as observational cinema in America was developing, Andrew Sarris attempted to give auteurism theoretical status by suggesting that the “inner meaning” of an auteur’s work arises from the tension between the

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personal vision of the filmmaker and their material.6 Earlier, André Bazin had asked, “Auteur, yes, but what of ?”7 Whether we understand the “what of ” to mean subject (“little themes,” in Claude Chabrol’s sense), script, or generic tradition, Sarris’s formulation would seem inappropriate to documentary because of the a priori existence of the profilmic events seen on the screen. The auteur becomes more difficult to discern in the documentary since there is frequently no script, and its traditions are less clearly defined than fictional genres (even though the boundaries of the latter may be in constant flux).8 Some critics do, in fact, vaguely refer to documentary as a genre, while others see it as a form containing several genres—direct cinema, city symphony, ethnographic film, and so on. How, though, can a category of cinema that encompasses such disparate works as those of, say, Robert Flaherty, Leni Riefenstahl, Stan Brakhage, Peter Watkins, Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and Ken Burns be precisely defined in a manner similar to the fictional genres? Already in 1950, Raymond Spottiswoode complained that definitions of documentary were “distressingly vague” (his own definition is hardly more satisfying),9 and the situation has improved little since then. As John Grierson, who coined the term, said in the early 1930s, “Documentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand.”10 While most definitions have been clumsy, one that has remained useful, despite its vagueness, is Grierson’s own “creative treatment of actuality.” Lacking the cumbersome circumlocution of so many definitions of the documentary, it incorporates both the facts of the outside world (“actuality”) and the filmmaker’s inevitable influence (“creative treatment”). Documentary filmmakers themselves long ago noted this tension in their work: Jean Vigo described his first film, A propos de Nice (1930), as “point de vue documenté,” while Jean Rouch called his Tourou et Bitti (1967) in the film’s voice-over commentary “ethnographic cinema in the first person.” Serious critical attention has been given to the personal vision expressed in documentaries like A propos de Nice, to be sure, but such work was encouraged because its director also made important fiction films. What, one wonders, would we think today of a film like Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1932) if it did not have Luis Buñuel’s name on it? Flaherty, of course, is the obvious exception that proves the rule. He is the only documentarian to have been granted pantheon status by Sarris in his influential 1968 book The American Cinema—although, tellingly, Sarris

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feels compelled to qualify his enthusiasm for a nonfiction filmmaker by declaring, “Actually, his films slip so easily into the stream of fictional cinema that they hardly seem like documentaries at all.”11 Multiple commentators have written about Flaherty’s romantic Rousseauesque vision of exotic peoples triumphing over hostile environments. Leni Riefenstahl seems to be recognized somewhat begrudgingly, no doubt because of the politics of her films, as an original voice in documentary, while Dziga Vertov occupies his own visionary place in film history. Indeed, The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the work for which he is best known, is often regarded as an experimental film rather than a documentary. In fact, his theoretical writings have probably exerted more influence on the development of documentary than his films have. In short, it is lamentable that while there are many studies on minor Hollywood directors, there is little sustained critical attention devoted to individual documentarians such as Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Arne Sucksdorff, Michael Rubbo, or the Maysles Brothers, all of whom are certainly deserving of them. Frederick Wiseman’s work is distinctively original, revealing a consistent style and attitude as immediately recognizable as that of any pantheon director. In conventional auteurist terms, his films clearly reveal the “stamp of the director’s personality.” Wiseman’s films tend to emphasize the human face as dramatically and insistently as those of Ingmar Bergman, while his periodic insertion of hallway and street shots is a stylistic device as consistent and as important as Yasujiro Ozu’s cutaways. Auteurists like to quote Jean Renoir’s remark that a director always makes the same film; Wiseman, similarly, says his documentaries about institutions “are always the same film, by and large,” and that they “are all one film that is 50 hours long.”12 Indeed, it might be said that his films constitute individual sections of one interlocking city-symphony epic. Richard Leacock’s view is that in observational documentaries, the filmmaker cannot be said to function as a director.13 In the credits for all his documentaries, however, Wiseman explicitly identifies himself as “director” (“When you’re signing the film, you are saying it’s your film, this is the way you see it,” he has said.14) In fact, this term probably describes more accurately his creative shaping of the material. Like the work of the most fascinating auteurs—think of Peter Wollen’s explanation of his preference for Ford’s films over Hawks’s because of the “richness of the shifting relations between antinomies” in Ford15—Wiseman’s vision of institutions is, as this

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book shows, dynamic. The vision or worldview presented in his late films is quite different from that of acerbic brutalism in his first films, Titicut Follies and High School. As with Hawks’s action films when considered in relation to his comedies, Wiseman’s different groups of films gain considerable depth when considered in relation to each other, as I show. For Errol Morris, because Wiseman produces, edits, directs, and also handles sound recording during the shoot, he is “the ultimate auteur.”16 With a total of forty-three documentary features to his credit (fortyfour if the unreleased The Garden is included), Wiseman’s output stands as one of the most prolific in documentary history. This prodigious output is even more impressive when one considers the length of these films: Near Death, for instance, has a running time of almost six hours, while Belfast, Maine, High School II, and City Hall are each over four hours. The Deaf and Blind films together run over eight hours. Many of his films have been regarded as among the most important documentaries ever made in the United States, offering the most complete account of American institutional life to be found in any medium. He has been called “the most distinguished practitioner of cinéma verité”; “the most interesting of American directors”; “our leading, our very best documentary film maker”; “the supreme documentary film maker of our time”; and “the most sophisticated intelligence in documentary.”17 To insist on Wiseman, or any documentary filmmaker, as an auteur is to run the risk of privileging the personal vision over both the films’ historical contexts and “the documentary tradition” (to borrow the title of Lewis Jacobs’s important anthology). Indeed, this may help to explain why this approach has been infrequent in documentary criticism. In a critical discipline that is acutely conscious of both the ideology of the texts under examination and of the analytical methodologies applied to them, no one wants to be accused of minimizing the historical real at the expense of the aesthetic artifice. As for the documentary tradition, it is obvious, I think, that Wiseman’s films exist not only within the tradition of documentary generally but also in relation to other specific documentaries that explore the same or similar subjects. Thus Basic Training, for example, might be compared to Soldier Girls (Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, 1980), Near Death to Dying (Michael Roemer, 1985), and Law and Order and Hospital to, respectively, Stan Brakhage’s Eyes (1970) and Deus Ex (1971), from his

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Pittsburgh Trilogy. Additionally, as much that follows in this book makes clear, Wiseman’s work grows out of and in dialogue with several other traditions in American art and culture, including painting, theater, and journalism. If I emphasize the relationship of Wiseman’s films to these traditions as much as to the documentary, it is for the purpose of demonstrating in a detailed fashion their aesthetic qualities, to show that aesthetic pleasure is as crucial to a full understanding of the documentary as are history, technology, and ethics. Understandably, Wiseman prefers to call his films “films” rather than “documentaries.”18 Certainly, as the following chapters demonstrate, some of Wiseman’s films can be profitably discussed in terms of the tension between personal vision and generic material. For instance, Titicut Follies in relation to the musical, Basic Training and Manoeuvre as war films (even more specifically, as service comedies), and Meat can be viewed in relation to the Western. Wiseman acknowledges that his documentaries exist in relationship to the dominant Hollywood cinema, noting, “They’re all movies, and sometimes my movies play against the clichés of their movies, and sometimes it’s quite deliberate.” A humorous sequence in Central Park shows Francis Ford Coppola directing Life without Zoe, his contribution to the omnibus film New York Stories (1988), without ever rising from his seat. This suggests the true distinction between the typical Hollywood movie as passive entertainment and the Wiseman documentary as a work that actively engages the viewer. Wiseman has a love of film that dates from his youth,19 and his knowledge of popular cinema shows in the ways he employs its conventions in his own work. Hollywood movies so dominate our perception of the world that people in his films sometimes conflate cinema and reality. Hence, the acting coach in Model describes a visual spectacle as being like “a flood by DeMille,” while an officer in Manoeuvre refers to historical personages in a documentary on American history as movie characters. The walls of Richard Lord’s Boxing Gym are festooned with posters of famous boxers such as Sugar Ray Robinson and Evander Holyfield, along with Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980). At this point, Wiseman’s films probably have had a larger audience than any other group of documentaries (with the possible exception of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, which were required viewing for GIs during World War II) because they were broadcast on television, “the ultimate

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medium for transmission of documentary communication” according to the media historian A. William Bluem.20 It should be noted, though, that Wiseman claims to make films, not television programs, and he does not alter his style to suit the smaller screen of the electronic medium, nor has he had to edit any of his films to fit into a predetermined time slot. Two successive five-year contracts with WNET, New York’s Public Broadcast System (PBS) station, allowed him to make one film a year from 1971 to 1981 (beginning with Essene) without constraint as to subject matter or running time—although, according to Wiseman, he had to battle with network executives over sequences in Law and Order and Hospital and was forced to make cuts for the telecast of Basic Training.21 Generally, the WNET showings were followed by broadcasts by PBS affiliates across the nation, and with the exception of The Garden and Crazy Horse, all of Wiseman’s documentaries have been broadcast on PBS stations. As well, many have been shown on television in other countries, including Germany, Italy, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. After the expiration of the second PBS contract in 1981, Wiseman used his MacArthur Foundation Grant (a so-called genius award) of $48,000 per year for five years, awarded in 1982, to begin films for which he then obtained financing, in part from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), on the basis of the rushes. Since then, other funding sources have included ITS (Independent TV Service), the Ford and Diamond Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and sometimes the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK and Canal Plus, ARTE, Planète, and the Centre National du Cinéma in France.22 These films have continued to be shown on PBS stations around the United States, although Wiseman’s relationship with the network has been an uneasy one. The public television system in the United States is, in Wiseman’s view, a “bloated and engorged bureaucracy” that, like the commercial networks and their policy of using only network-produced documentaries, is discouraging to independent filmmakers. (To his great distress, Wiseman discovered only three days before the scheduled broadcast of the first of the four Deaf and Blind films that PBS was going to show them in a different order than he had intended. Fortunately, the proper sequence was restored after he protested, but the episode provided him with further evidence of American public television’s bureaucratic

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insensitivity.) In a 1983 article in the New York Times, Wiseman attacked the administrative structure of both CPB and PBS, which brings together judges for the Program Fund who are unfamiliar with film as well as each other.23 Since the expiration of the contract with WNET, Wiseman has been turned down eighteen times by CPB’s Program Fund. Significantly, he has managed to maintain control over the distribution of his films by founding his own distribution company, Zipporah Films, in 1970. Chapter 1 of this book examines Wiseman’s style and approach and contextualizes his work within the traditions of cinema verité and direct cinema. Here, I also explore the films’ connections with other aspects of American art. Each of the subsequent chapters examines a group of films that are related thematically and stylistically. While these groupings are not chronological, they do tend to fall into a roughly chronological order that, I argue, reflects the evolution of Wiseman’s vision. Chapter 2 considers six of the earliest films that look at public, tax-supported institutions. The tone of these films is, for the most part, that of exposé, although there is compassion as well—an attitude that becomes more pronounced in future films, beginning with those films discussed in chapter 7 (Essene, the four Deaf and Blind films, and Aspen). Chapter 3, “The Big Parade,” focuses on the three military documentaries, which show Wiseman’s developing sensitivity to the formal qualities of the image. In these films, the filmmaker’s sense of humor is also on full display. Chapter 4 considers four films featuring animals. These films reveal Wiseman’s concern with editing and rhythm as well as mise-en-scène, formal features that also are important to the films about other art forms examined in chapter 10. In chapter 5, I discuss four films that show Wiseman expanding his concept of what an institution is, moving beyond a specific, physically bounded space to incorporate aspects of ideology. Chapter 6 examines the first two fiction films in which Wiseman was involved, Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World and his own Seraphita’s Diary, showing their thematic and stylistic connections to the documentaries. Then, chapter 7 explores the group of films mentioned above that focus on issues of spirituality and human connection, films in which Wiseman seeks to foreground stylistic elements such as the long take that complement his subject. Chapter 8 is devoted to Near Death, a monumental work that continues the approach and expands the sensibility of the films discussed in the previous chapter. The four films discussed in chapter 9 return to subjects explored

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in previous films, revealing commonalities with those earlier films even as they examine differences. The eight films analyzed in chapter 10 focus on theatre, dance, and art. As they chronicle these arts with admiration, they also show Wiseman exploring the connections of his own work to these other art forms as well as the distinctiveness of the film medium. Finally, chapter 11 looks at the most recent cycle of films that examine different communities, both geographic and institutional, all of which are concerned with the functioning of democracy. Given the historical contexts of their making, they are, I argue, among Wiseman’s most political films.

V OYA G E S O F D I S C O V E R Y

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hile it is not an entirely accurate claim, Frederick Wiseman’s films are generally described within the context of either direct cinema or cinema verité. Both documentary approaches involve the employment of lightweight, portable cameras and sync-sound equipment, filming with a hand-held camera rather than a tripod, and capturing events as they happen (i.e., without a script). They also share the premise that capturing life in the “raw” (Siegfried Kracauer’s term), or “life caught unawares” (Dziga Vertov), is not only inherently interesting but more revealing, more truthful to the complexities of experience than either fiction or documentary reconstruction. For champions of either method of filmmaking, life caught spontaneously by the motion picture camera yields a deeper truth. (Predictably, such grand claims have provoked equally intense critical antipathy, as in William Bluem’s rather overheated rejection of Richard Leacock’s The Children Were Watching [1960].)1 Both Dai Vaughan and Colin Young have used the term “observational cinema,” conflating both the direct and verité approaches and avoiding the imprecision often attached to their use. While neither writer offers a definition that usefully applies to Wiseman’s work,2 observational cinema does foreground this characteristic feature of spontaneous scrutiny of profilmic events. The observational filmmaker, perceiving not with the naked eye but with the Kino-Eye, must enter what Jean Rouch calls a “cine trance” and discover meaning as embodied in the surface of things within

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the realm of visible phenomena. This is a crucial feature of Wiseman’s cinema, both while the events are transpiring in front of the camera (the shot) and afterward during the process of editing (the structure). Elements of the observational style can be traced back to the beginnings of film history, to the Lumière actualités, and later, to postwar Italian neorealism (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini) and the British Free Cinema movement in the late 1950s (Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson). But it was with the development of portable, sync-sound equipment around 1960 that this approach to the documentary began to appear almost simultaneously in several countries—most notably, Canada, the United States, and France. In Canada, the form was pioneered by English and Quebecois filmmakers working for the National Film Board (NFB), founded by John Grierson in 1939. In the NFB’s Unit B, under executive producer Tom Daly, English-speaking directors Terence Macartney-Filgate, Roman Kroitor, and Wolf Koenig produced work for the Candid Eye series broadcast between 1958 and 1959, which clearly anticipated the style, despite the technological limitations that still existed at the time. In Quebec, Michel Brault (Les raquetteurs, 1958, with Gilles Groulx) and Pierre Perrault (Pour la suite du monde, 1963, with Brault) used the observational style to give voice to their province’s suppressed culture during the Quiet Revolution, even as they sought to fashion a personal approach to documentary filming. In the United States, independent filmmakers began working with the new portable equipment. Among others, Lionel Rogosin (On the Bowery, 1956), Bert Stern (Jazz on a Summer’s Day, 1959–1960), John Cassavetes (Shadows, begun in 1959 but not released until 196l), and Morris Engel, apparently shooting with portable 35 mm equipment of his own design (The Little Fugitive, 1953; Weddings and Babies, 1960), experimented with shooting synchronized sound on location in both documentary and fictional contexts.3 More importantly, a group of young documentary filmmakers organized by Robert Drew began making films for Time Inc., in an attempt to transfer the style of magazine photojournalism to cinema. The group included D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, and Richard Leacock (who had been the cameraman for Robert Flaherty’s last film, Louisiana Story [1948]). Together, they made a series of nineteen pioneering films for television, beginning in 1960 with Primary, about the Wisconsin presidential primary campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Hubert

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Humphrey, and continuing until Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment in 1963. The Drew Associates sought to be invisible observers of events transpiring before the camera—like a “fly on the wall,” as Leacock described it. They often spoke about the exhilaration that resulted from being able to follow in one shot, for the first time, an action such as Kennedy entering and then crossing a crowded hall where he is to speak, climbing a narrow, more darkly lit stairwell, and taking his place on the stage.4 According to Erik Barnouw, the technology of the portable equipment peaked with the Drew unit’s Eddie (1961), about the racing car driver Eddie Sachs, with the camera, tape recorder, and microphone achieving independent mobility.5 When the Drew unit disbanded, the individual filmmakers went on to make some of the most important American observational films. In France, the approach took a somewhat more assertive form. Jean Rouch, an anthropologist (credited as the first filmmaker to abandon the tripod completely), and Edgar Morin, a sociologist with an interest in film (his book on stardom in the cinema, Les Stars, was published in 1957), collaborated in 1961 to make the extremely influential Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), photographed by the French Canadian Brault. The filmmakers foregrounded their involvement in the film by appearing onscreen and prompting the Parisians they interviewed with questions. Later in the film, they appear again, showing the footage to these people and talking with them about it. Two years later, Chris Marker made Le joli mai (The lovely May, 1963), which also featured an assertive style of interviewing. Rouch and Morin subtitled their film “une experience de cinéma vérité,” and although historical accounts variously ascribe the coinage of the term to one or the other of them (and film historian Georges Sadoul also claims to be the first to use the term in a 1948 translation of Vertov’s “Kino-Pravda”),6 it is clear that “cinéma vérité” was intended as an homage to Vertov and his idea of the “Kino-Eye,” a belief that the camera eye was capable of seeing better than the human eye. For Rouch, as for the revolutionary Soviet filmmaker before him, the camera is a catalyst that ignites sparks of truth from what it photographs. According to Barnouw, “The direct cinema documentarist took his camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinéma vérité tried to precipitate one. The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the Rouch cinéma verité artist was often an

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avowed participant. The direct cinema artist played the role of uninvolved bystander; the cinéma vérité artist espoused that of provocateur.”7 Thus, for example, although both films deal with the same ostensible subject, the Holocaust, and even share some strikingly similar tracking shots, Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1986) is verité while Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1955) is not. Yet to what extent this distinction is, in fact, accurate is a matter of debate, and Wiseman’s films are not the only documentaries that refuse to fit comfortably into either category. Certainly, the two terms are often used imprecisely and interchangeably, presumably because both relied upon the technology of portable synch-sound equipment for their development, eschewing the use of the heavy 35 mm camera, that bulky, prominent apparatus that was for Renoir a “god” and for Leacock a “sort of monster” that commanded the center of attention.8 The lightweight 16 mm cameras meant that the camera no longer had to be the object of “worship,” just as sound equipment was reduced in size and weight from approximately two hundred to twenty pounds. Observational documentaries thus rely on conditions of production that are different from scripted documentary and, consequently, have different aesthetic criteria (although, to return to my earlier point, it must be emphasized that while these aesthetic qualities in large part follow from the conditions of production, they are not one and the same). Since observational films are shot in uncontrolled situations, the camera must frequently adjust both focus depth and lens aperture, compensating for changing light conditions and distance from the action. Camera movement is sometimes jerky and seemingly unmotivated, as the camera operator seeks out material of visual interest with varying degrees of success. The camera is not always in the ideal position to catch the action since it cannot always anticipate what will happen or where, and sometimes its view is blocked by people moving in front of it so that important action is missed or the camera must be repositioned. Thus, these films have developed a distinctive look that has come to signify reality. So, for example, the scripted Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), which is shot in this manner, gains an impression of authenticity, as do the furtive, shaky shots in the “News on the March” newsreel in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), which show the reclusive Kane through the slats of a fence, as if filmed clandestinely—even though the film predates observational cinema by more than a decade.

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Further, sometimes the drama in observational documentary resides as much in the camera’s spontaneous search for points of visual interest as in the action of the profilmic events themselves. At one point in Leacock’s Happy Mother’s Day (1963), for example, while the camera is in the process of reframing Mr. Fisher, we momentarily glimpse Mrs. Fisher before the camera decides on a tighter framing of her husband. While the reframing likely was necessitated by the uncontrolled setup, the brief inclusion and then omission of Mrs. Fisher suggests how she has been consistently disregarded as the town attempts to exploit her quintuplets to promote tourism. Of course, such unforeseen situations are not always so expressive. Elsewhere in the same film, the camera moves from the Fisher family obliging a photojournalist by driving their family Model T Ford in circles to three ducks walking in a line, presumably to make a point about the family’s docile response to all the hoopla. But the ducks fail to do anything in particular, and the camera, as if reconciled to an unprofitable digression, wisely returns to the Fishers in their car. For Rouch, instances of particularly concentrated observation in documentary filmmaking are privileged moments, which he defines as epiphanic flashes of insight, “those exceptional moments when  .  .  . there’s a revelation, a staggering revelation.”9 Such privileged moments are usually understood in the context of character revelation, when the camera pierces the truth behind a person’s social facade. As early as 1949, Boris Kaufman (Vertov’s brother), writing about his camerawork for Vigo’s A propos de Nice (1930), claimed the goal of what he called “social documentary” was for the camera to reveal “the hidden reason for a gesture,” a person’s “complete inner spirit through his purely external manifestations.”10 The moment when Jason Holiday’s theatrical persona momentarily crumbles in Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) and tears roll down his cheeks; the final shot of Paul Anka in Koenig and Kroitor’s Lonely Boy (1961), when the singer is at last offstage and his expression and body posture reveal his exhaustion; and the point where Paul Brennan questions his own ability in the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman (1967)—these are all powerful instances of privileged moments that yield deeper insight into the films’ human subjects. Whether and to what extent the presence of the camera affects the profilmic event—and how much this compromises the verité of the privileged moment—has been perhaps the most hotly debated issue concerning

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observational documentary. The presence of the camera, critics argue, makes people either self-conscious and inhibited or allows them an opportunity to perform, but in neither case are people acting naturally. For Rouch, though, the camera functions as a “psychological stimulant” that, while perhaps affecting behavior, allows people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t, therefore revealing character. Paradoxically, Rouch sees the camera as adding an element of artifice to a situation that ultimately results in greater truth. As he puts it, the camera is, for him, less a brake than an accelerator.11 Wiseman believes that people do not significantly alter their behavior for the camera and that the camera therefore is capable of capturing truths of human character. In his view, if people are made self-conscious by the camera, then they will fall back on behavior that is comfortable “rather than increase the discomfort by trying out new roles. This means they will act in characteristic rather than new ways.” Of course, in some sense, all the world is a stage, and all of us, as Wiseman’s fictional Seraphita observes, are actors, behaving (performing) in ways we assume desirable or expected. Contemporary cultural and psychoanalytic theory has convincingly demonstrated the significant extent to which a subject’s personality is constructed by ideology. Because of observational cinema’s method of production, this is necessarily one of its great subjects. So if Wiseman thinks that someone is altering his or her behavior for the camera rather than out of social constraints (he calls this his “bullshit meter”), he will not use the footage.12 He also feels that if someone he is filming acknowledges the camera, it breaks viewers’ suspension of disbelief (a dynamic of reception at work despite the qualification of “documentary”) and allows them to escape the implications of the subject positioning of his cinematic construction. When he captures something revelatory, Wiseman prefers the term “magic moments” or, interestingly, simply “good scenes” since, for him, cinema ideally penetrates surface appearances. Wiseman operates the tape recorder, not the camera, during shooting (he was a court reporter during his stint in the army, “repeating everything that was said in a courtroom into a microphone for someone else to transcribe”),13 but he directs the camera via hand signals worked out in advance with his cameraman or by leading him with the microphone. Doing the sound rather than looking through the viewfinder of the camera, Wiseman claims, gives him greater freedom to see what is around

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him and to choose those things that he considers to be of primary visual interest.14 First shooting in 16 mm black and white, Wiseman switched to color with The Store in 1983 and to high-definition video with Crazy Horse in 2011, and from editing celluloid on a Steenbeck to Avid editing with La danse—Le ballet de l’opéra de Paris in 2009.15 Yet, while the technology of shooting and editing has evolved, and Wiseman has adapted to it, the final look of the films remains remarkably consistent. After using established ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall on Titicut Follies and important Canadian cinematographer Richard Leiterman on High School, he has worked consistently with the same cameraman. William Brayne, chosen on Leiterman’s recommendation and for his work on Allan King’s Warrendale (1967), shot ten of Wiseman’s films, and John Davey, who had years of experience as a documentary cameraman prior to working with Wiseman, has photographed all of them since Manoeuvre in 1979. Thus, the communication between Wiseman and his camera operator becomes particularly well established—like a dance, an art form in which Wiseman is much interested. Thomas Benson and Carolyn Anderson have interviewed Wiseman’s cinematographers, noting that their accounts of working methods differ from his. They suggest, too, that the four cameramen “are not merely transparent windows for Wiseman’s vision” and that each has a distinctive style, although they fail to demonstrate this claim convincingly in their book.16 One might argue for some stylistic element that is distinctive to the work of either Brayne or Davey; but as the following chapters show, Wiseman is clearly the shaping influence in his films, his vision ultimately overriding that of the cameraman, whichever one it is. One common criticism of observational filmmaking is that it tends merely to pile on details of surface reality—what Lewis Jacobs calls “the bric-a-brac of mere observation”17—in the hope that out of the sheer density of things, some kind of truth will emerge. However, because this type of documentary is, like classical narrative cinema, a system of visual signification with its own codes and conventions, the best of them do not merely accumulate visual facts but invest them with meaning. As with T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative,” objects and actions can be infused through cinematic means with emotional or thematic significance, like iconography in genre films.18 Even Grierson, who strongly wished to avoid the “aestheticky” in documentary, acknowledged the cinematographic

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image’s symbolic potential. This is made clear in his attack on Flaherty’s avoidance of social issues in Nanook of the North (1922): “When he draws your attention to the fact that Nanook’s spear is grave in its upheld angle, and finely rigid in its down-pointing bravery, you may, with some justice, observe that no spear, held however bravely by the individual, will master the crazy walrus of international finance” (emphasis mine).19 While it is possible for observational films to invest profilmic reality with symbolic significance, this aesthetic quality functions differently than in fiction film. A crucial difference, of course, is that, unlike iconography in genre films, objects in observational films often lack a priori symbolic significance. In these documentaries, the physical elements of the mise-en-scène are found, not created. Metaphoric implications are discovered within the material rather than invented and imposed on it. Objects may begin as functionally present things in the world rather than as deliberately placed props within the diegesis, and people are real individuals rather than characters, but once captured by the camera and projected onto the screen, they become part of the imagery. As Alan King has remarked, in his film A Married Couple (1969), Billy and Antoinette Edwards, the couple referred to in the title, are not real people, but characters, images on celluloid.20 At the same time, because we know the events depicted in observational films really happened—that is, documentary images reveal a greater degree of connection to the real world—it could be argued that the symbolism of observational cinema generates a greater affective power for viewers than similar imagery in fictional films, however convincing their verisimilitude. No matter how marvelous the special effects in a fiction film are, a death scene will never produce the same kind of horror as that generated by, say, actual footage of a Vietnamese bonze’s self-immolation or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. A shot of the former is startling when it appears in a fiction film such as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). It is exactly this ontological difference between real and fictional images that generated such controversy about what were dubbed “snuff films.” Although violent death is depicted frequently and casually in fiction film, when it was thought that real death was being filmed for the sake of voyeuristic pleasure, many people protested. (In the end, it turned out to be a publicity hoax.) Critics are quite aware of the experiential difference resulting from these two kinds of images, the fictional and the

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observational, but have as yet to theorize adequately the implications of this difference. E. Ann Kaplan, for example, can only vaguely note, “While it is true that a documentary is a signifying practice and thus removed from lived experience, it seems to occupy a status differing in some measure from that of signs that are produced in a studio or in a fashion that assumes fiction-proper from the start.”21 This point carries important aesthetic implications. Consider, for instance, James Wolcott’s view that the final scene of Wiseman’s Welfare is a serious aesthetic misjudgment because it is so obvious. The scene shows a frustrated man who, having been shuffled through the bureaucracy of the welfare system, addresses the ceiling and God, saying that he must be waiting for Godot (see figure 1.1). Wolcott confuses fiction and observation, basing his judgment on an implied equation of the two: “The guy seems to have wandered in from the set of a Cassavetes film,” he declares.22

FIGURE 1.1  Welfare: A client invokes Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to describe his experience with the welfare office.

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Indeed. But what might make the scene simplistic in a fictional context is precisely what makes it extraordinary in a real one. As the novelist John Barth writes in The Floating Opera: Nature, coincidence, can often be a heavy-handed symbolizer. She seems at times fairly to club one over the head with significance. . . . One is constantly being confronted with a sun that bursts from behind the clouds just as the home team takes the ball; ominous rumblings of thunder when one is brooding desultorily at home; magnificent sunrises on days when one has resolved to mend one’s ways; hurricanes that demolish a bad man’s house and leave his good neighbor’s untouched, or vice-versa; Race Streets marked slow; Cemetery Avenues marked ONE WAY. The man whose perceptions are not so rudimentary, whose palate is attuned to subtler dishes, can only smile uncomfortably and walk away, reminding himself, if he is wise, that good taste is, after all, only a human invention.23

In observational cinema, truth, no matter how obvious, can indeed be beauty. For similar reasons, André Bazin declares that the view revealed by a bronchoscope descending into the human body dwarfs constructed drama with its revelation of “supreme beauty.”24 In the case of Welfare, because Wiseman did not invent the scene but happened upon it, he rightly included it at the end. As Dan Armstrong has convincingly shown, the entire film works as an extended analogy to Samuel Beckett’s play.25 The explicit reference at the film’s conclusion nicely sums up much of what the film is about, and because one of the welfare clients says it, the filmmaker himself does not have to. As this example demonstrates, Wiseman is quite conscious of the different status of observational footage, and his films exploit this difference in a variety of ways to further complicate the viewer’s response. Certainly, one of Wiseman’s great skills as an observational filmmaker is that he knows where to look and how to capture images on film that resonate with meaning despite the uncontrolled circumstances in which he shoots. His eye is less “innocent” (a term often used in reference to Flaherty) than it is intelligent. Wiseman has spoken of privileged moments of speech in his films as “found eloquence,”26 but he could just as well have been describing his own art. Transcendentalists see the physical world as emblematic, and Wiseman, like William Carlos Williams, knows how much depends upon observing a red wheelbarrow beside the white

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chickens glazed with rainwater. Biologist Richard Dawkins asserts at the beginning of EX-LIBRIS that facts are poetry, and, indeed, Wiseman’s images are charged with meaning beyond the literal to an extent that can only be called poetic, for he consistently seizes upon objects and physical details (what Sophia Tolstoy in Un couple calls “the prose of life”) and invests them with significance beyond their functional purposes. The physical appearance of the school in High School (discussed in chapter 2) and the processed egg product in Meat (chapter 4) are just two of the most obvious examples of how in his work, physical space and objects, respectively, function on a symbolic level. Hallways and exteriors in Wiseman’s films often are shown to embody the attitude of the institution under examination or represent that of the film toward it. Gestures and body language, often emphasized in closeup, frequently resonate with deeper meaning.27 The zoom in to the wiggling finger of the sexist gynecologist talking to an assembly of boys in High School is an especially vivid instance of Wiseman’s skill at reading body language symbolically (see figure 1.2). He defends this particular part of the film with the claim that

FIGURE 1.2  High School: The importance of body language in Wiseman’s films is vividly

shown by this closeup of the gynecologist’s hand gesture.

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“it’s not twisting what’s going on to suit my point of view,” explaining that by “twisting,” he means imposing something that has not happened on the profilmic event.28) Hands especially become expressive when shown in isolated closeups in his films, and they are crucial to the themes of Essene, the Deaf and Blind films, and Near Death. In The Store, for example, there is an impressive sequence shot showing nothing but the hands of a jewelry salesman and customer as they discuss expensive rings. In talking about paintings, the museum guides in National Gallery emphasize the importance of gesture, a comment that applies equally to Wiseman’s films. Finally, as for John Ford, ceremonies and rituals consistently assume additional significance, most prominently in such films as High School, Canal Zone, Sinai Field Mission, State Legislature, and Monrovia, Indiana. Wiseman’s vision is akin to that of the transcendentalists. For him, as for Emerson, “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”29 Wiseman’s films are full of closeups of faces, revealing the startlingly expressive panoply of American visages. Painted portraits and closeups of museum patrons fill National Gallery, and the three fiction films he directed, Seraphita’s Diary, La dernière lettre/The Last Letter, and Un couple, rely heavily on facial closeups. His ability to penetrate the surface of his subjects’ countenances—to reveal the chaplain glancing at his watch during a conversation with a distraught soldier (Basic Training) or the repressed smiles on the faces of prospective models (Model), for example, is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s claim to “see neath the rims of your haggard and mean disguises.”30 People in Wiseman’s films (for example, Basic Training, Primate, Model, Blind, La Comédie-Française ou L’amour joué) are frequently shown putting on or taking off literal masks of one kind or another. Seraphita notes, “Many times the mask is different than what is underneath,” while in Un couple Sophia Tolstoy concurs that “Even the most sincere and honest of us always wear a mask that hides what we are deep inside.” Michael J. Arlen writes that Wiseman, like Vertov had earlier wished to do, looks at “men without masks.” Indeed, his work fulfills what the film theoretician Béla Balázs saw as the ability of the cinema to reveal the “microphysiognomy” of human facial expression.31 In Primate, Wiseman achieves some of the most expressive closeups of animal faces in all of cinema. Wiseman’s films treat sound in a similar manner. Most obviously, they capture the “barbaric yawps” (Whitman) and “primal warblings”

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(Emerson) of the American people, the rhythms of real speech that Louis Marcorelles argued are so essential to the nature of direct cinema.32 The authentic minimalist monologues of the arrested youth in Law and Order, the controller in Manoeuvre, or the dialogue between two men with the stolen refrigerator and the arresting officer in Public Housing are examples of lived speech unmatched by even the most naturalistic dialogue in fiction films. No doubt, Wiseman would consider these moments examples of “found eloquence,” a kind of auditory equivalent to Rouch’s notion of the privileged moment observational filmmakers seek to capture with the camera. They may be less articulate than Mr. Hirsch’s concluding monologue in Welfare about Waiting for Godot, but they are, in their own way, as expressive and revealing. The importance of language in Wiseman’s work is amply demonstrated by Benson and Anderson, whose work focuses on dialogue in the films. And this aspect of Wiseman’s cinema is crucial to the democratic concerns of the later films about communities (see chapter 11). In the cinematic contexts established by Wiseman, dialogue frequently comes to resonate with meaning beyond that intended by the speaker. Lines like one scientist’s wish to “let nature take its course” in Primate, or a worker’s fear in Meat that “heads will roll” because of management policy, accrue thematic weight hardly foreseen by the people who utter them. The occasionally muddy sound or dialogue drowned by ambient noise, especially in the more technically limited earlier films, can also work meaningfully. In the scene in the teachers’ cafeteria in High School, for example, the viewer is unable to make sense of the lunchtime conversation because of the din of clattering dishes and other background sounds. This suggests that their talk is, in fact, so much noise, as empty of significance there as it is in the classroom. Similarly, the constant background noise in Welfare expresses the insurmountable bureaucracy that defines the institution and the distance between the workers and clients during the seemingly interminable interviews. The construction noise that can be heard during the Evan Picone commercial shoot in Model and the unrelenting crying babies during the talk on birth control in Public Housing are just two more examples of where sound is crucial to meaning in Wiseman’s films. Just as he is attuned to the visual potential of his profilmic subjects, Wiseman’s Kino-Ear is attuned to sound. (For many years, Wiseman used a Nagra 3,4.2, ISL, and a Fostex; more recently, his sound recorder is

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Sound Devises model 633. His microphones have been a Sennheiser 815, 416, and a Trans Radio Mic, replaced by a Lectrosonics SMQV, Sanken CS-2, Sanken COS, and Schoeps mini-CMIT shotgun mic.) He is equally as careful in his sound editing as he is with the visuals. The importance of sound in Wiseman’s films is dramatically clear from his first film, Titicut Follies, in the montage sequence involving the embalming of the inmate Malinowski. Accompanying the visual crosscutting between the face of the living and deceased inmate is a boldly expressionist manipulation of the soundtrack: the shots of the inmate while still alive being force-fed are thick with ambient noise (which contributes to a sense of the force-feeding procedure as insensitive and invasive), while the shots of his corpse are completely devoid of sound, evoking the stark reality of death. These brief moments of silence are powerful and impossible to achieve during observational shooting unless the microphone was turned off during filming or the sound was eliminated during editing. In Central Park, Wiseman several times lets the diegetic music from one scene carry over to and then gradually fade out during montages of people in different places in the park as if to suggest a lyrical bonding among the park’s patrons. The film’s final scene, shots of the park carousel with its tinny version of Irving Berlin’s “Over There,” carries over there to final shots of the nighttime sky and even to the final credits, just as the hymn sung by the church choir that ends Aspen moves from the church interior to two concluding shots of the surrounding mountains and then the closing credits, giving the landscape a sense of the sacred. Public Housing, to take one last example, makes brilliant use of police sirens and ice cream truck music to contrast real-world violence and childhood innocence, as discussed in chapter 9. As this last example indicates, found music almost always works symbolically in Wiseman’s films, beginning with the first images of Titicut Follies. As discussed more fully in chapter 3, that film’s use of music tends to be ironic, as it often is in Wiseman’s films. His interest in found music is clear throughout Titicut Follies and in High School, his next film, as well, right from the opening scene with Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” accompanying images of the approach of the camera by car to Northeast High School. Further, in Wiseman’s documentaries, institutions themselves are treated symbolically. The films employ textual strategies that force the viewer to understand them as social microcosms, as interwoven parts of

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the larger social fabric. Wiseman says he is “interested in how institutions reflect the larger cultural hues” and refers to the process of filming institutions as a search for cultural spoors. He also likens it to tracking the abominable snowman—looking for the creature but finding only its traces.33 Andrew Sarris explained that the poetic nature of John Ford’s films resulted from the director’s ability to present “double images”— images that at once express both the concretely individual (“the twitches of life”) and a sense of historical context (“silhouettes of legend”).34 Wiseman’s documentaries work in a similar way. In fact, sometimes his images, as in Basic Training and Meat, clearly evoke Ford’s mise-en-scène (see the discussion of these films in chapters 3 and 4, respectively). In Hospital, for example, New York’s Metropolitan Hospital comes to signify an illness in American society itself, while the world of Nieman Marcus in The Store metonymically embodies nothing less than capitalist consciousness. By framing the ordinary and familiar on the screen (Wiseman had dabbled in still photography before making films), he provides a new frame of reference for the viewer and so creates what Vertov called “a fresh perception of the world.”35 Isolating and magnifying the familiar in his images, Wiseman affects a defamiliarization in the manner of the Russian formalists. A particularly vivid instance of this defamiliarization occurs in Zoo, where viewers are encouraged to regard the people visiting the zoo as one species among many in a constructed habitat. As the following chapters show, Viktor Shklovsky’s claim that “in order to render an object an artistic fact it must be extracted from among the facts of life . . . it must be torn out of its usual associations”36 would seem to apply rather well to Wiseman’s documentary practice. Structure has been a particularly crucial issue in the aesthetic debate surrounding observational films. Its practitioners have insisted almost unanimously that the films must be structured chronologically in order to remain as faithful as possible to profilmic events. At the same time, as Stephen Mamber and others have pointed out, observational filmmakers have sought to combine conventional dramatic structures (protagonists overcoming obstacles to achieve goals) with chronology.37 Leacock, whose work is usually chronologically structured, claims that the documentary filmmaker should avoid nonchronological editing “like the plague.” The Maysles’ work, similarly, with the exception of Gimme Shelter (1970), is consistently structured according to profilmic chronology. As Al Maysles

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has declared, “In the long run what works best—and we find ourselves coming back to it—is having it happen just the way it happened.”38 In contrast, Wiseman’s films are clearly structured according to principles other than chronology. Rather, they are designed in a manner that Bill Nichols describes as a distinctive “mosaic” structure.39 The chronology of profilmic events in his work is, on occasion, drastically altered. Sometimes even the temporal duration of specific events is violated, usually for thematic (rather than dramatic) purposes. From his first documentary, Titicut Follies, which begins and ends by showing parts of the same musical show, Wiseman has not hesitated to play with chronology and duration. Some films, such as Meat, reveal a relatively close fidelity to chronology because of the importance of the particular process (in this case, meat packing) to the function of the institution under examination. Sequences and shots are almost always connected by straight cuts rather than by fades, wipes, or dissolves so that temporal cues are not provided. These devices are seldom used in observational documentaries, probably because they call attention to the medium itself and so detract from a film’s power of observation, but they do occasionally appear. In King’s Warrendale, for example, major sequences are separated by dissolves. In The Store, Wiseman humorously uses the opening and closing of elevator doors as the found equivalent of the wipe, but technically he relies, as almost always, on the cut. He seldom includes indications of temporal relations between sequences unless they happen to arise in the dialogue, as when the chaplain in Basic Training mentions in his sermon that he has been speaking to the trainees now for five consecutive Sundays. Nor do Wiseman’s films ever feature a narrator, either within the profilmic events or as voice-over (except in one sequence in Primate, where a scientist explains the purpose of his experiments directly to the camera, his account continuing over shots of him at work). Nevertheless, because Wiseman’s films rely on the conventional techniques of narrative construction (establishing shots, cutaways to reaction shots, continuity editing), individual sequences in the films are relatively easy to comprehend. Wiseman’s ability to construct individual sequences according to conventional narrative codes is indeed remarkable, given the fact that he films with only one camera. In the final sequence in Primate, for example, following the scientists from the Yerkes Research Center to the Air Force jet, or the beginning of Canal Zone, showing the process

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of moving ships through the Panama Canal, Wiseman’s camera seems able to move from one place to another, as does the omniscient camera of classical Hollywood cinema. As well, dialogue sequences are frequently constructed so as to appear seamless, revealing no apparent breaks in conversation or logic, though they may be much condensed. Nichols notes that while each film’s individual sequences (the facets or “tesserae” of the mosaic) are organized by narrative codes of construction, the relations between these facets are rhetorical. It is at this level that the viewer must work to grasp the structural logic of Wiseman’s films. Since sequences are arranged neither chronologically nor narratively, they actively engage the spectator, who must discover structural and thematic relationships between them. Sequences in Wiseman’s films may relate in terms of comparison, contrast, parallelism, inversion, irony, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, or summation. Wiseman says he never pushes his point of view on the audience, for he abhors didacticism. Instead, his cinema is dialectical, asking the viewer to tease out meaning by discovering the structural logic at work. As might be expected, Wiseman’s films have invited Marxist analyses, as much because of their style as for their institutional subject matter. It is in the process of editing, this “thinking through the material,” where Wiseman engages in a kind of second-order looking. It is while examining the material for less obvious significance (the “silhouettes of legend” as well as the “twitches of life”) that his films become profoundly observational. Wiseman readily admits the creative manipulation in his work when he describes his films as “reality dreams” or “reality fictions.”40 As school head Paul points out in High School II, one of the “habits of mind” that encourages critical thinking is to ask, “From whose perspective is something being presented? Like when you read history, it’s always from someone’s perspective.” The most important aspect of Wiseman’s creative manipulation is, of course, his distinctively expressive editing. The individual shots themselves originate in the real world, but, says Wiseman, “really they have no meaning except insofar as you impose a form on them.”41 In this editing process, elements of profilmic reality are compressed, reordered, and omitted, resulting in the creation of an aesthetic construction, or what Vertov called a “film-object.” While it is true that the profilmic events are always real, never staged, recreated, or rehearsed for the camera, the footage remains, for him, only a record of

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the events—meaningless until he structures it at the editing table. On occasion, he has acknowledged an analogy between his approach to editing and the preparation of a legal brief. He has also referred to editing as a process of chipping away that which is extraneous to reveal the film, as Michelangelo sculpted.42 Testimony in the Titicut Follies trial suggests that even before making his first film Wiseman was seeking to make documentaries that were both “poetic and true.”43 Wiseman devotes a considerable amount of his time to editing. While he spends from four to six weeks shooting, he spends more time in the editing room sifting through and giving shape to the material. High School took him a relatively short four months to edit, Primate all of fourteen.44 His shooting ratio is high, varying from 10:1 for the lengthy Near Death to 30:1 for Missile, which at two hours is only one-third as long. In the 1980s, Wiseman’s average was about 20:1, but he reports that it has since grown closer to 40:1. Some of the films, such as Primate and Meat, rely heavily on editing for formal and thematic reasons. He admits to doing almost no sociological research in preparation for shooting in an institution; instead, he reads novels relating to the subject. Shooting, he explains, is his research. He claims that he enters an institution with inevitable preconceptions or stereotypes, but the experience of filming reveals to him a greater complexity about the institution.45 He initially saw the making of Law and Order, for example, shot shortly after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as an opportunity to “get the pigs.” After being out in patrol cars on a daily basis with the Kansas City Police, however, Wiseman’s attitude changed significantly.46 What he discovered, he says— and indeed, what a careful reading of the film reveals—is that “piggery is in no way limited to the police.” In editing, Wiseman works out a “theory,” as he calls it, about events that is then reflected in the film’s structure, or the “web he spins.” He sees the process as a “voyage of discovery” and the end result as “a report on what I’ve found.”47 (Only twice, with Law and Order and the Deaf and Blind series, did Wiseman return to an institution to shoot additional footage after beginning the editing process. In the first case, he found he didn’t have enough material inside the precinct station, and in the second case, it was “because it was difficult to keep in mind everything I’d need for four films.”) The viewer, in a sense, repeats Wiseman’s own process by discovering the structural logic of the films and exploring their

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implications. In Wiseman’s words, viewers “have to fight the film, they have to say, ‘What the hell’s he trying to say with this?’ . . . And they have to think through their own relationship to what they’re seeing.”48 Not randomly, the first words in Central Park are an exhortation to “Open your eyes, stay awake.” In a way, the films are instances of Kracauer’s notion of “found stories,” for with multiple viewings, patterns begin to emerge from what initially might seem random, as when observing eddying waters in a river or lake.49 Wiseman readily admits that his films are personal expressions, and, unlike the “phony baloney” rhetoric of direct cinema (an “incredibly pompous expression”),50 he makes no pretense at being objective. Still, Wiseman does insist that the views his films express are fair to the experience during the shoot. Wiseman’s style is thus a synthesis of realist and formative elements. He does not hesitate to manipulate the order of events or to break them up, and he has, on occasion, even “twisted” events, as he defines it. Sometimes, as in Meat and parts of The Store, he relies heavily on editing, building sequences of considerable length out of many brief shots. Wiseman’s description of some of these sequences as “medleys” (as opposed to “montages”) underscores his sense of their rhythmic and structural qualities. Yet, his films also employ a good deal of camera movement and long takes, stylistic elements essential both to observational cinema and classical narrative realism. Nichols quotes Barry Salt’s claim that the average shot length in classical Hollywood film is approximately nine to ten seconds and compares this to the average shot length for a third of Hospital, a considerably longer thirty-two seconds.51 Just as the mosaic editing structure requires active participation on the part of the viewer, so do the long takes of the realist approach. Charles Barr has convincingly argued that when the filmmaker does not “signpost” his meaning through analytic editing, the viewer is forced to extract the meaning from the mise-en-scène. For this reason, as Roberto Rossellini puts it, “a realist film is precisely one which tries to make people think.”52 It is possible, too, to view Wiseman’s approach as a combination of observational documentary and the more traditional Griersonian documentary. His uncontrolled method of shooting, the use of the portable camera and tape recorder, and recording of wild sound all belong to the observational style. But while such films have tended to focus on individuals (most of them, moreover, celebrities and stars, such as Jane Fonda,

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Paul Anka, Bob Dylan, Joe Levine, Marlon Brando, and so on), there are no true protagonists in Wiseman’s films. People may reappear within an individual film, such as Sam in Welfare, Mrs. Finner in Public Housing, Betsy Barlow in Central Park, Richard Lord in Boxing Gym, and Marty Walsh in City Hall (and the notorious Miss Hightower from Hospital, who is not seen but is heard arguing with a doctor over the telephone, later appears in Welfare), but the mosaic structure encourages the viewer to focus on the logic of cinematic construction and institutional organization rather than to empathize or identify in any consistent fashion with specific individuals. The earnest Judge Turner in Juvenile Court, the postulant Richard and the abbot in Essene, the somewhat eccentric Dr. Weiss of Near Death (not to mention the four patients in this film), Richard Lord of Boxing Gym, and Mayor Walsh in City Hall perhaps come closest in Wiseman’s work to resembling recognizable protagonists. Even in these cases, though, the focus remains diffuse enough so that the possibility of sustained identification is thwarted. Rather, Wiseman says, the institutions are the stars of his films.53 The emphasis on institutions rather than individuals, of course, reflects the Griersonian concern with contemporary social issues. Wiseman sees his films together as presenting “a natural history of the way we live.”54 Just as the mandate of the National Film Board of Canada, founded by Grierson, was to interpret Canada to Canadians and the rest of the world, Wiseman shows us genuine contemporary American life more consistently than any other filmmaker. Wiseman, typically observing his own culture as opposed to another, has created an unparalleled series of ethnographic films that reveal how Americans really talk, dress, behave, and think.55 Like certain great American photographers (Matthew Brady, Jacob Riis, Walker Evans), he has chronicled in pictures a period of national life. It is not insignificant that Wiseman chose an established ethnographic filmmaker, John Marshall (most notably, The Hunters, 1958), as the cameraman for Titicut Follies. (Marshall himself, like Colin Young, emphasizes sequence shooting in ethnographic films, but he also understands Wiseman’s mosaic approach as appropriate to the abstract concept of an institution, even though personally he finds the style manipulative.)56 Wiseman has defined an institution as “a place that has certain kinds of geographical limitations and where at least some of the people have well-established roles,”57 although, as we shall

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see, his sense of what constitutes an institution has changed somewhat over time. Grierson’s ideas about documentary, particularly his view of documentary as public education and propaganda, were greatly influenced by the social philosophy of Walter Lippmann, whom he became acquainted with when he visited the United States in the 1920s. Lippmann believed that in contemporary democratic society, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the individual to function as a responsible citizen directly and to be fully involved in the decision-making processes of government. This wish for responsible and direct participation in government recalls the idealist democracy of the nation’s founding. Just as Thomas Jefferson once remarked that, given a choice between government and newspapers, he’d choose newspapers, so Grierson believed that “instead of propaganda being less necessary in a democracy, it is more necessary.”58 Wiseman himself suggests an analogy between documentaries and news and considers his films as similarly protected by the First Amendment.59 Like Peter Watkins, Wiseman sees one of the major functions of his work to be public education and awareness. When asked by Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline (August 25, 1987) why he was opposed to a public screening of a censored version of Titicut Follies, Wiseman pointedly explained that “The censoring of Titicut Follies or any other film prevents people in a democracy from access to information which they might like to have in order to make up their minds about what kind of society they’d like to live in—it’s as simple as that.”60 In short, as he has said elsewhere, “the public good outweighs any individual loss of privacy.”61 Given their function as exposé‚ the early films also belong to the muckraking tradition of American journalism. Like Ida M. Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company (1902) and Frank Norris’s unfinished trilogy of novels, The Epic of the Wheat (including The Pit [1903], one of the sources for Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat [1909]), Wiseman’s documentaries reveal the underside of the American dream through its institutions. In a general sense, the camera’s ability to document particulars recalls the muckrakers’ uninhibited naming of names and citing of specific charges, an inherent aspect of observational filmmaking that Wiseman exploits vigorously. More specifically, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), although quite different in tone from Wiseman’s Meat, focuses upon the same institution, the meat-packing industry. Where Sinclair exposes the unsanitary

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conditions of the Chicago stockyards and slaughterhouses, Wiseman shows the amazing efficiency of a streamlined Colorado packing firm; yet both share the impulse to shed light on working conditions that, for different reasons, are deemed unwholesome. Wiseman himself cites the Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel (1525–1569) and the Dutch Jan Steen (1626–1679), two painters of detailed social panoramas, as artists whose work anticipated his own. He explores this link explicitly in National Gallery. Wiseman’s films, like classical European painting, present a tapestry of the artist’s social milieu. After making his first four documentaries, Wiseman declared that he had “directed four of the most depressing documentaries ever made.”62 Certainly, in these films, as well as in some of the later ones, Wiseman finds a kind of terrible beauty (“Even the corpse hath its own beauty,” said Emerson63) that suggests an affinity with the imaginative worlds of Brueghel and Steen, as well as Hieronymus Bosch. His work also has elements of American naturalism, anticipated by painters like Thomas Eakins, whose depiction of such then unlikely subjects as boxing matches (Taking the Count [1898] and Between Rounds [1899]) sets his work apart from contemporary salon painting. These paintings are echoed by Wiseman’s Boxing Gym, while Eakins’s startling depictions of surgery in The Gross Clinic (1875) and The Agnew Clinic (1889) are reminiscent particularly of the opening of Hospital but also of the surgeries in Zoo. The turn-of-the-century “ash-can” painters—John Sloan, William J. Glackens, and Everett Shinn (the inspiration for Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius [1915])—were followed in turn by the harsh leanness of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. The work of all these painters reveals a certain affinity with Wiseman’s “depressing” documentaries. There are also clear links between Wiseman’s work and the literary realism of William Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane (who wrote “snapshots” of bowery life in such stories as “The Men in the Storm” and “An Experiment in Misery”), Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos (whose style could be called, like Wiseman’s, “mosaic”), and Sinclair Lewis. Like Wiseman, these writers often deemphasized the characterization of individuals to concentrate on the nature of institutional life and social forces. Dreiser’s description of the eponymous Sister Carrie (1900) as “a waif amid forces,” for example, could well describe many of the clients of Hospital and Welfare, some of the accused youths of Juvenile Court, the students of High School, the trainees in Basic Training, and so on.

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Wiseman began making films out of an urge for social reform. Before becoming a filmmaker, he taught courses in criminal law, family law, legal medicine, and psychiatry and the law at Boston and Brandeis Universities beginning in 1958. He got the idea for his first documentary, Titicut Follies, from visits he made to the Bridgewater, Massachusetts, Institute for the Criminally Insane, where he took his law students to show them where they might be sending convicted criminals. The film became the focus of a lengthy legal battle that unfortunately displaced the institution itself as the subject of much media coverage. Wiseman’s view is that the appalling conditions at Bridgewater had not changed in any significant way. As a result of this experience, Wiseman lost a good deal of faith in the ability of the cinema to affect social change. Sinclair’s The Jungle may have been instrumental in initiating the legislative reform of the pure food laws, but Wiseman has remained skeptical. “I naively thought that all you had to do was show people how horrible a place was and something would be done about it,” he explains. “I learned from Titicut Follies that this is not the case.”64 His early optimism had also led to his involvement from 1966 through 1970 in the Organization for Social and Technical Innovation (OSTI), which he described then as “a non-profit research and consulting corporation which works to bring about social and institutional change.” Here, too, his experience was less than sanguine. Later, he called it “a grand boondoggle” comprised of “middle-class professionals who were just sitting around in rooms, speculating about experiences they knew nothing about.”65 By 1984, Wiseman was claiming that there is no evidence that documentaries affect social change and that “like plays, novels, poems, [they] are fictional forms that have no measurable social utility.”66 Wiseman reiterated this view even as Randall Adams, an apparently innocent convict who had spent years on death row in a Texas prison, was about to be released, largely as a result of Errol Morris’s stylish documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988). Consequently, Wiseman’s films have grown less didactic and more aesthetically complex, as indicated by their gradually increasing length. The first few documentaries have an approximate running time of an hour and a half; Canal Zone and Central Park are almost twice as long. High School II is more than twice the length of High School. Deaf and Blind became a series of four films, each approximately two hours in length, and Near Death is just under six hours. Wiseman claims not to consider

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external constraints, such as television programming slots, when editing his films but to work only according to the demands of the material. Rather than being motivated by the hope of social change, Wiseman now says he makes his films for himself first, to please his personal aesthetic sense.67 Elsewhere, he says that he intends his documentaries to be as structurally complex as a good novel.68 Already by 1970, when asked if he considered himself a reporter, historian, or editorial writer, his reply was, significantly, “a filmmaker.”69 In 1974, Wiseman observed that a recurrent theme in his work is the depiction of “a gap between the formal ideology and actual practice, between the rules and the way they are applied” in the different institutions he has filmed.70 (Indeed, this may be a significant difference between important observational cinema in general and the earlier Griersonian documentary. Consider, for example, the mythic harmony of capitalist enterprise and workers envisioned by Drifters [Grierson, 1929], Industrial Britain [Grierson and Flaherty, 1933], and Night Mail [Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936].) Wiseman’s first documentaries make these gaps obvious, throwing them into relatively sharp relief. The later films, which show institutions that appear to function seamlessly, reveal the gaps more subtly. For this reason, however, many critics have viewed Wiseman’s later work as less powerful than the earlier films. Alan Rosenthal voices this common view in his remark that Wiseman “seems to have lost some of his original brilliance. . . . his recent films . . . are somehow lacking.”71 However, as the following chapters demonstrate, these later films are no less incisive or critical but only less obvious, less animated by moral outrage and the tradition of exposé that had earned Wiseman the (misleading) title of “the Ralph Nader of documentary.”72 These shifts in Wiseman’s work suggest that the later films are closer in spirit to New Journalism than to the tradition of muckraking. Developed in the mid-sixties, this brand of journalism, as practiced by such writers as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, combined reportage with literary devices to present journalistic coverage in undisguised essay form. Capote’s oxymoronic description of In Cold Blood (1965) as a “nonfiction novel” is similar to Wiseman’s descriptions of his films as “reality fictions.” The tendency to use a narrative voice in New Journalism, either by writing in the first person or by writing about oneself in the third person, is perhaps analogous

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to Wiseman’s establishment of authorial presence through his assertive editing strategies (although unlike, say, Michael Rubbo, Michael Moore, or Ross McElwee, he never literally appears in his own work). According to Wolfe, Breslin’s method was to arrive on a scene early and place himself firmly in the situation so that he could gather “novelistic” details— an approach that sounds quite similar to Wiseman’s.73 Furthermore, like Wiseman, the New Journalists tended to focus on institutions—for example, the military (John Sack’s M, Mailer’s The Armies of the Night), professional sports (George Plimpton’s Paper Lion), and Wall Street (Adam Smith’s The Money Game). Like Wiseman’s sense of his films as “a natural history of the way we live,” Wolfe saw the function of New Journalism to chronicle “the way people are living now.”74 Despite the unflinching harshness of Wiseman’s films, at the same time, they are frequently very funny, again like much New Journalism. Nichols refers to documentary as “discourses of sobriety,”75 but no account of Wiseman’s work would be complete without mention of his sense of comedy. Often the comedy is rather dark, as in the case of Primate and Missile. Not infrequently, the material is, frankly, humorous enough to make one laugh out loud. The sequence in Basic Training where recruits learn to brush their teeth in unison, the “drama” of the mortarboard tassel dangling on the valedictorian’s glasses in Canal Zone as the lad gamely presses on with his vacuous speech, the first couple’s story in Welfare, which gets more ludicrous as it goes on, and the teachers’ discussion about the proper use of condoms in High School II, the discussion leader all the while stroking the demo dildo, are four instances that come immediately to mind. At other times Wiseman simply presents quick shots of found material that are laughable for the irony of their context. Thus, in Canal Zone, we briefly see blank-faced Panamanians watching Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials on television, while in Primate, a scientist swings on a trapeze to encourage the monkey to do likewise. Wiseman describes the extended sequence in Hospital where the psychiatrist vainly attempts to get welfare assistance on the telephone for his patient from the improbably but appropriately named Miss Hightower as “an old Shelley Berman routine.”76 The material, says Wiseman, often has “situation comedy value” (as in the office of the vice principal in High School), although his intention is not to make jokes at people’s expense but rather to reveal the ironic quality of the gaps between an institution’s

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stated goals and its practice. In the process, he perhaps even reveals something of the comic element that informs the human condition. As the acting coach observes toward the end of Model, “Tragedy and comedy are very close.” This sentiment is shared by the model in Seraphita’s Diary, who adds that “the world prefers to laugh than to cry.” The strong comic element, as perhaps most effectively revealed in Primate, presents the viewer with a complex blend of outrage, exposé, horror, and humor that complicates one’s response and prevents one from making easy moral judgments. Thus the comedy in Wiseman’s films is “in the jugular vein” of dark humorists such as Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Joseph Heller and reminiscent of the absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. (Wiseman has claimed that a collection of Ionesco’s essays on playwriting was “the best book I ever read about filmmaking.”77) In both traditions, contemporary life is seen as largely purposeless and illogical, engendering a metaphysical anguish that humor helps to contain. Friedman’s observation that the New York Times “is the source and fountain and bible of black humor” and that “the satirist has had his ground usurped by the newspaper reporter” would appear applicable to Wiseman’s approach as well.78 It may seem counterproductive to the political nature of Wiseman’s cinema, but as the following chapters demonstrate, the humor often works to further involve, even to implicate, the viewer in the issues examined. Structural complexities, shifts in tone, and the absence of the traditional Griersonian voice-over commentary in Wiseman’s films heighten their ambiguity. Nichols claims that “observational documentary appears to leave the driving to us,” and, therefore, the danger of observational cinema is that one can respond to it like a Rorschach test.79 Some teachers, for example, viewed High School as a positive depiction of public education, while others saw it as an indictment. Some critics have dismissed Wiseman’s films, contending that their structural subtleties drain them of clear positions and allow viewers to interpret them as they wish. Alan Westin, for example, even though he admires the films, refers to them as “a form of social Rorschach blot. The viewer can read into what he sees on the screen whatever judgement he holds about American society and its values.” Richard Meran Barsam, too, uses the inkblot metaphor, claiming that the meaning of Wiseman’s films is determined by each viewer’s stock

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responses and personal values.80 Even Wiseman has said (although with characteristic understatement) that response to High School “is very much dependent on the values, attitudes and experience of the audience.”81 The sequences depicting Rorschach or similar psychological testing in Juvenile Court and Canal Zone may be seen as deliberate metaphors of viewer reception of the films themselves. Yet it is not true that, as theatre administrator Jean Pierre Miquel says in La Comédie-Française, “Truth is what we want it to be.” We are free to read what we want into any text, but that does not make the reading justified. Here I agree with Benson and Anderson: “Are the films merely inkblots? We think not.”82 Films stubbornly remain texts, and every text has specific textual properties. This is not to advocate for “some immanent meaning to the text,”83 however. As Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky write in their book Film Analysis, “Any reasonable reading or analysis must be based, first of all, on what is in a film, on evidence and examples from the text itself.”84 Because of their style, Wiseman’s films are especially rich in connotation, and “this connotative complexity helps explain why certain films generate a wide variety of interpretations.”85 The readings of Wiseman’s films offered in the following chapters are, I hope, justified by their textual complexities, but nowhere do I suggest that these are the only possible readings.

2 AMERICAN MADNESS Titicut Follies (1967) • High School (1968) • Law and Order (1969) • Hospital (1970) • Juvenile Court (1974) • Welfare (1975)

I

n 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the most perceptive of the many Europeans to visit the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, observed that social mobility and the lack of a true aristocracy in America broke the social chain of being that had characterized European society and freed the individual “links.” He found democracy, therefore, paradoxical and prone to instability, with the individual subsequently rendered “puny” even as he or she was empowered politically. Tocqueville attributed the amazing preponderance of institutions and organizations he had discovered in America to an attempt to counter the individual’s reduced sense of social cohesion and importance.1 Wiseman’s early films examine these institutional and organizational structures and how, ironically, they have made us all “puny,” both individually and collectively. “Each film,” Wiseman has said, “explores a different aspect of the relationship of the individual to the state in a democratic society.”2 While later films, such as State Legislature and City Hall, explore the democratic process itself (and in so doing, work as a response to these early films), the clients struggling to navigate the system in Welfare; the medical staff, patients, and families in Near Death grappling with the ethical choices that have arisen as a result of sophisticated technology; the people struggling to lead decent lives in the blasted neighborhood of Public Housing all are presented as reduced in a variety of ways, made onedimensional by contemporary American culture. The recurrent images of

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people forcibly shaved, as in Titicut Follies, Basic Training, and Hospital, as well as the monkeys shaved for experiments in Primate and the sheared sheep in Meat, express this diminished autonomy of the individual. Shots of files and dossiers, computer cards and tape punctuate these early films, suggesting how people have been reduced to statistics. A former student in High School, about to be dropped behind the DMZ in Vietnam, defines himself as “only a body doing a job.” This phrase reverberates tellingly throughout Wiseman’s oeuvre. The six early documentaries discussed in this chapter share a common focus on public, tax-supported institutions. Wiseman approaches these institutions as, in his words, cultural “spoors” or social microcosms. In Primary, the Drew filmmakers want us to view the campaigns of Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy as emblematic of the American political process and its debasement by the mass media. Yet, the film finds no textual strategies for representing its profilmic material in this way and so must fall back on the narrator’s assertion that what happened in Wisconsin in 1960 could happen anywhere, anytime. Wiseman films, by contrast, while viewing their subjects with the concrete force that observational cinema is ideally suitable for, encourage a wider reading of the specific institution as a reflection of American society itself. This wider view is animated in these films by a sense of outrage, a strongly negative vision of institutions. Because of this moral concern, Wiseman refuses to provide a comfortable position for viewers, offering textual ambiguity instead. These six films inaugurate Wiseman’s search for an aesthetically satisfying form for his concept of “reality fiction,” establishing the basic method and style that characterize his subsequent work. From the outset, the effect is provocative. The wryly ironic opening of Wiseman’s first documentary, Titicut Follies, shot in the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, presents some darkened, at first indistinct faces. The camera pans from one face to the next, momentarily bringing each out of the engulfing darkness into the light, only to disappear into darkness again. The light itself is ghastly, emanating from harsh footlights below, as in an old Hollywood horror film. Wilfred Sheed’s description of the production as “a travesty of the latest Ziegfeld, as interpreted by Trappist monks” only begins to capture its eerie quality.3 These sickly faces sing the Gershwins’ “Strike Up the Band” as if marking the initiation of Wiseman’s entire institutional series (see figure 2.1).

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FIGURE 2.1  Titicut

Follies: The performance that opens the film is unsettling.

This opening sequence, at the inmates’ annual musical revue from which the film gets its title, inaugurates a reflexive examination of observational cinema that Wiseman has continued throughout his work, especially in Model and National Gallery. It immediately establishes the filmmaker’s awareness of his chosen medium and the viewer’s position as an active participant.4 Because it depicts a performance, the sequence addresses the debate about how the camera affects the profilmic event and to what extent people perform for the camera. The implication is that people indeed may perform, and sometimes do, but as Wiseman (like Rouch) has said, this does not necessarily invalidate the observational method, for out of it, insights may nevertheless emerge. As a teacher tells a parent in High School, “We can only judge on the basis of performance.” Performance, too, is central to Wiseman’s cinema, most obviously in Ballet, La Comédie-Française, La danse, and Crazy Horse, but the issue arises in every film.

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The camera records the opening “Strike Up the Band” performance from the audience’s vantage point as if the performance is put on for the film viewer. One is reminded of Norman Bates’s attack on Marion Crane in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) when she suggests he send his mother to an institution; his description of the place with “the cruel eyes studying you” suddenly makes us, along with Marion, feel ashamed. We are made to respond similarly in Titicut Follies. This is one of our institutions, after all (Barsam notes that “Titicut Follies exposes more about us than it does about Bridgewater”5), and so attention must be paid. Wiseman says that “the idea of the movie came out of the absolute sense of shock about what Bridgewater was about.”6 This feeling is, in turn, conveyed to the viewer, who is not allowed to maintain the comfortable position of invisible voyeur. A position as the invisible, unacknowledged spectator that Richard Leacock calls “the fly on the wall” is one that can rarely be assumed in Wiseman’s cinema for any length of time, despite first impressions based on his generally unacknowledged camera. This undercutting of voyeuristic invisibility is reinforced at several points in the film when the camera’s gaze is returned by patients. The most powerful example of this occurs when the camera follows the naked ex-schoolteacher Jim into his cell, where he huddles in a corner, trying to cover his genitals with his hands. Jim’s futile attempt at modesty signals his awareness of the camera’s presence, as does his direct return of the camera’s gaze. Momentarily, he halts in his action as if sizing up the camera’s focus on him. Inevitably, we become painfully aware of the camera’s (and of our) intrusive presence. Further, performance is thematically central to the film since the inmates are forever “on stage”—always under observation by the staff. As Michel Foucault has shown, the mental institution is a place where the behavior of people labeled insane is always being observed and judged by those in control, “a sort of invisible tribunal in permanent session.”7 The film shows inmates in a variety of performances, some overt, others more subtle. As in Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963), sanity at Bridgewater is defined as a “convincing performance.” Vladimir, trying too hard to convince the staff that he is sane and should be sent back to prison, overplays his role such that his request is denied. Even Eddie, one of the guards, seems to define himself more as a performer (he acts as emcee of the follies revue and sings several other times

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in the film) than a guard. After his song in the party sequence, he does an encore and exits with a theatrical flourish. The film ends with another song from the revue, the finale (“We’ve had our show/ The best that we could do/ To make your hearts aglow”). Like a musical, the entire film is framed within the context of a show, demonstrating the work’s awareness of its performance aspect. In contrast to the classical musical’s vision of a harmonious, utopian community,8 however, Titicut Follies presents a dystopian collection of alienated and isolated individuals. This first film shows a remarkable sensitivity to the textual implications of found music.9 When a guard talks about how they used to gas patients, making his eyes tear, a few notes of Erroll Garner’s classic “Misty” are heard coming from the radio in the room. Such irony, however, is often more significant than simply comic. “Chicago Town,” for instance, sung by Eddie and Willie, expresses the wish to be a child (“Oh, what a joy/ to be only a boy”) who delights in amusements (“I want to ride on the shoot-de-shoot/ And the merry-go-round”) of the big city (“That’s where I long to be”). As Dan Armstrong points out, the patients of Bridgewater are frequently treated like children;10 yet, it is also significant that the wish of the song contrasts sharply with the stultifying reality of the institution. Most of the musical numbers feature lyrics about “elsewhere.” Like the irony of “Chicago Town,” the trombone rendition of “My Blue Heaven” in the yard contrasts pointedly with the purgatorial reality of people aimlessly milling about. Along with Essene, the title Titicut Follies is for Wiseman’s work uniquely nondescript. It gives us no indication of its subject if we are unaware of the Bridgewater facility beforehand, and its significance is never explained within the film. Even if we happen to possess this information in advance, the opening performance is still confusing because it is impossible to know with any degree of certainty the status of some of the people we are shown. Are these all inmates, or are some of the men guards? We do not discover that Eddie is, in fact, a guard until he is glimpsed later in the film walking by the camera in his uniform. Reviewer Robert Hatch complained that the film was inept because it raised but failed to answer so many questions: “Is the show a part of their therapy, how does the audience respond (there is not a single shot into the house), is this a regular feature of the hospital life?”11 But, of course, this is quite to the point, for the sequence attacks our comfortable position as

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spectators from several flanks at once. After the finale, Eddie, as emcee, asks with unintentional irony, “Weren’t they terrific?” These are the film’s last words, leaving us to determine our responses to and judgments about the inmates, their “performance,” and their situations. The black humor (Eddie declares, “And it keeps getting better and better”), the found symbolism, the importance of social functions and rituals, the problematized relationship of the spectator to the text, and the reflexive implications about observational cinema itself are all significant elements of this opening sequence. Thus begins Wiseman’s work in documentary, a prescient sequence that adumbrates various aspects of his style. At the same time that Titicut Follies forcefully confronts us with particular people in a specific institution, we are invited by the film to view Bridgewater metaphorically. One patient (identified in the transcript as Kaminsky) delivers a delirious monologue that explicitly makes an analogy between Bridgewater and America itself. The country’s military aggression is, he says, a result of frustration, of being “sex crazy”—the same opinion Dr. Ross holds of the sex offender Mitch. Several contemporary reviews of Titicut Follies compare the film to Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, made into a successful film by Peter Brook the year before Wiseman’s film and shot in a pseudo-direct cinema style.12 Both films are set in mental institutions, both feature aspects of performance within the text, both make important use of music, and both explore the nature of madness in the context of politics and the state. However, more resonant connections can be discerned with Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), although they seem to have been overlooked, at least by reviewers. The works of Kesey and Wiseman share a view of the mental institution as a metaphor for what Wiseman calls the “larger cultural hues” of America.13 (It is probably for this reason that Wiseman inserts a shot of a cinema marquee advertising Milos Forman’s 1975 film version of Kesey’s novel in the later Canal Zone. Benson and Anderson report that, according to Wiseman, Forman’s cast and crew watched Titicut Follies repeatedly before beginning production.14) The book’s self-conscious “American theme” is suggested by Kesey’s narrator, a mute Native American, just as Wiseman refers to Native America in his film’s title, “Titicut,” being the Native American name for the Bridgewater area. Welfare, tellingly, begins with a displaced Native American protesting that he is “a person.” The man’s description of

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the reservation as a concentration camp echoes Chief Bromden’s fantasy in Kesey’s novel about the military-industrial complex that he calls “the combine” (the same phrase that is used by Governor Parfitt to describe the political/economic control of Zonian life in Canal Zone). Titicut Follies and Cukoo’s Nest both focus on issues of emasculation through medication (in Titicut Follies, one patient imagines that the doctors are going to remove his testicles) and other severe forms of treatment as ways of maintaining social control. (In this sense, the film anticipates Primate.) Finally, both works question the definitions of madness and sanity. In Titicut Follies, Dr. Ross and the patient Vladimir have a discussion in the yard (see figure 2.2). Dr. Ross predicts that, if released, Vladimir will return to the asylum immediately. Then, strangely, Dr. Ross tells Vladimir that if his prediction is wrong, “you can spit on my face.” Vladimir responds with the sensible question, “Why should I do that?” At this moment, the doctor, like Kesey’s Nurse Ratched, seems to be the mad one. Similarly, the behavior of some of the guards may also seem “crazy.”

FIGURE 2.2  Titicut

Follies: An inmate discusses his case with the doctor.

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In Titicut Follies, however, insanity is less the seething, controlled hostility of a Big Nurse than the banality of common callousness, as when Jim is taunted about his dirty room and Albert is teased in the bathtub. Yet, there is a crucial difference between the two works. In Wiseman’s vision of the American snake pit, there is no boisterous embodiment of the life principle to equal Kesey’s robust Randall Patrick McMurphy. Vladimir, like the novel’s Billy Bibbit, can mount only a weak protest, the response to which is increased medication. His inescapable position is represented by the brick wall in the yard behind him when he talks with Dr. Ross, who “stonewalls” him. In Kesey’s book, McMurphy’s lobotomy serves as a sacrificial act that redeems the Chief from his muteness. In the end, Bromden escapes the institution to return to his land (“I been away a long time,” he says).15 But the vision of Titicut Follies is darker, for it seems that the only way out is through death. Vladimir wants to leave but cannot, while, as far as we are shown, only a corpse is allowed to depart Bridgewater. In the film, Vladimir may resist, but it helps neither him nor anyone else. The film refuses to allow the viewer a comfortable experience because of its strong sense of moral indignation—a point of view clearly signaled by the word “follies” in the film’s title. Indeed, in Titicut Follies, Wiseman criticizes the conditions at Bridgewater with editing that, like Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of the “Kino-fist,” is far from subtle. Immediately after the opening performance, there is a quick shot of a guard ordering an inmate to get his clothes. This is followed by Mitch’s interview with Dr. Ross, who questions him in a blunt way that, while likely necessary, nevertheless seems unduly callous. As the interview proceeds, Wiseman cuts suddenly to some guards strip-searching newly arrived inmates. The film then returns to the interview, where Dr. Ross’s questions become more aggressive, perhaps even tinged with cruelty. (Arthur Knight describes him as “a German-accented doctor who licks his lips over every sex question,” while Amos Vogel calls him a “Dr. Strangelove psychiatrist.”16) Viewer sympathy here is more likely to align itself with the patient, who admits his problems and seeks help, than with the doctor, who says weakly, perhaps even begrudgingly, “You’ll get it here, I guess.” The inserted shot of the stripping of the inmates offers an obvious comparison between the two procedures; Dr. Ross’ interview with Mitch is a psychological stripping, a cold, incompassionate prodding that offers little warmth or

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comfort. As Foucault said of the science of mental disease as it developed in the institution of the asylum, it would always be observation and classification, never a dialogue.17 Similar in tone is Wiseman’s presentation of the emaciated Malinowski, the inmate who is force-fed because he refuses to eat. Like the inmates in the earlier strip-search sequence, the man is naked, a sign of his vulnerability and powerlessness. As the tube is lubricated and pushed through one of Malinowski’s nostrils (on a wall behind the doctor hangs a calendar with an advertisement for “Perfection Oil”), Wiseman inserts several quick shots of the same man being prepared for his funeral at a later date. The shaving of the corpse connects the treatment of Malinowski to the earlier rough shaving of Jim’s face, which caused blood to trickle down his chin and, as Stephen Mamber notes, ironically suggests that Malinowski receives more attention in death than he did when alive.18 Moreover, the inserted shots draw precise ironic parallels between the two procedures. When the tube is put into his nose, there is an inserted shot of the dead Malinowski being shaved; when the camera pans to the watching eyes of the guards holding him down, there is a shot (in a quick series of three shots) of the dead man’s eyes being stuffed with cotton; after Ross removes the tube from Malinowski’s nose, there is a shot of the shaving process completed; and after Malinowski is led away, there is a shot of the body being stored on a sliding tray in the morgue. The contrast between these two events is emphasized even further by the editing of the soundtrack, for the feeding procedure is accompanied by a clutter of ambient noise and voices, while each of the embalming shots is starkly silent, redolent of death. Finally, while force-feeding the inmate, Dr. Ross smokes a cigarette, its long ash hanging precipitously over the funnel through which the patient is receiving his food. Like the cigarette and ruler in the hand of the coroner at the end of Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), the image is a powerful objective correlative of institutional indifference. The stark, unsettling power of Titicut Follies embroiled Wiseman in a complex legal battle that was not resolved until July 1991, when Judge Andrew Gil Meyer of the Massachusetts Superior Court reversed the earlier ruling.19 Before the court’s decision, Titicut Follies was screened as part of the Social Change in America program of the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1967 and then had a six-day commercial run. With the

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exception of the reviews by the more perceptive Robert Coles and Richard Schickel, the film was not particularly well received. Wilfred Sheed, for example, saw the film as exploiting the inmates (“offering a vulture’s-eyeview”), while Arthur Knight thought it violated “common decency” and even falsely accused Wiseman of shooting with hidden cameras. Brendan Gill claimed it “was a sickening film from start to finish,” and that it “has no justification for existing except to the extent that it is intended to have legislative and other non-aesthetic consequences.” Vincent Canby, not knowing exactly what to say about it, described the film as “occasionally awkward and always compelling.”20 The result of the extended legal battle, dubbed by Charles Taylor “the Titicut Follies follies,”21 was that the film itself became the focus of attention rather than the conditions at Bridgewater. The much-publicized litigation may have gained Wiseman some notoriety early in his career, but it did little to improve conditions at the institution. It was reported by the press in the spring of 1987, twenty years after Wiseman’s film, that five inmates had died that year alone at Bridgewater, four of them by suicide.22 The institution was the subject of ABC-TV’s Nightline on August 25th that year, with Wiseman as one of the guests. The Titicut Follies experience taught Wiseman that social change is not easily achieved. This lesson, it would seem, significantly affected his filmmaking practice, for not only did Wiseman become more careful of legal concerns, but his style would become less didactic in manner and more subtle in its social criticism. High School, Wiseman’s second film, already reveals such aesthetic growth. Indicative of this was his decision to film in an institution that seemed to be working relatively well. The film was shot at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, a relatively “good” school in the system (unlike Bridgewater, neither underfunded nor understaffed) and chosen because Wiseman felt an inner city school would be too easy a target.23 The film demonstrates a remarkable advance in Wiseman’s sense of structure. From the sledgehammer Kino-fist style of Titicut Follies, in this film, he begins to explore a more complex dialectical form of montage, establishing more resonant relationships between sequences that are themselves embedded within a more carefully organized structure. Elements of the film’s style, it is true, particularly the numerous closeups, retain the heavily didactic quality of Titicut Follies and obviously portray the teachers at Northeast negatively. High School relies on these

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closeups to a greater extent than any of Wiseman’s other films, with the exception of Essene, where they function differently. In High School, the closeups appear consistently, beginning immediately with the first teacher who announces the “thought for the day.” With few exceptions, they are of teachers’ faces rather than of students. When the vice principal (identified as the dean of discipline in the transcript) speaks to a boy who does not want to take gym, for example, the camera zooms in to a big closeup of his mouth (see figure 2.3). The image of the mouth, isolated from the rest of his face and greatly magnified in closeup, implies that he is talking at rather than to the boy. Moreover, the mouth’s unnatural bigness on the screen gives it a menacing quality wholly appropriate in context; the camera zooms out, as if recoiling, when the vice principal rises from his chair and ominously approaches the boy. By contrast, closeups of students’ faces are almost always accompanied on the soundtrack by a teacher’s voice and so tend to suggest passivity. As in Titicut Follies, there is very little real dialogue in the film; we almost never see the kids communicate with one

FIGURE 2.3  High School: This big closeup of the vice principal graphically expresses the

teacher’s dominance over the students.

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another, as the students frequently do in the Deaf and Blind films and High School II. Twice teachers ask, “Any questions?” but there are none, and we see nothing of the promised discussion of Simon and Garfunkel’s appropriate “The Dangling Conversation.” As the vice principal so aptly puts it to the boy who does not want to participate in gym, “Don’t you talk and you just listen!” Some critics have reacted to this aspect of the film’s style as heavyhanded manipulation, perceiving the closeups as “cheap shots.” “Take the scene with the counselor, an older woman with bottle-thick glasses. Those extreme closeups of the woman make her look grotesque, which prejudices us against her in a certain way,” objected G. Roy Levin, for example (see figure 2.4). Like Gulliver’s response to the Brobdingnagians, some viewers are inevitably repulsed by the details of common faces with all their blemishes magnified on the movie screen. Closeups of the teacher with thick glasses or the guidance counselor with extremely puffy eyelids are perceived as degrading images rather than as ironic expressions of

FIGURE 2.4  High

School: This teacher’s thick glasses serve as an image of the school administration’s myopic approach to education.

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the school’s narrow, myopic vision. Wiseman countered Levin’s interpretation by claiming that it is one conditioned by Hollywood’s reliance on beautiful stars and that the shots in question are thematically motivated.24 His assertion that their significance can only be understood in context suggests the extent to which Wiseman is approaching his material in cinematic terms. The film’s editing, though, is, on occasion, heavy-handed in its irony, as, for example, when an English teacher’s painful reading of Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” (the last line is “Mighty Casey has struck out”) is followed by girls swinging at baseballs in a gym class. The scene where the camera follows a teacher patrolling the school hallway (reconstructed as a nouvelle vague–like homage in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore [1998]) works similarly. After questioning students on the telephone about their hall passes, the teacher looks through the window in a door as the pop song “Simple Simon” fades in on the soundtrack. The song’s authoritative commands—similar to much of what we hear from teachers throughout High School—reinforce the film’s overall view of the education process as impersonal and authoritarian. The film cuts from the teacher in the hallway peering through the window to the gym, where girls in uniform are exercising to the song, and viewers are encouraged to read the connection between the shots to suggest that the teacher was looking at this particular activity in the gym and that the camera’s emphasis on the girls’ buttocks is a point-of-view shot from the teacher’s perspective, with all that implies. Somewhat more subtle is the placement of the sequence with the vice principal and the boy who is avoiding gym class. Wiseman edited it between classroom scenes of foreign languages, an ironic suggestion about the remote relationship between teachers and students. As far as the student who wants to be excused from gym is concerned, it is as if he and the vice principal are speaking two different languages since it is only after he agrees to put on his gym outfit that he is suspended. Such moments of playful or ironic montage construction, however, may obscure the film’s more thoughtful design wherein, as the English teacher says of the Simon and Garfunkel song, “all the various poetic devices reinforce the theme.” Ultimately, these more subtle structural relations demonstrate the potential of Wiseman’s observational cinema to probe events for meaning beyond the visibly apparent.

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High School is structured according to two organizing principles. The first is the conventional “day-in-the-life-of ” approach. Thus, the film opens with the camera riding in a car, presumably on the way to school in the morning. The first classroom shots contain announcements and the “thought for the day” that clearly mark the beginning of the school day, and about midway through the film, there is a scene of the teachers having lunch. The second aspect of the film’s surface organization, frequently mentioned by Wiseman in interviews, is the presentation of the school as being similar to a manufacturing process (indeed, there are several links between this film and, for example, Meat). Wiseman has said that when he first saw the school, he was struck by how much it resembled a factory, like a General Motors plant, and so he integrated this perception into the film’s structure.25 Shown in the opening sequence from the car, the exterior of the building, with its smokestack and fences, looks at least as much like a factory as it does a school (see figure 2.5). The idea of the school experience as a factory-like process, with the students becoming

FIGURE 2.5  High

School: Northeast’s architectural resemblance to a factory reinforces the film’s view of education as an impersonal process.

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socialized “products,” informs a more complex thematic structure than the day-in-the-life format and gradually subsumes it. After the opening shots in the car, the camera stays inside the school until the third from the last sequence, in which the returning Vietnam veteran talks with the gym coach in the schoolyard. The initial movement from exterior to interior space suggests, as in the beginnings of Hospital and Canal Zone, that the film will take a penetrating look into this institution rather than merely observe (from the outside) its surface phenomena. The first words spoken in the film, a teacher’s “thought for the day,” is, on this level, an appropriate aphorism: “Life is cause and effect. One creates his tomorrow at every moment by his motives, thoughts, and deeds of today.” This sentiment is echoed by the teacher in the girls’ sex education lecture, who says that boys “never connect what they are doing today with what happens tomorrow,” and by the counselor, who remarks to the student Rona that “the only thing that you can do is try to do better in the present so that the future will be better.” All three comments emphasize the relation between present and future and, by extension, between earlier sequences and later ones, and how they must be read in terms of their context, their position within the text. This idea is borne out by the dialectical manner in which the sequences are ordered. Individually, most of them are stylistically neutral, offering little textual evidence for a negative reading of the institution. After the homeroom announcements, the first lesson shown is the Spanish class discussing existentialism. Here, Wiseman immediately establishes the film’s attitude by beginning with a lesson about a philosophical worldview that champions individualism and that claims “existence precedes essence.” The content of the lesson is ironic in the context of its presentation, for the teacher’s approach is to have the entire class drone in unison everything she says. Individual response is not permitted, and later we see that those who have not wholeheartedly accepted the school’s values are isolated into a separate discussion group. The Spanish lesson scene is significant because of its placement as the first class shown and because Wiseman cuts from it to a percussion lesson, with the music teacher’s conducting hand, emphasized by the framing of the shot, keeping the beat for the students. Here, as in the Spanish class and everywhere else in the film, there is no room for a different drummer.

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The school’s claim for the importance of individualism, consistently denied in practice, is only one instance of the institution’s use of contradictory messages, what Thomas Benson, citing anthropologist Gregory Bateson, calls “the double bind.”26 On a formal level, these double binds are expressed by a motif of paired sequences; there are two language classes, two English classes, and two scenes with Rona’s parents (one profilmic event separated by editing). Frequently, these pairs relate in terms of strong contrast, further emphasizing the double bind. One of the English classes, for example, features the stiff recital of “Casey at the Bat,” while the other contains the more contemporary Simon and Garfunkel song (a “rock with Shakespeare” display is visible on the back wall of this classroom). As many commentators have noted, most of the film’s sequences, in one way or another, emphasize depersonalization and ideological indoctrination. (“You have had practice in controlling your impulses and feelings ever since you have been a baby. . . . You have learned by now that it’s part of being human, that you can’t have what you want when you want it,” the teacher in the girls’ sex education lecture declares.) The similarity of the row houses glimpsed in the opening drive to the school foreshadows the impersonal conformism that dominates the school’s activities and its approach to education. The girls in the fashion class are identified by numbers, as are the three “astronauts.” In the girls’ gym class, the camera focuses not on their faces but on their bodies, clad in identical uniforms, their group calisthenics anticipating similar scenes of regimented exercise in Basic Training and Juvenile Court. One teacher explains to a girl who wants to wear a short dress to the school prom, “It’s nice to be individualistic, but there are certain places to be individualistic” (although we see no such places in the film), and the girl is forced to apologize (“I didn’t mean to be individualistic”). Bob Walters, a former student and author of the letter read by the principal in the last scene, describes himself as “only a body doing a job.” For Wiseman, he is the logical end of the process, the final product of the assembly plant, an unquestioning, obedient person, the “Chevrolet rolling off the GM line.”27 The school lessons and activities tend to focus particularly on issues of sexual identity and gender definition. Wiseman refers to the film’s emphasis on sexual issues as its “unisex theme,”28 although it is more accurate to describe it as the learning of sexual difference according to dominant ideology. On the back of the dairy truck in the opening sequence, we see a “Penn

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FIGURE 2.6  High School: The “Penn Maid” logo in the opening sequence is a visual pun

that initiates the film’s examination of sexual conditioning and gender definition.

Maid” logo, accompanied by a caricatured contented cow featuring prominent painted lips and a fulsome, pendulous udder (see figure 2.6). The image puns in two ways. “Penn Maid Products,” as Benson has noticed,29 refers to the students as products of this Pennsylvania school and as prison inmates. The cartoon image also graphically expresses the simplistic yet strong sexist attitude that pervades the school and which is one of High School’s dominant motifs (as made clear in the rally scene where boys dress as cheerleaders complete with large breasts). The film’s final few sequences draw this view to a logical conclusion, suggesting the implications of this specific school’s process of socialization by progressively connecting it to another national institution, the military—which had particular significance for students in 1968. Wiseman’s strategy of pursuing the larger implications of Northeast’s ideology follows from the vice principal’s definition of manhood early in the film as being able to take orders, and several critics have noted the strong connections between High School and Basic Training.30 The first major sequence after the former student on leave from duty in Vietnam

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visits the gym teacher involves the simulated landing of the three student astronauts as part of Project SPARC, an activity endorsed by NASA (the teacher reads a letter of congratulations from real astronaut L. Gordon Cooper). The next and last sequence is the reading of the letter from Bob Walters, who at the time of writing was waiting to be dropped behind the DMZ. The order of the sequences reminds the viewer that space research exists in a military context, much as the scientists’ idea of “pure research” in Primate is undercut by the subsequent experiment aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. Even the short sequence shot positioned between these last two important sequences, showing the school color guard carrying the flag and dummy rifles, possesses a pronounced militaristic quality. In the scene where the boy who has not dressed for gym is suspended, a photograph of an American flag on the wall behind the vice principal encourages a reading of the teacher’s attitude as reflecting national ideology and, thus, that the school is a representative social microcosm (see figure 2.7). In the second sequence in the office where Michael is forced to take a detention against his principles, the flag photo is again

FIGURE 2.7  High School: The image of the American flag acknowledges the film’s examination of the school as a “cultural spoor.”

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featured prominently in the frame, directly above the vice principal’s head. Later, the vice principal himself unintentionally contextualizes his own role in the larger social fabric when, teaching a lesson on the history of organized labor in America, he explains that workers felt it necessary to unionize because there was a lack of communication between employers and employees. Over the opening car ride sequence, Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is heard on the soundtrack. The song does not emanate from the car radio but was added to the soundtrack. This is a rare instance of Wiseman’s “twisting” of the material, which he defends as observationally true to the experience since he did, in fact, hear the song every morning during the shoot while driving to the school. Wiseman has interpreted the song’s thematic significance as being about the death of the American Dream, for its narrator has removed himself from the world by turning away from civilization: “It’s about a guy who has left Georgia and gone to California in search of America. . . . He’s at the end of the continent. He’s traveled all over and it doesn’t mean a thing to him!”31 Like Huck Finn, he has lit out for the territory, and so from the very beginning, the viewer is encouraged to read the film for its larger social implications. The principal’s remark after reading Bob Walters’s letter, while grammatically a declarative statement, functions like a rhetorical question, addressed as much to the viewer as to the assembled teachers. “Now when you get a letter like this,” Dr. Haller says, “to me it means that we are very successful at Northeast High School. I think you will agree with me.” The fact that the film ends abruptly as she concludes her reading leaves the viewer to contemplate the extent to which one agrees with her assessment of the letter. V. F. Perkins has argued that this effect of leaving the question for the audience to decide is enhanced by Wiseman’s sound editing. Because Wiseman eliminates the sound after the question, deleting any sense of the assembled teachers’ response, and he holds the image a beat longer, we are left at the film’s end with Dr. Haller’s triumphant smile, a prod to our own judgment of the principle’s view of educational success.32 Like Eddie’s evaluation of the inmates’ performance at the end of Titicut Follies, phrased as a question, the viewer is left to consider the implications and consequences of the high school experience as depicted in the film.

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After the gynecologist’s lecture comes a sequence from a sex education film that the students are also watching. The narrator discusses gonorrhea and its effect on pregnant women, concluding with the statement, “When the baby is ready to be born there is danger that she may transmit the disease to the child when it passes out of her body.” The transmission of disease to the young who emerge into the world acquires in context a social meaning for students who graduate and enter the world of adulthood, especially since Wiseman follows this sequence with the uniformed former student visiting the gym coach. Hospital, Wiseman’s fourth film, picks up on this metaphor, examining New York’s Metropolitan Hospital as a symptom of larger social ills. One doctor’s remark that “man is not born with disease. He acquires these disorders when he tries to adapt to a certain level of civilization” articulates the film’s thesis. In Hospital, Wiseman, so to speak, performs a cinematic exploratory—the cut of the scalpel analogous to his work as a film editor. The malignancies he finds are unpleasant truths. In order for us to understand the hospital as itself a symptom, along with Wiseman, we must look intently, like the interns who unflinchingly examine the brains of deceased patients. As in Titicut Follies, with Hospital’s very first image—a high angle shot of an anesthetized patient—Wiseman seeks to grab viewers and shake them out of a voyeuristic complacency by moving beyond, as it were, a “gut response” (see figure 2.8). Hospital is a clear example of what Nichols has called Wiseman’s “tactlessness,”33 for in the surgery images or the lengthy scene of the induced vomiting in the young man who had taken mescaline, the film deliberately violates good taste. The psychiatrist’s apparent appeal to the camera (actually, he speaks to a resident in the room who is kept out of frame) that Miss Hightower at the welfare office “hung up on me” directly connects the viewer to the film. (“Let us go then, You and I,” the beginning of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is evoked by the opening image of the patient seemingly etherized upon a table). Its structure, too, works to grab and hold the viewer’s attention. As Brian Winston has noted, Hospital “is structured around sequences of normal, emotionally uncharged activities crosscut with sequences of distress, whereby the former become shorter and the latter longer and more distressful as the film progresses.”34 Despite the many unpleasant sights in the film, Hospital, in fact, generally avoids a sensationalistic approach.

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FIGURE 2.8  Hospital: The opening shot introduces the film’s examination of both physical and spiritual illness.

Most importantly, the film does not condemn the staff of Metropolitan Hospital by showing them brutalizing patients in the manner of Titicut Follies. Indeed, one doctor who has commented on the film asserts that if any criticism is to be leveled at Hospital, it is that the staff is depicted as impossibly positive.35 The biggest gap revealed in Hospital is not between the ideology of the institution and its practice but rather, as Harry M. Geduld notes, between the rich and poor.36 The film emphasizes that this economic disparity— what one of the teachers in High School calls, after Michael Harrington, “the other America”—is but a symptom of social illness. Indeed, there is a gross irony in the fact that the horses in Racetrack receive better medical attention than many of the human patients in Hospital. Unlike High School, which Wiseman chose to film in a “good” school, Hospital was filmed in a large, overburdened public health facility located near Harlem and Spanish Harlem. The film concentrates almost exclusively on the hospital’s

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emergency room, where the need for immediate medical attention heightens the sense of the place itself as a site of crisis. Many of the patients suffer from drug-related problems, injuries received in fights, or family or social neglect—problems not restricted to a particular class but certainly more prevalent among the economically underprivileged. Economic issues are therefore inevitably foregrounded since these patients are obtaining this medical service not by choice but because of economic necessity. Wiseman himself says that the film is not a critique of this particular institution. It’s too much of a liberal’s thing to say, “If only we had more doctors, if only we had more nurses, the situation would be different.” The problems are so much more complicated, so much more interesting. You see people who have never been to doctors in thirty years, who can’t read or write, who live in crappy houses, who don’t have jobs, are recent immigrants either from other countries or from rural or urban areas. And you see the staff trying to deal with them as best they can—but they can’t correct the conditions that led to these people walking through the hospital door in the first place.37

Toward the beginning of the film, Dr. Schwartz calls another hospital that has just transferred a patient to Metropolitan. He complains about the sloppiness of the procedure; no information was sent with her or in advance, even though her condition may require emergency surgery. It is as if she had been regarded as so much baggage, a situation that is apparently all too common. With stoic resignation in his voice, Dr. Schwartz concludes his phone call by saying, “This is the sort of thing that we see all the time, and whenever it happens, I make it a habit of calling the administrator and voicing my complaint.” Near the end of the film, similarly, an ambulance driver and a policeman discuss a woman just brought into the hospital. The driver had searched for several hours without success for a hospital to admit her. He repeatedly says that “it don’t make sense” (a phrase also used earlier to describe a situation in which a neglected boy who has fallen out of an apartment window cannot be kept in the hospital overnight until social services investigates), but the policeman diagnoses the problem as an economic one: “I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have no money at all. You have to take what comes.” These two

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sequences bracket most of the medical procedures in the film, lending them all a sense of economic constraint. Perhaps the film’s most visually striking instance of this theme is the sequence of the psychiatrist’s interview with the young, gay black man. Throughout the interview, the man is seated against a wall while the camera pulls back slightly to incorporate within the frame a picture of thenmayor of New York John V. Lindsay hanging above him (see figure 2.9). The picture, originally a cover from Life magazine, features the caption, “The Lindsay Style.” The gay man and the image of Lindsay within the film’s image offer a striking contrast: one is black, the other white; one is poor, “freakish,” and disempowered, unable to obtain welfare assistance and rejected even by his mother; the other is wealthy, glamorous, and politically influential. The gay man describes himself as “not a normal human being,” while the specter of Lindsay hovering above him expresses much of society’s masculine ideals. The contrast between them is amplified by the fact that the gay man’s body, arm, and head are arranged in a manner almost identical to Lindsay’s pose in the photograph. These

FIGURE 2.9  Hospital:

A graphic representation of the “Other America.”

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two nevertheless radically different male images graphically express the examining psychiatrist’s diagnosis of the man as a schizophrenic. He can never attain the cultural ideal literally hanging over his head in this scene because of his skin color, economic status, and sexual orientation. The film extends its social criticism to the viewer as well, particularly in the conclusion, one of the most powerful moments in all of Wiseman’s work. The last sequence of the film shows patients praying in the hospital’s chapel. There is a cut to a long shot of the hospital building taken from a nearby highway (see figure 2.10). The hospital seems to recede with the slow reverse zoom of the camera while cars traveling on the highway enter the frame and then fill it, moving across the image between the camera and the hospital. The voices of the patients singing a hymn in the chapel can still be heard, but they gradually diminish in volume and are replaced by the “whooshing” of the automobiles driving past the camera. The moving cars express the peripatetic rush of contemporary life. Their growing domination of the image both visually (filling the foreground of the

FIGURE 2.10  Hospital:

The reverse zoom that concludes the film is a forceful comment on contemporary alienation and indifference.

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frame) and aurally (their sounds replacing the hymn on the soundtrack) suggest how the world is too much with us. In the immediate concerns of everyday experience, we forget spiritual values, just as when we are healthy, we prefer not to think about illness—whether physical or social. (Wiseman returns to the theme of spirituality in Essene, the Deaf and Blind films, and Aspen.) The position of the patient’s body on the operating table in the film’s opening image evokes not only Eliot’s “Prufrock” but also the crucifixion (as does the force-feeding of Malinowski in Titicut Follies),38 and connects to the final highway shot by suggesting it is “our sins” that are depicted here. While it is true that the soundtrack is here manipulated (“twisted”) beyond the limitations of synchronization, like Wiseman’s use of the Otis Redding song in High School, the effect is consistent with the film’s point of view and provides an effective summation of its social concerns. Both Law and Order and Juvenile Court also deflect their social criticism back to the spectator by presenting a deliberately shifting view of institutional authority. Both employ a similar symmetrical design but to different ends. Law and Order avoids a simplistically negative treatment of the Kansas City police by instead showing them from a double perspective. The sequence where one policeman becomes a father figure to a lost little girl, bringing her to the station and giving her candy, may be, as Mamber asserts, the most annoying scene in all of Wiseman’s work because it is both obvious and cloying.39 But it functions as only one instance in a series of sequences that systematically presents the police as alternately kind and cruel. The policeman himself provides the perfect emblem of his “parental” position by taking out a pipe and smoking it as he drives the patrol car with one arm wrapped protectively around the child, and Wiseman clearly encourages this view of him by shooting the policeman from a low angle. But elsewhere in the film, we see events that are likely to make us angry, such as the shocking scene where a detective seems excessively violent to a prostitute, choking her even as he denies doing so. For every scene in which a policeman does something like find a lost purse for an elderly woman, there is another, such as the one in which a detective seems to inexplicably ignore a man who wants to report someone with a gun. Thus, viewers are placed in a double position in relation to the police— their torn response analogous to the position of the police themselves.

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The film suggests that the sometimes inadequate or excessive responses of the police are, in turn, symptomatic of the impossible demands—as in High School, a double bind—made upon them as a result of larger, systemic social problems. The police can neither solve domestic crime nor prevent it. Often, all they can do is inform people that “there’s nothing we can do about it”—the response they give in both the opening and closing sequences involving domestic disputes. Indeed, most of the police force’s activities in the film involve handling drunks, accident victims, and domestic conflicts. The domestic emphasis of routine police work (to which Wiseman returns decades later in Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence 2) is expressed by the number of sequences in the film that refer to family and social tensions. In addition to the two domestic arguments that bracket the film, there are also, among others, a man charged with having molested a boy, a man who threatens to kill another man for molesting his niece, and a runaway boy. As well, the fear of a recent race riot permeates the dialogue, and racial tension is evident throughout the film. A white woman who has been arrested makes a point of specifying the racial identity of the arresting officers, for example, while the black youths arrested in the clothing store blame their fate on racial prejudice. Richard Nixon’s campaign speech near the end of Law and Order, in which he says voters are faced with a clear choice between rising crime and reestablishment of “respect for law and order in this country,” makes explicit the social tensions that infuse the film. Society itself is torn by racial hate and fear, just like the police and the viewer are torn. And just as Wiseman, as explained in chapter 1, developed a more complex view of police work during the shoot, so the viewer is challenged to do so as well. In the two sequences of family arguments that bracket the film, the police attempt to mediate. Wiseman has described the film’s design as circular, saying that when the “guy runs off at the end of the film he’s running off to the beginning of the film.”40 Law and Order is circular in the sense that it differs from the structure of, say, Titicut Follies and High School, both of which can be seen as “linear” (to the extent that this is possible within the overall mosaic structure) since both show beginnings and ends to their respective institutional processes. By contrast, Law and Order presents an accumulation of events, an ongoing process, and so is closer in this sense to Juvenile Court and Welfare as well as Hospital. This structure is appropriate, given the film’s view of police work as a combination of routine and

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danger, a situation that Wiseman has described as being “like a taxi driver playing Russian Roulette.”41 Both aspects of police work are shown at once in the sequence of Howard Gilbert’s arrest for auto theft. The camera waits with the youth and the arresting officers, who must listen to his string of racist insults for over five minutes of screen time until the paddy wagon arrives. Later, we hear two references to the fact that Gilbert has been released because he is a youthful offender. Thus, the film’s structural symmetry suggests futility rather than closure; indeed, over the final credits (echoing the conclusion of The Cool World), a voice from the police radio speaks of yet another dangerous suspect in a seemingly endless parade. Juvenile Court examines the legal process for youthful offenders, in a sense picking up where Law and Order leaves off, after the arrest procedure. The film shows an institution ministered by well-intentioned judges, lawyers, parole officers, and social workers (two children of a woman discussing her case sit on the lap of Judge Turner, another seemingly benevolent patriarchal authority), but, like Hospital and Welfare and the Florida courtrooms in Domestic Violence 2, the juvenile courts of Memphis are besieged by a constant flow of clients, many of whom have problems beyond the ability of the institution to handle. Juvenile Court suggests the continuous flow of cases by concluding almost every major sequence in the courtroom with the bailiff announcing the next case. The film is also punctuated several times by a courthouse receptionist answering a barrage of phone calls and by shots of people waiting around on benches, as in Welfare. Judge Turner himself remarks on the large number of child abuse cases he has seen. The film’s very length (144 minutes, Wiseman’s longest to this point—although some of the later films are much longer) speaks of how much work the courts must handle. Given the heavy volume of cases, those who minister the institution try their best to move people through the system as swiftly as possible— sometimes at the expense of the clients themselves. This view of the juvenile court system becomes chillingly clear in the final, lengthy sequence concerning the case of Robert Singleton. The sequence acts like a summary of the entire film and is disturbing in large part because it presents the gap between the institution’s goals and its practice in such an understated way (although one suspects that the filmmaker, himself a lawyer, could not but have responded with outrage to the situation). Singleton is charged with armed robbery, although he only drove the getaway car, had

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no weapon himself, and did not enter either of the places that were robbed. He claims that his life was threatened by the man who actually committed the two robberies and that he was forced to act as the man’s accomplice. His claim is apparently supported by the unsubmitted testimony of the other man involved. Singleton’s defense lawyer, who can hardly be adequately prepared since he had taken on the case just that morning, claims to believe that the boy had no intention to go along with armed robbery and that a trial might exonerate him. Judge Turner decides, however, that in the boy’s best interests, Singleton should plead guilty in juvenile court and serve several months at a youth training school rather than face trial, which might result in a penitentiary term of twenty years. In a private discussion in chambers, Singleton’s lawyer explains that, in his view, neither society’s nor the boy’s best interests would be served by having him tried as an adult; the lawyer is willing to enter a plea of guilty if the court decides in favor of retaining jurisdiction. But Singleton wants to “fight it out in court and prove that I’m innocent.” The lawyer’s view, as he reports to the judge, is that “the boy has lost all control over himself ” and that he is “not in condition to make a decision.” The judge agrees, even though he took the opposite position in the earlier molestation case. The film, though, shows no evidence of irrationality in Singleton, only his different view, his wish to have his day in court, and his sobbing when he is refused and sentenced. During the time in chambers and for most of the time in the courtroom, the camera omits Singleton from its view, just as he seems to be excluded from the undue process that is deciding his fate. In one brief shot, we see him sitting alone on a bench against a wall, isolated both visually and aurally from the proceedings. In the plea bargaining process, the question of guilt is pushed aside, displaced by the question of jurisdiction (just as Michael’s principles become less important than the fact that he take some form of detention in High School). Singleton’s lawyer attempts to console the boy by encouraging him, again reminiscent of High School, to “handle this like a man” and by telling him that in time his record can be erased because “this is America.” Wiseman establishes this larger connection early in the film through several different short but nevertheless significant shots that suggest an analogy between the institutions he has previously examined and juvenile court. In one of these, for example, a detention center guard searches a boy, an image that refers back to the strip searches in Titicut Follies. There follows

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a shot of three boys getting haircuts, an image that also appears in Basic Training and that echoes the shaving in Titicut Follies. Shortly after this, we see boys doing calisthenics, followed by a shot of the court files; the uniform exercises are reminiscent of similar shots in High School (“Simon Says”) and, again, Basic Training, while the files anticipate the impersonal treatment of clients that culminates in the paperwork and bureaucracy of Welfare. Singleton is led out of the courtroom (“An injustice has been done,” he cries), the shot holds on the courtroom door as everyone files out, and then the door closes, an image of the boy’s now-sealed fate (see figure 2.11). Wiseman follows this with two concluding shots of the exterior of the courthouse building and the street, exactly reversing the film’s two opening shots. Unlike Law and Order, the fearful symmetry of this structure here expresses less a sense of futile continuation—although this is suggested elsewhere, in the cutaways of the receptionist, bailiff, and people on the benches—than a closed system that “traps” people, as Singleton says, as often as it provides justice.

FIGURE 2.11  Juvenile Court: The doors of justice close on the youthful offender in the final sequence.

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The ironically titled Welfare is the closed system par excellence, a nightmare vision of institutional bureaucracy out of control. In this film, Wiseman sums up all the institutional and social problems explored in the earlier documentaries. It is no accident that, chronologically, Welfare comes between Primate and Meat; the titles of these films express how far, for Wiseman, living has become objectified, commodified, a matter of mere existence. Phrases like “nothing we can do about it” and “it isn’t our responsibility,” heard in the earlier films, insistently return in Welfare. Here, social and economic relations are reduced to verbal exchanges between welfare workers and clients—the clients seeking the money that the workers have the power to dispense. Welfare foregrounds the economic disparity shown in some of the earlier films since everyone seeking help from the welfare system is penniless, many seeming to be on the verge of starvation. As Mr. Hirsch, the final client shown in the film, says: “There’s no middle class anymore. There’s just the rich and the poor.” John J. O’Connor is, of course, correct when he says that Welfare is the most pointless of Wiseman’s films, for we are all aware of the entangled mess of the system.42 But such criticism misses the essential point of Wiseman’s cinema. It is also the case that almost everyone who views High School has suffered through that experience. It is, as Pauline Kael notes, “an obvious kind of film to make,” but, for her, the film’s power derives in good measure precisely from this fact.43 Wiseman’s documentaries heighten our awareness of routine life in America or, perhaps more accurately, present us with aspects of this life that we assume we know. It is no coincidence that Wiseman goes on to make films entitled Deaf and Blind, films that urge us to regard our world more closely than we normally do. Wiseman’s camera looks intently at aspects of daily life that, exactly because they are so common, we, in fact, often overlook. We are all aware of, although we may prefer not to think about, the horrors of mental institutions, what Marion Crane in Psycho euphemistically refers to as “someplace.” Just as Titicut Follies depicts life in Bridgewater with such power that it cannot be ignored, Welfare is at once obvious and revelatory—in a sense, anticipating the transcendental style of Essene and Deaf and Blind. In Welfare, the camera leaves the building just once, at the beginning. After this, we remain confined within, unlike most of Wiseman’s films which at the very least offer periodic exterior shots as rhythmic pause or

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release (even the enclosed world of Missile is relieved by the occasional outside shot of Vandenberg Air Force Base). Here, though, our physical point of view remains claustrophobically confined within the harsh walls of this one New York City welfare office. When a white racist is tossed out of the building by uniformed guards, the camera moves into a closeup of one of their nightsticks wedged between two door handles, preventing the man from entering—and us from leaving. This place is an absurd huis clos, and we must wait it out along with the system’s needy clients. The first phrase we hear in the film, the receptionist’s “please have a seat,” is thus not only a self-reflexive acknowledgment to the viewer that the film is now beginning but also an ironic invitation to sit through a long ordeal, as the applicants themselves must. Welfare’s nearly threehour running time reflects the labyrinthine, self-contained system of procedures and paperwork through which welfare applicants must navigate. Even at the end of the film, the ambient sounds of the welfare office carry over into the final credits as if interminable. This film is Wiseman’s Bleak House, but instead of the pervasive symbolic fog with which Dickens’s novel opens, Welfare is ironically bathed throughout by the artificial harshness of what James Wolcott aptly calls a “firmament” of fluorescent lights.44 Entrapping the viewer within the building, Wiseman refrains from making its physical layout clear. The geography of the place is confusing to the viewer, just as the procedures are to many of the clients. Physical space is subordinated to cinematic space. Within the welfare center, Wiseman suggests, again, a circular structure similar to that of Law and Order and Juvenile Court. The first couple interviewed in the film is shown again at the end, waiting. As well, clients are frequently trapped in a variety of catch-22 situations, the circular logic consistent with the film’s structure. One client, for example, wants to move but cannot because there is no record of housing violations, but she is unable to get a building inspector to come and formally record the necessary violations. Another client becomes ineligible for benefits because he missed his appointment at the welfare office while attending his fair hearing required by welfare procedures. Toward the beginning of the film, a man seeking immediate help says that he is getting a “run around.” The phrase is echoed periodically by several other clients. Toward the end of the film, a woman who, speaking for her mother, angrily complains that she is caught in a never-ending

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“vicious cycle.” Even Miss Hightower, who had put off the psychiatrist on the telephone and finally hung up on him in Hospital, claims she is getting a “fast shuffle” by the institution. Thus, things have come “full circle,” as Hightower has changed roles from that of victimizer to victim. During the first interview with the couple seeking emergency benefits, they are instructed to proceed first to the housing office on the fifth floor and then to return to the employment office on the fourth floor. But most of the interviews seem to hover in an indeterminate space, a Kafkaesque world in which people never seem to get their cases heard. Like Mr. Hirsch in the film’s final sequence, everyone appears doomed to wait for Godot. Tangible assistance from welfare, even though many people’s needs are immediate, seems unattainable, like Kafka’s castle. The best one can hope for, apparently, is an appointment to return tomorrow. While Dan Armstrong makes a convincing case for the film’s similarities to Waiting for Godot,45 perhaps Act Without Words I is the Beckett play closer in vision to Welfare. As in both Beckett and Kafka, reality in Welfare seems unsettlingly indeterminate. Some applicants have multiple names, and so even their identities are unclear. Welfare, in fact, depicts a world where meaning has crumbled. All of Wiseman’s films reveal people speaking naturally and spontaneously so that their discourse is frequently confused, hesitant, inaudible, and vague. This is, of course, the difference between lange and parole, a difference that observational cinema, because of its unscripted quality, captures so well. Welfare certainly contains its share of incorrect usage. One client, for example, complains that he is being required to “relocate instamatically,” while the white racist speaks of how quickly Blacks “progenerate” and how they are inferior to whites “biologically and nomalogically and pharmanoloty.” But here, to a greater extent than in any of the other films, language is often drained of meaning. The welfare workers speak of “re-entertaining applications” and “financial servicing” for the clients. (Their language anticipates the euphemistic discourse of military indoctrination in Basic Training and the “linguistic detoxification” of nuclear weapons explored in Missile.) “When I say ‘you,’ I don’t mean you,” explains one client to a worker. One woman, according to a case worker, is “using a loose term, but broadly,” with the result that she is accusing herself of child abuse. Sometimes language is used without faith, merely as a signifier; one man uses strong language to present himself

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assertively, then switches immediately to a sweet, endearing tone and expression when he learns that he will be given an interview tomorrow. Welfare is the culmination of the institutional tendency to, as Eliot puts it, fix people in a formulated phrase (as in the dismissive diagnosis of Vladimir in Titicut Follies). Welfare emphasizes the wielding of language for institutional control as explored in High School and Basic Training (“it depends on the language,” as one teacher declares to Rona’s father). Because of the importance of language in Welfare, for the most part, the camera remains content to film people talking. And they do indeed talk, voluminously, more often at cross purposes than not. The interview with Valerie Johnson, the woman whose name seems to have disappeared from the welfare rolls, alone lasts a full twenty-two minutes. Consistently dense, the soundtrack is filled with the constant chatter of typewriter keys, background noise, and voices. The film, like the welfare center itself, is swamped with various kinds of forms. We see or hear about application forms; referral slips; notarized, registered, and certified letters; verifications of pregnancy; marriage licenses and driver’s licenses; bills and receipts; change of address forms and prenatal forms; written budgets and pay stubs; food stamps; Medicaid cards and social security cards; housing deeds, disability checks and proration checks; carbon copies and photocopies. One client complains that she has to “get a notarized letter for this, a notarized letter for that.” Another client, standing aimlessly against a post, launches into a monologue about the “rigmarole of forms” he must fill out; “Papers, papers, papers,” he says, finally dropping them on the floor and leaving in frustration. Even the woman on the telephone, who has provided “every goddamn thing they’ve asked for,” still cannot get “serviced.” The film is punctuated with shots of files and records, timeclock cards, computers, and printouts. Valerie Johnson has become, in effect, a nonperson in the Orwellian sense; her friend remarks with resignation that “if they don’t have your record, they don’t know nothing about you. You could be Jane Doe.” This enclosed world of Welfare (“We go to court, from the court to the hospital, from the hospital to Social Security, to welfare, back to Social Security, to the court,” states an angry client) is like a pressure cooker that inevitably reaches the boiling point (see figure 2.12). After over two hours of seeing clients being frustrated in every possible way, we are not

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FIGURE 2.12  Welfare: The frustration of the clients boils over in the enclosed world of the welfare center.

surprised when two of them, Mr. Rivera and Mrs. Gaskin’s daughter, can no longer contain themselves. They move around the desk, traversing the boundary that separates workers and clients, just as their emotions have spilled over, to confront the welfare worker Elaine, who also loses her temper (“Get a job,” she snaps at Rivera). The anger and frustration of both worker and clients in this climactic scene are the understandable results of everything that has come before. After the climax comes the denouement, the calm after the storm. Mr. Hirsch, made to sit and wait alone on a bench, looks up and addresses the neon firmament and an absent God, saying he will wait as long as deemed necessary. As in Hospital, the workers have become inured to the pain and misfortune of the clients and, perhaps to maintain their own sanity, many have adopted a “strategy of withdrawal.”46 Just as the nurse in Hospital who is thinking of taking a neglected child home with her is warned not to get too involved, so the welfare workers constantly dismiss clients by sending them to “39 Broadway.” In one problematic case, the supervisor

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instructs a worker to reject or accept the client, “either one,” not wanting to become involved any further. Wiseman discovers a found equivalent of Sirkian irony (which he uses again in The Store): Christmas decorations bedeck the welfare center, a counterpoint to actual social relations. The regulations and procedures have overwhelmed all that is human (hence the spiritual quest of Essene and the Deaf and Blind films). “Void this 913,” says one worker, using a kind of newspeak to avoid the reality of the client’s fate. Like the split between morality and technology in High School (“Scientifically and technologically, Northeast is an advanced school. . . . Morally, socially, this school is a garbage can,” says one insightful student), in the welfare center, one client complains, “You give me technicality. I’m telling you about a condition.” Welfare also brings to a head the racial tensions in American society touched upon in several of the earlier films, especially Law and Order, and in other films to follow. At one point in the film, the Black guard who is taunted by the white supremacist responds to the claim that Black people are out to “get Whitey” by saying, “What goes ’round comes ’round.” This is the ultimate expression of the film’s circular motif, for it returns us to the prejudice and social inequities documented in the earlier films. For Wiseman, it is significant that the alienated, disillusioned singer of “The Dock of the Bay” in High School is a Black man, for he sees it as expressing nothing less than the Black experience in America. The Black guard says he trusts no one, and from his point of view, we all act like savages. “That’s the way this country was founded,” he observes. He has fought in a war and killed for a country from which he feels alienated, like the persona of the Redding song. He is, he says, just surviving (a phrase echoed in Basic Training). How ironic it is, then, that at a time when the welfare center is particularly understaffed, one worker is obliged to take the afternoon off for her biannual “disaster training.” They prepare for fire, flood, even the atomic bomb, according to Elaine—but the disaster is, clearly, right here, right now. “Man, it’s getting late,” is the dire prophecy of the white racist; “The streets are gonna run with blood.” In the final scene, Mr. Hirsch predicts that if things don’t change fast, in fifteen years there will be no more United States of America. The Native American at the beginning of the film likens the reservation to a concentration camp. Wiseman’s early documentaries show that we have created our own penal colony, for just as the inmates of Bridgewater

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in Titicut Follies are literally incarcerated, so the people in High School, Law and Order, Hospital, Juvenile Court, and Welfare are, in a variety of ways, imprisoned. America, these films suggest, is in some ways a social bedlam. In a letter submitted as testimony in the Titicut Follies litigation, Wiseman said the film is “about various forms of madness”47—a claim that, in a sense, can be made about all of these films. These films show us how, in the words of William Carlos Williams, “the pure products of America go crazy.”48 People in these six films have become disillusioned, broken, and made hopeless by the failure of the American dream in a world where the American promise of equality has become, in Mr. Hirsch’s words, “when somebody has and somebody hasn’t and the one who hasn’t tries to rip off the one that has and the one that has tries to keep what he’s got.” To return once again to the end of Hospital, Wiseman’s camera on the highway recalls the famous ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). As Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) does in that film, it shouts a warning about contemporary life that begs to be heeded.

3 THE BIG PARADE Basic Training (1971) • Manoeuvre (1979) • Missile (1988)

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iseman has made three films focusing on various aspects of the United States Armed Forces, each separated from the next by several years. Basic Training deals with the standard eight-week training for new army inductees and enlistees at Fort Polk, Kentucky. Manoeuvre examines the annual rehearsal of the rapid deployment of American troops from Ft. Polk to join NATO forces in Europe. Missile documents the fourteen-week training program for Air Force officers at Vandenberg Air Force Base to man the launch control centers of land-based Minuteman ICBMs. (Sinai Field Mission, made just prior to Manoeuvre, might be included in this group as well, but because it is closer conceptually to Canal Zone, it is discussed in chapter 5.) Wiseman himself had been in the army from 1955–1956, although his personal experience is less the reason for his interest in the military as a subject than the fact that it affords an extremely concentrated view of the institutional life that so concerns him. In these three military films, the maintenance of power and the processes of ideological indoctrination, primary aspects of institutional functioning explored in Wiseman’s previous films, are revealed with special clarity. Lt. Hoffman puts it bluntly in his welcoming speech to the men in Basic Training: “The best way to go through basic training is to do what you’re told, as you’re told, and there’ll be no problems.” Also, the repetitiveness of institutional processes explored in, say, Welfare, Meat,

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and Model are reminiscent of military procedure. Officers in both Basic Training and Missile stress the continuity between military and civilian life by emphasizing the former’s participation in various civic functions. City Hall, for instance, ends with a quasi-military color guard display before a speech by Boston mayor Marty Walsh. If there is a difference between military and civilian institutions in Wiseman’s films, it is a matter of degree, not of kind. According to the company commander in Manoeuvre, the army is “a good cross-section of American society,” and for the commanding general in Missile, the Minuteman crews are “a microcosm of our great society.” These films show a greater interest in formal matters than the earlier documentaries. For example, Basic Training periodically features shots of marching soldiers silhouetted against the rising or setting sun that possess the compositional beauty and iconographic resonance of some of John Ford’s cavalry shots (the kind of image that Wiseman employs with greater thematic weight in Meat and Sinai Field Mission). Similarly, Manoeuvre contains images of tanks moving into the frame that establish bold lines of compositional direction in the manner of what Eisenstein calls graphic conflict that perfectly express the aggressive penetration of Germany by the American forces. In one particularly striking shot in Basic Training, the soldiers march in the foreground as if beneath a large American flag waving in the background. Here, Wiseman finds a visual equivalent to the military’s reliance on iconographic language that expresses the extent to which the individual is subject to the state—a point reiterated by the image of the soldiers entering a transport plane shot from a position within or under it—its dark, jagged edges seeming like a giant maw about to consume the men. Also, whereas Wiseman’s camera has previously tended to be, as one might expect of shooting with a hand-held camera, at eye level, in Basic Training, there are, for the first time, several striking shots from both high and low angles for thematic purposes (see figure 3.1). Basic Training—logically and chronologically the first film of the group—introduces the viewer to military life along with the inductees. Immediately, the men lose their individuality and are made anonymous, as demonstrated in the brief montage sequence with which the film opens. The inductees leave their civilian identities behind, becoming anonymous parts of the military machine. In the first shot, the trainees arrive on a bus, from which they walk unhurriedly to the barracks dressed in a variety of

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FIGURE 3.1  Basic

Training: Silhouetted compositions of marching soldiers ironically invoke the nostalgic vision of John Ford’s cavalry films.

civilian clothes. Their difference at this point is emphasized by the soldier giving the speech in the final graduation scene, who notes, “We arrived in blue jeans, sandals, tennis shoes, and T-shirts.” In the second shot, they are assigned bunks by number. In the third shot, they are measured for uniforms, the tailor calling out measurements. Next come three shots of men having their hair cut short, a recurrent Wiseman image signifying loss of individuality and absorption into the institutional system. In one of these shots, a man is in the process of losing his distinctively long sideburns. Then there are quick shots of fingerprinting, ID photos being taken, and a trainee, in answer to an interview question, giving his social security number. Numbers are repeated later in scenes showing physical exercise, the demonstration of the M-16 A-1 weapon (“not to be confused with the M-16”), and in the many marching scenes. At the end of the overture sequence, the men run in their new uniforms, a marked contrast to their leisurely gait in the first shot. A sergeant then informs them of the proper way to address someone of higher rank. In short order, the men

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have become unindividuated in both appearance and behavior. They are then arranged for a group photo, carefully posed just as they have been (re)composed for military life. This brief, rapidly edited sequence unambiguously sets the tone for the entire film. The pomp and circumstance of music in the films further emphasize the loss of individuality within the larger group. The function of music is established immediately in Basic Training when the commanding officer and his entourage smartly march into a room to welcome the trainees accompanied by the musical fanfare of “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.” The military exercises in Manoeuvre also begin with marching band music and accompanying ceremony. Proper toothbrushing techniques are presented to the men in Basic Training in an instructional film with innocuous rhythmic accompaniment on the soundtrack. Wiseman’s camera tilts from all the men brushing their teeth, imitating the demonstration on the screen, to a closeup of one trainee’s foot, tapping in time to the music. Basic Training is punctuated with shots—“like a musical refrain”1—of the men drilling, keeping time with marching tunes. In these (and in similar shots in Sinai Field Mission and Canal Zone), the camera frequently tilts down to isolate in closeup the legs and feet of the men, emphasizing the influence of what Marechal in La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1936) calls “the thud of marching feet” and the importance of keeping in step. As in High School, no one is allowed to march to the beat of a different drum, but all follow what Kurt Vonnegut describes in The Sirens of Titan (1959) as the persuasive “rented a tent, a tent, a tent” of the snare drum. And if, like the hapless recruit Hickman, they have trouble keeping in step, they are drilled over and over again until they get it right. In Missile, the pervasive subliminal hallway Muzak at the Vandenberg Minuteman training center adds significantly to the conditioned detachment of the trainees from everyday life. In the war movies of Samuel Fuller, there is a similar emphasis on feet, but while for Fuller, the effort of moving forward is an expression of human will, in Wiseman’s military films, the imagery implies the opposite, the immersion of individual consciousness in the movement of the mass. Because the two-month basic training period may be seen as a condensed version of institutional functioning generally, critics have been quick to notice many connections between Basic Training and some of Wiseman’s other films—especially High School, which, as suggested in

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chapter 2, establishes connections with the military. As Stephen Mamber notes, “In High School, Wiseman repeatedly points up militaristic aspects of the high-school experience; in Basic Training, he emphasizes the high-school-like aspects of the training process.”2 Both films feature marching bands, and both feature scenes focusing on the bandleader’s hands keeping time. Also, both films show the goals of their respective institutions to be the stifling of individuality and the maintenance of the institutional system. The girls’ gym class, showing the performance of calisthenics by faceless girls, seems like the fitness part of basic training. The boys’ gym class features a ball game that encourages aggressive competition, another aspect of military indoctrination emphasized in Basic Training. The vice principal, with his disciplinary approach and military brush cut, treats the students like soldiers, saying, “We’re out to establish that you’re a man and can take orders.” Parents endorse institutional attitudes in both films. In Basic Training, the parents who visit their trainee son sound very much like the vice principal, repeating several times the common view that the basic training process will make him a “true man.” Inversely, Basic Training often seems like high school. Training consists of classroom-like lectures as much as it does the acquisition of physical skills. Both films show instructors lecturing (in Basic Training, they are, appropriately, often shot from an extreme low angle). Their auditors, whether students or soldiers, are shown in individual closeups as they listen. Indeed, some of the lecture subjects, like dental hygiene, seem more appropriate in a school context than in the army. In both films, classes make use of instructional movies. The trainees pose for a “class photo,” and the film concludes with its own graduation ceremony, complete with a “valedictorian” address. The attempt of the chaplain (described by one reviewer as “a Baptist Barry Sullivan in burnt cork”3) to instill motivation in Hickman is quite similar to the counselor’s advice to the girl in High School who “messes around.” The disciplining of Pvt. Booker, the soldier caught fighting, is remarkably similar to the office scenes in High School. And finally, just as the girl who wanted to wear a short dress to the prom is told that it is nice to be individualistic but only when deemed appropriate, so in Basic Training, Pvt. Johnson is told by Lt. Hoffman that “every person is an individual, but there are things that are regulated, that you have to do.”

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Wiseman’s editing emphasizes that in boot camp, as in high school, people are given contradictory messages. The chaplain’s words of encouragement to Hickman, “If you fall down in the mud, you have to be willing to get up,” are obviously contradicted by the crawling scenes in which the instructors prevent the men from rising. He is also told by his drill sergeant, “You’re gonna have to think about what you’re doing, Hickman, or you’ll never make it,” even though the men are explicitly instructed at the outset that they should simply follow orders (“to do what you’re told, as you’re told”). Although the trainees are encouraged to become fighting machines, they are also sent to corrective custody (CC) for punishment if they fight with each other. To make the similarities between the two institutions perfectly clear, Wiseman edits Manoeuvre such that after the brigade commander asks, “Are there any questions?” there is a cut to the next scene before anybody can respond; he did the same with the fashion and typing class scenes in High School. In fact, the men in Basic Training often seem more like schoolboys than adults. As one mother explains to her son, the army is the transition stage between being a teenager and an adult. So, as if a child, Hickman is shown by his sergeant how to lace his boots; the sergeant, like a parent concerned about whether his son is properly dressed and fed, asks him where his hat is and whether he had his breakfast that morning. Elsewhere, a drill sergeant chews out a soldier for bringing a can of soda pop onto the firing range, the kind of prankish flouting of authority (“messing around”) typical of youth. In the final training exercise of the film, on the infiltration course, the men prowl about with rifles, giggling as they go, as if engaged merely in a game like paintball or capture the flag. Just as the men are conditioned in military discipline, so Wiseman plays with the viewer’s generic expectations of Hollywood war movies. But unlike the men, Wiseman’s position is a resistant one, playing off the genre in several ways for the ultimate purpose of dispelling its glorification of combat. In her study of Hollywood war movies, Jeanine Basinger offers a list of the genre’s elements, including a hero; the faceless enemy; an objective; a harmoniously functioning, ethnically diverse fighting unit which she calls a “democratic ethnic mix”; and, sometimes, a “last stand” fight.4 All of these can be found in some form in these three documentaries—except for the hero, who, significantly, is notable only in his absence.

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Traditionally, the thrust of the genre is the elimination of unmanageable individualism and the welding together of a fighting unit (infantry platoon, bomber or submarine crew) of mixed ethnic backgrounds, representing a microcosm of the American melting pot (“a good cross-section of American society”). Hence the genre’s treatment of stars (James Cagney, John Wayne) who iconographically embodied the essence of stalwart American individualism. Resistant at first, eventually, they become model servicemen. If they stubbornly remain uncompromising individuals, they suffer a rare death, as happens to Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949). Even the existentialist Bogart persona ultimately commits himself to the Allied cause in, for example, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and The African Queen (John Huston, 1951), movies Dana Polan calls “conversion” narratives.5 When Lt. Hoffman tells a Black private who cares about no one but himself in Basic Training that “the Army’s not just one man, it’s millions of people,” and that he must work with the group, he echoes the social message of virtually every classical instance of the genre. Hence one reviewer observed that the depiction of basic training in Wiseman’s film seems rather close “to the old Warner Brothers Gung-Ho Fighting Flicks of the feckless forties. The sergeants, and even more, the lieutenants and captains are saying the same things.”6 Yet, there is a crucial difference. For while the classical war films depict the compromise of individualism as a noble sacrifice necessary for the war effort, the Wiseman trilogy views the military as unacceptably dehumanizing. One might expect the “democratic ethnic mix” to be the most important generic element in these films since Wiseman typically approaches the military, like other institutions, as a cultural “spoor.” But the ethnic mix here is neither democratic nor harmonious. The absence of racial issues, which served obvious propaganda purposes in the genre classics of the World War II era, is as clearly present in Wiseman’s military films as in his earlier films. Early on in Manoeuvre, the white company commander says in an interview with an American television news crew that he has noticed no “new racial problems” in the army, but this claim is denied by the evidence already shown in the earlier Basic Training. In any case, his response is somewhat disingenuous, for does he mean that there are no racial problems or no new ones? That is, are the problems the same old ones? In Basic Training, awareness of racial difference is present from the beginning. In the initial montage sequence, a Black soldier posing for his

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photograph is coaxed into smiling by being asked to say something nice about then-governor of Alabama George Wallace, a notorious segregationist. As well, there are two alienated Black soldiers in the film, both reminiscent of the guard in Welfare. One is “tired of people” and would rather spend his time in jail than participate in the unit’s activities. The other wants out of the army, claiming to be “a man without a country.” Both Black soldiers are like the persona of the Otis Redding song in High School, whose alienation for Wiseman symbolizes the fate of Blacks in America. Wiseman underscores the racial significance of the second soldier’s attitude by juxtaposing through editing the promotion of the white Lt. Hoffman to captain, the presiding officer telling him that he has “equal opportunity now.”7 Also, in the combat practice sequence, Wiseman presents first a white and then a Black soldier in separate closeups, facing in opposite screen directions, shouting violent encouragement to the combatants. Basinger’s “faceless enemy” in Basic Training is the Vietcong, who are only talked about but never shown, and whose status as the enemy, unlike the Nazis or Japanese in World War II, as at least one of the instructors acknowledges, is not completely accepted by Americans. The irony of Manoeuvre in this context is that the “enemy” is another NATO detachment. In essence, they are their own enemy! This becomes frighteningly clear in Missile, where the entire institutional structure is designed as a safeguard against American military personnel using their own weapons and in the general’s concluding speech, wherein he imagines a Soviet doppelganger. And since the enemy moves from a qualified Other to ourselves, the objective in the films becomes less clear, from winning a war (Basic Training) to playing at war (Manoeuvre) to maintaining a system in the event of a war that cannot, in any case, be won (Missile). Just as Wiseman plays with genre in these films, so he maintains a ludic spirit by employing in all three (and Sinai Field Mission and Racetrack as well) an elaborate game motif, most prominently in Manoeuvre. As Marshall McLuhan has noted, “Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic.”8 In Basic Training, the theme is initiated by the sergeant who introduces the “movie matinee.” Like George C. Scott’s opening speech as the eponymous general in Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1969), itself based on several of his actual speeches prior to the invasion of Normandy, the sergeant emphasizes the winning tradition of

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the American military by making an analogy to great teams in the history of sport, none of which, he says, can boast the same record. (“All the great champions that you’ve never thought of never went undefeated the whole time.”) In Missile, the two-person crews are literally referred to as teams, and, according to one instructor, “Just like a football team, or a basketball team, you know, it takes teamwork to win in the game.” In a sense, the entire training program in Missile is a glorified game, a more elaborate version of High School’s Project SPARC, for the trainees must pretend that they are in real missile silos controlling real missiles, but a dummy missile planted on the grounds of Vandenberg AFB serves as an emblem of the entire enterprise. Manoeuvre makes the most elaborate use of this motif since the NATO exercise it chronicles is, of course, a war game. As the tanks pull out from Ramstein AFB in West Germany, they pass a sign that says, “Reforger is fun.” (“Reforger” and “Crested Cap” are the official names for the exercise.) Battalions are referred to as teams; the controllers (designated to assess “kills”—that is, to keep score) are called umpires and referees. The commander makes an analogy between the maneuver and the seventh game of the World Series. Later, he says that the day the enemy attacks will be “the fun day” and that “we’re gonna bring home the marbles.” A Department of Defense observer interviews a soldier in a scene that seems very much like a pregame interview with an athlete about the lack of homefield advantage. According to General Steele, the aim of the maneuver is “to reproduce the fog of battle that is such a real factor on any battlefield” and to simulate the pressure and stress of combat that cannot be provided by textbooks or in the classroom. (Unsettlingly, this comment throws the entire training program in Missile into doubt.) The sergeant’s advice to the men at the commencement of the exercise to “be safe,” reiterated later in the field by the company commander, thus seems, in context, rather silly. Indeed, the film’s presentation of the exercise reveals that the attempt to duplicate actual battle conditions is ludicrous and impossible. On their way to their chosen defensive positions, the men are cautioned to watch out for civilians in BMWs, and the tank convoy is temporarily stopped by nothing more than an elderly German forest warden with a shovel (a “population problem”). As the troops await the assault by the enemy, civilians curiously skirt the area with binoculars and cameras, children ride by on bikes, a farmer plows his field, and controllers leisurely chat

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with German women. Some of the soldiers play a game of touch football— appropriate, given the terminology of the sport (enemy territory, penetration, blitz, long bomb). The film’s treatment of these maneuvers as a game is very much in keeping with the view of warfare advanced by such writers as Johan Huizinga. His analysis of warfare demonstrates that historically, combat has been approached in the spirit of “play,” which he defines as a temporary order set apart from the flux of life by a clearly defined structure (a set of rules). Play, games, and sport are “pretend,” although this does not mean that such activities lack seriousness. Warfare, in fact, is “the most intense, the most energetic form of play and at the same time the most palpable and primitive.”9 According to Huizinga, warfare expresses the values of justice, fate, and honor necessary for civilization. (Huizinga traces a direct line of descent from the medieval knight to the modern gentleman, this last term used consistently in the films by officers and NCOs to address their men.) However, if one participant in war refuses to play by the rules, then these civilized values disappear and are replaced by barbarity and unredeemed violence. From the American point of view, this was the case in Vietnam, as we learn from instructors in both Basic Training and Missile, since the Vietcong engaged in guerilla warfare and enlisted the services of women, children, and men out of uniform. In Missile, the commander acknowledges that warfare today is more complex than in the past, when combatants were clearly identified and when, after the battle, the rules of the game clearly allowed for “rape and pillage and whatnot.” Missile also shows that the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction and the consequent strategy of limited military engagement has undermined any possibility of war as noble play. Now the rules of warfare are negotiable rather than noble, as we see in the lengthy argument between a missile lieutenant and a controller in Manoeuvre over “kill credit” and in the bargaining over “kill ratios” between German and American officers. The American officer explains to his men that, despite having performed well, they lost in the exercise as a result of “the play of the game.” The negotiations, he explains, were discussed “over the hood of the jeep because we couldn’t go in the woods anywhere because of the rain last night”—hardly the fog of battle. The controller sums up the film’s view of the entire endeavor: “This is not a real war, man. Why you think you in a real war? If this was a real war, half

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of this shit that’s going on wouldn’t even happen. When you was on the road coming here you’d be dead now.” Wiseman allows his ludic spirit free reign in Manoeuvre, sparing us little of the absurd he manages to find in the situation. A German controller, unhappy with a developing situation, says he will temporarily stop the war. Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the two sides agree on a time to resume battle. The German tells his American counterpart that the experience has been “enjoyable” and cheerfully departs, calling, “ ’bye, and happy war.” An officer laughs when his situation is defined by a controller as a “last stand” (undercutting yet another element of the classical war film identified by Basinger). Another chuckles when the battalion commander says they’ll all go down together. Images of George Romero zombie movies are conjured up by one officer’s report that the enemy are “all dead and sitting in a holding area” and by the commander’s request for “all your dead crews out there waving hand and arm signals.” Gen. Alexander Haig’s strong speech about preparedness and equivalence (“a crucible of collective security”) is followed by a reception for the soldiers in which an army band performs the song “We’ve Only Just Begun.” The song’s lyrics (“Talking it over/Just the two of us . . . /So much of life ahead”) ironically contrast with Haig’s hawkish position. The film also features several hilarious conversations, including the argument over kill ratios. (“You think you know this shit, now. You don’t know shit. Not this shit. I know this shit.”) This strong comic tone infuses all three films, suggesting, as in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), that war is an absurdity requiring a sense of humor. Missile humorously comments on the military’s bureaucracy by emphasizing its acronyms, reminiscent of several jokes in Howard Hawks’s postwar service comedy, I Was a Male War Bride (1949). The film’s dialogue and images are filled with such acronyms. There are the familiar OTS, SAC, and ICBM, of course, but there are also, among many others, ILCS (Improved Launch Control System), which is not to be confused with ILC (inhibit launch command). Such jargon leads to discourse like this by one of the program’s instructors: “So PRP, the same type thing applies to pilots. We have what’s called duty not involving alert, DNIA. You get sick, they gotta give you medication that may make you drowsy, you go DNIA and you can’t go on alert, because that would violate PRP. Pilots DNIF, duty not involving flying. Same exact concept.”

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Basic Training is the most consistently funny of the three films. It has a strong undercurrent of black humor, yet another quality it shares with High School. Several writers have commented on the irony of the scene in which Pvt. Booker is given correctional custody for fighting by alluding to what is probably the best-remembered line from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963), that there is no fighting allowed in the war room.10 (In fact, the subtitle of Kubrick’s dark military comedy—How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—could well serve as an alternate title for Missile.) There is a bizarre discussion about karma and reincarnation, ironically counterpointed by continuous gunfire from the firing range, which concludes with one sergeant’s apparently serious assertion that the descendants of Atlantis have infiltrated NASA. As in High School, Wiseman occasionally plays with his editing in Basic Training. Perhaps the funniest instance of this is when the sequence in which one trainee is instructed on how to clean the latrine cuts to a class where the entire group practices proper toothbrushing techniques. It is at once a joke about “a war on tooth decay,” as David Slavitt suggests;11 a pun on the cleaning of enamel; and a wry comment on the foul language frequently associated with the military (although this is much more in evidence in Manoeuvre). Wiseman concentrates his comedy in the figure of the hapless Hickman, the trainee who has trouble with everything from marching to making his bed. As the other trainees learn to march in unison, the physically short Hickman stands out more and more. While attempting something as simple as reversing direction while marching, behind him we see the other men marching with increasing uniformity and skill. And just as they tend to march in the opposite direction from Hickman within the frame, so the lack of ability by this one individual in the foreground sets him up as a foil to the many in the background, all of whom are quickly becoming professional soldiers. (Their growing proficiency also provides Wiseman with a visual way of “marking time” in the film.) Hickman, at least initially, seems a real-life Sad Sack, in the tradition of such comedians as Charlie in Shoulder Arms (Chaplin, 1918) and Lou Costello in Buck Privates (Arthur Lubin, 1940). Periodically, we see the platoon in close order drill, with Hickman hopelessly attempting to keep in step with the rest of the men. How can he possibly pick himself up by the bootstraps when he cannot even lace them properly? He is, in short, a marvelous found example of the comic misfit literally out of step with society.

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While Basic Training may invoke in its depiction of Hickman the lowbrow humor of the service comedy, it does so only to underscore its seriousness by, once again, making viewers examine their own responses. These men, after all, are training for combat in Vietnam—a fact introduced with jarring suddenness when, during the first class about weapons we see, one trainee somewhat innocently asks whether these guns they are now handling for the first time have ever been used to kill people. After hesitating for a moment, the instructor responds to this “pretty heavy” question by admitting that in Vietnam, it is kill or be killed. There are, in fact, some rather chilling moments in the film, and it is Wiseman’s ability to balance the comic and the serious (in David Denby’s words, “comic military disciplines alternate with intimations of mutilation and death”12) that, in large part, gives the film its distinctive power. So Hickman, as funny as he may seem, has at the same time his tragic potential—not unlike the unfortunate draftee Pyle in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), who eventually snaps, killing his sergeant and then himself. Perceived as inept by the other men as well as by the viewer, Hickman is threatened with a “blanket party,” the same ritual hazing to which Kubrick’s Pyle is subjected. Hickman’s response, we discover, was to attempt to overdose on drugs. The first sergeant diagnoses him as having suicidal tendencies. (“In other words, it seems like he wants to knock hisself off.”) Thus, we can never be entirely “at ease” laughing at Hickman, and inevitably we feel somewhat guilty about initially responding this way. There is yet a further complication to our response. We also appreciate Hickman’s ineptitude because, just as the film’s humor serves as a corrective to the military’s deadly seriousness, so Hickman represents a quality of human imperfection that is all but eliminated as the men become trained soldiers. Indeed, Basic Training suggests that as men become good soldiers, so they lose their humanity. In one training sequence, the men cheer, encouraging each other to “get him from behind” and “hit him in the head,” as they fight two at a time. Even after the whistle blows, signaling the combatants to stop, we see one pair continue on, their potential for violence now fully aroused. In several of the fight training sequences, Wiseman shoots the men from a high angle, the camera meditating on what fools these mortals be. In one instance, the camera pans a field filled with pairs of soldiers boxing, a shot of metaphysical import, before singling out individual pairs in closeup. Ultimately, Basic Training

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offers a vision of masculinity not unlike that of William Goldman’s Lord of the Flies (1954); the innate violence beneath the civilized exterior of boys emerges as the veneer of civilization is stripped away. In Wiseman’s film, this stripping is symbolized by the quick loss of civilian clothes and identities, as shown at the beginning. This vision of masculine violence is suggested, too, in the toothbrushing scene, where several of the men are shown, in effect, foaming at the mouth. In one scene, the men fight dummies, the objects serving as metaphors for the extent to which the men have been indoctrinated with a military view. Significantly, most of their actual training in the film is bracketed by crawling scenes. During two scenes toward the beginning, the men look like mad bugs, their limbs flailing in the dirt. Just before the two crawl scenes near the end of the film—one in daylight, the other at night—the men silently apply makeup to themselves, the only noise the loud buzzing of insects. During their first period of bayonet practice, the men shout “yaaah” as they whirl, lunge, and thrust in unison to the instructor’s commands, and similar sounds are repeated by the men in several other scenes. In short, these “grunts” are abandoning language for screams of violence. The men are reduced merely to animal instinct: “You probably won’t have anything in your mind except survive, survive, survive,” as one instructor tells them. This capacity for violence is associated with sexual aggression and dysfunction in all three films and would seem to demonstrate the opinion of several commentators that warfare is, at least in part, a substitute for sexual experience.13 On the firing range in Basic Training, a demonstrator fires his weapon, extending it from his crotch, accompanied by a crude joke from the instructing sergeant. In the earlier latrine-cleaning sequence, urination is described in terms of weaponry: “That’s where people try to shoot from way back over there.” One soldier’s description of the impersonal, pneumatic bliss to be obtained from a Louisville prostitute is paralleled by the introduction of the M-16 A-1 rifle: “Nut for nut, screw for screw, rivet for rivet,” boasts the instructor, “it is exactly—exactly, my friends, the same as the one I have in my hand.” Most important is the scene where one trainee is visited by his family, who concentrate their attention and conversation on his rifle, fetishistically investing it with unmistakable phallic implications. In this scene, the relationship between sexuality and aggression is given a particularly American emphasis: the mother’s view of the experience as a rite

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of passage for her son and her repeated assertion that it will make him “a true American soldier, a true man” evokes D. H. Lawrence’s famous description of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo as representative of the American psyche: “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”14 In retrospect, Kaminsky’s mad monologue in Titicut Follies about the connection between American military aggression and sexual pathology would seem to possess an unsettling accuracy. Manoeuvre contains much footage of tanks, cleverly presenting them as the phallic embodiment of cultural penetration. This suggests a view of American imperialism, as in Canal Zone, as a form of rape. The film begins with shots of the troops’ considerable gear being loaded onto military planes for transport to Germany. But the Americans bring their cultural baggage with them as well. As the convoy moves through the rural German landscape, we hear conversations on the radio between tank crews. The young men assess the German women they pass (“All of them are nice looking. Even the thirteen year olds”) as if these young men were back home cruising the local strip for some action on a Saturday night. Some of the men pick apples from atop the tank turrets and, shortly after, others stop to pick corn (“nice lookin’, too”), apparently without permission of the landowner, suggesting in context defloration. In another scene, the briefing in the tent, the field commander explains their battle plan, speaking several times about “penetration,” while one of the officers in the group smokes a big cigar, a visual rhyme with the tank cannons. Indeed, rumbling through sleepy German towns, their ominous metallic clank permeating the soundtrack, the tanks suggest phallic aggression, as in Bergman’s The Silence (1963). Cars pull up on sidewalks to avoid the oncoming tanks, damaging them. Trees are uprooted in the forest as tanks plow through it, despite the commander’s explicit instructions not to destroy any foliage since this is a watershed area. There are many brief shots in the film of tanks moving laterally, entering the frame from one side and exiting from the other (see figure 3.2). Wiseman consistently holds these shots just long enough for them to disappear across the opposite side of the frame from which they entered. Their sweeping movement across the frame underscores their potency. The cannons are emphasized in these shots since they are the first part of the tanks to be seen. Sometimes they protrude from the foliage, where the tanks are entrenched, as if a profanation of nature. In one shot, taken

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FIGURE 3.2  Manoeuvre:

Tanks are consistently framed so as to suggest penetration and

violation.

from atop the turret, cows scatter as a tank passes by, its cannon leading the way (near the end of the film, a couple of soldiers, looking at a nudie magazine, laughingly refer to a woman with large breasts in one of the photographs as “a guernsey”). Occasional low angle shots from close to ground level, as tanks move toward the camera, emphasize their power even further. Also, some of the shots begin by showing objects, such as houses, at a great distance, and so the viewer scans these shots “in depth.” This space is then violated by the sudden appearance of a tank entering the foreground from either side of the frame, “violating” the viewer’s perception of depth. In short, Wiseman uses a wide range of cinematic devices to depict the tanks in this manner. In Missile, sexuality is entirely sublimated by the overwhelming presence of the giant missiles in their silos “down deep in the bowels of the earth.” (One thinks of Slim Pickens straddling a nuclear bomb like a bull out of a chute, or a giant phallus, at the end of Dr. Strangelove.) Indeed, there seems to be an emotional malaise hanging over everyone in the film,

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making the warning to the instructors to avoid “fraternization” superfluous. As Col. Ryan, the commander of the program, talks about how this is the most difficult and intensive of all military training programs, one of the trainees yawns widely. Later, an instructor boasts that he has been practicing a blank look for years. Even though these people are learning to tend the weapons that have the potential to destroy life on the planet, Col. Ryan is puzzled by the attitude of one of the trainees, guessing that for some reason, he must be feeling “a little bit of apprehension.” The military state of mind in Missile seems a clear example of what Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk have defined as “numbing”—the psychic defense of excluding or minimizing feeling because the realities of nuclear war are too horrifying for the mind to bear.15 This numbing enables people in the contemporary world of nuclear proliferation, in the words of the sergeant in Basic Training, to “survive, survive, survive.” The people in Missile joke about the weapons to avoid confronting their devastating reality, an illustration of what Lifton and Falk call our inability in the nuclear age to “imagine the real.” For example, the Titan System is laughingly said to be so volatile that missiles could be launched at the drop of a wrench; yet they fail to perceive the irony in the Colonel’s concern about “the nuts . . . who seek to come in and kill people and destroy property and that sort of thing.” Like plain folks, they go about their normal routines, barbecuing hamburgers, playing softball, and drinking Coke, seemingly insensitive to the deadly realities of their work, which they refer to simply as “a profession” and “a business.” According to Lifton and Falk, one of the primary manifestations of numbing is a “linguistic detoxification,” an attempt to “domesticate these weapons in our language and attitudes.”16 This is clearly shown in the film, most obviously in the use of all those acronyms. Their language also employs many euphemisms. To tame the possibility of the unthinkable, the accidental launching of a missile is referred to merely as a “big error,” and the violation of Weapons Systems Safety Rules (that is, a release of radioactivity or a nuclear detonation) is described as “a biggie . . . one of those times when the old career dissipation light comes on.” Similarly, the trainees are told that if complications arise during a launch process, they should “get a successful launch and take care of any other problems that happen afterwards.” (The implication is, of course, that there will be an “afterwards.”) The detached discourse of Welfare has become

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here, in Lifton and Falk’s phrase, “nukespeak,” what poet Allen Ginsberg calls “black magic language.”17 Such language is already detectible in Basic Training, where, for example, the men are told to call their M-16s a “weapon, rifle, piece, or what have you,” but never to refer to them as guns. In Manoeuvre, terms like “survivability” and “more survivability” mask the deadly reality of armed conflict. Similar is the army’s consistent invocation of tradition and history through the use of words charged with iconic power. Yet the words are used emptily—a perfect example of what Roland Barthes calls the “depoliticized speech” of cultural myth.18 Frequently, the men are asked to live up to the traditions of “their forefathers, and theirs before them.” “It all started back, way back there about the Boston Tea Party, and it kept workin’ up,” one instructor tells the men in Basic Training. The speech at the end of the film by the soldier winning the American Spirit of Honor Award, described by Slavitt as “not only a Hallmark card, but echt-American,”19 invokes such predictable mythic moments of American history as Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and San Juan Hill. His discourse is a string of clichés: “When Fascism reared its ugly head, the American Spirit came forth and slew the dragon.” (The name of the presiding general, we note with amusement, is B. G. Cantley.) In short, such language, like the “nukespeak” in Missile, attempts simultaneously to minimize the reality of warfare and to bolster ideology by invoking cultural iconography and mythology. In Missile, emotional numbing is expressed not only by the discourse on the soundtrack but also visually and structurally by the film’s emphasis on enclosure. At the beginning of the film, a building is shown displaying a sign that reads, “Welcome to space and missile country,” as if this were a land apart. In the training program’s opening seminar, Col. Ryan acknowledges that in their underground capsules, missile crews will not have full access to information about a situation (although he reassuringly adds, “You’re not going to be working completely in a vacuum”). Wiseman’s characteristic transition shots are, in this film, especially thematically resonant. The hallways he shows have no discernible entrances or exits and are filled with vapid Muzak and blinking red lights—a totally artificial environment. The film’s structure reinforces this sense of isolation and apartness in two ways. First, Wiseman methodically alternates interior shots of classes and training sessions with outdoor shots of the buildings as an introduction to each sequence. Through contrast, the outdoor shots show how enclosed

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the interior spaces are, like the “world” of Welfare. As well, the specific views given in these shots are significant. In one of the typical traffic shots, for example, a warhead is transported. In two others, construction pylons on the road visually rhyme with the shape of the warhead. In yet another, a military building is consumed by fire, foreshadowing the kind of devastation a nuclear strike would bring. If that final shot of traffic in Hospital suggests that “the world is too much with us,” the traffic shots in Missile adumbrate our potential to “lay waste our powers.” Second, Wiseman brackets (encloses) the film with two different speeches about the necessity of strong deterrence, the same philosophy espoused by Gen. Haig but undercut by editing in Manoeuvre. For Lifton and Falk, this view of stockpiling and preparedness as an effective deterrent to nuclear war is, in large part, self-justification—what they call “nuclearism.” The self-justification is obvious. “Our country needs us to do just what we are doing,” the general says. “Frankly, if we don’t need that kind of a deterrent force, they don’t need us.” Stylistically, this bracketing provides a closed structure and suggests entrapment, as do the frames of Titicut Follies, Law and Order, and Juvenile Court. By bracketing the film with this argument, Wiseman suggests the entrenchment of the system; counterarguments are “closed out” of the text. But the irony of the general’s last words that abruptly conclude the film—“we’re a people who are concerned about God”—hauntingly remain to be pondered as the credits appear. In an early scene, Col. Ryan articulates the philosophy of deterrence to the trainees. Behind his head on the wall is a photograph of a missile launching, the image directly contradicting his words (see figure 3.3). This happens yet a second time later in the film. As he explains that the missile crews have at their fingertips the awesome power “to launch the world into nuclear darkness,” his hands work, as if of their own accord, already in flight. When he speaks of “measured response,” one of his hands ironically forms the shape of a pistol. In the class on firearms, we see a giant mock-up of the M-15 Smith & Wesson Combat Masterpiece handgun (see figure 3.4); the size of the weapon (emphasized by Wiseman’s framing it in closeup) underscores its potential for use. (“Mr. Nixon, drop the bomb/ ’cause I don’t want to go to ’Nam,” sing the men as they march in Basic Training.) A soldier who has done fieldwork in Europe unearthing artifacts from World War II shows a photo of himself posed by gravestones, providing a pointed editorial comment.

FIGURE 3.3  Missile:

The photograph of the missile in flight belies the colonel’s words

about deterrence.

FIGURE 3.4  Missile: The scale of the model pistol suggests the human potential for violence.

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Missile, finally, reveals how, according to Lifton and Falk, in the nuclear era, the mind comes to be determined by technology “rather than the mind-set controlling and restraining the technology.”20 The film shows the military system for authenticating and executing launch orders, an elaborate technological structure that supposedly precludes the possibility of a fail-safe scenario. This is a system designed, ironically, to prevent itself from being employed in every case except one. The system, elaborately detailed in the film, constitutes what Lifton and Falk cite as a dominant “nuclear illusion”: “the illusion of a ‘systems rationality’—of a whole structure of elements, each in ‘logical’ relation to the other components and to the whole.”21 Thus, the launch control panel without the MCUs, says one instructor, is just “a hunk of iron.” The system seems perfect, a pure form removed from reality and history (analogous to the film’s treatment of physical space). Accordingly, in the hermetic world of Missile (amazingly, the switch on the launch control panel indicating War Plans A and B is unconnected), history begins to fade. Already the trainees respond to the one soldier’s research about World War II as little more than an archeological curiosity from the barbaric past. If “the flow of history,” as Gen. Haig calls it in Manoeuvre, has begun to fade in Missile, then Wiseman’s aim in these films is to help us understand its course. He emphasizes the importance of historical knowledge for political action in the later EX-LIBRIS: The New York Public Library and City Hall, and the project of the military films is, similarly, to counter the myths that come to replace history. They proceed toward this end not only by playing with generic conventions and by examining the institution’s ideological discourse but also, particularly in Manoeuvre, by adopting a selfreflexive strategy that makes us view combat itself, like narrative cinema, as a construction—a “theater of war,” so to speak. Just as the generic conventions of war movies are thwarted in these three films, forcing us to adopt a new position toward the cinematic depiction of the military, so we are encouraged to look at military operations themselves as elaborate fictions (mythologies, in Roland Barthes’ sense), like the film on military history with its cast of “historical characters” shown to the men in Basic Training. Manoeuvre begins with the process of transporting men and equipment from the United States to Germany for the Reforger exercise, consistently presented by Wiseman so as to allude to the event as a fictional construction. Several times, cameras are shown. In the film’s third shot,

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ID photos of the men are taken; later, one soldier takes a snapshot of some friends. There are also two scenes showing a television news crew shooting a story. As in the production of movies, the physical apparatus (military equipment), costumes (uniforms), musical accompaniment (military band at the reception), and even advance publicity (the officer’s orientation speech in which he valorizes the exercise’s “special effects”) are all arranged before “shooting” begins. The men constitute a cast of thousands. Deplaning in Germany, they even enter from the wings, as it were. The battalion is turned over to the general in charge of the exercise, who becomes, in effect, the “director.” Significantly, this is Wiseman’s only film wherein the opening title credit is not shown immediately but is delayed until the transport planes (and the “plot”) take off. The delayed title, like a Brechtian placard, serves as a further reminder that Wiseman’s film, like the NATO exercise itself, is an elaborate fiction. During the argument over assessing kills—in other words, a script conference—the controller makes an explicit distinction between the exercise and “real life.” Wiseman foregrounds this distinction, asserting, moreover, that to do so is a more truthful (less fictional) account than either Hollywood war movies or even television news “stories.” Thus, Wiseman films the news crew from behind, showing the act of production, and presenting a wider view than what their camera shows (the same strategy that he later exploits for similar reasons in Model). We see not only the physical apparatus of the camera but the discussion about the background and a retake when the reporter flubs his lines. Manoeuvre is, finally, a war movie without action, where fighting is discussed rather than shown. The action, explicitly acknowledged within the text as “simulated,” undercuts the typical Hollywood approach to combat as glorifying action—not unlike Godard’s Les carabiniers (1963). Denied this visual pleasure and constantly reminded that what we are watching is a text, we are forced to think about warfare rather than passively view it as spectacle. At one point, the men are warned about any “unduly curious” civilians with cameras, for they may be guerillas; Wiseman is, in effect, such a guerilla, for in these films, he snipes at the institution of the military, deconstructing both its fiction and our suspension of disbelief, uncloaking the cover of night by which ignorant armies clash.

4 BLOOD OF THE BEASTS Primate (1974) • Meat (1976) • Racetrack (1985) • Zoo (1993)

R

acetrack, focusing on the sport of horseracing and the running of the Belmont Stakes, and Zoo, shot at the Miami Metrozoo (the Miami-Dade Zoological Park and Gardens, also known as Zoo Miami), show how presumptuously proprietary people are about animals. Zoo may open with a shot of a male lion—the king of the jungle—but clearly, the animal kingdom is subservient to the controlling gaze, wants, and whims of the humans for whom it is on display in captivity. Both films establish clear parallels between humans and other animals while also making clear how the former objectify and control the latter. Racetrack includes, for example, scenes of feeding (horses in the stalls; workers in the cafeteria), grooming (horses being curried; jockeys in the barbershop), competition (horses in the winners’ circle; John Morris in the spotlight at the evening reception singing “New York, New York,” a song about surviving the urban “rat-race”). Zoo offers, as one might expect, humorous shots of people gawking at the various zoo animals, including several of people imitating animal calls and one of a man beating his chest in imitation of a gorilla he is watching (monkey see, monkey do) (see figure 4.1). In both films, the lives of the animals are completely regulated and determined by people. Early on in Central Park, a priest performing a marriage ceremony in the park cites Genesis (1:26): “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that

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FIGURE 4.1  Zoo:

Visitors to the zoo come to seem like another species of animal in an artificial environment.

creeps upon the earth.” These two films confirm that while people have not “replenished” the earth, they certainly have “subdued” it (1:28). In Zoo, animal eating and sexual activity are monitored and manipulated, as in Primate. Their corpses are unceremoniously dumped into an incinerator, not unlike the tossing of unwanted and abandoned furniture into the garbage compactor in City Hall. Immediately after the opening montage of animals, Zoo shows us the “Miami Metrozoo Big Show,” with trained elephants going through their learned motions for the amusement of spectators, accompanied by an uninspired version of “In the Mood” on the loudspeaker system. Zoo concludes with the “Feast with the Beasts” fundraising dinner, where guests pose for pictures with some animals while eating others. Earlier in the film, the relatively long sequence of an animatronics display makes explicit our objectification of animals. Thematically, all four films discussed in this chapter share a similar vision regarding the relationship between humans and animals; it runs

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through them like the monorail that seems omnipresent in Zoo. But Primate and Meat are especially fascinating in their deployment of cinematic technique and their consequent engagement of viewers to explore the theme. Indeed, these two films build on the promise of the military films by demonstrating both a deeper understanding of what institutional life has done to human consciousness and an impressive ability to express these themes in cinematic terms. Among Wiseman’s most complex films, they convey the filmmaker’s “theory” of the events by masterfully positioning viewers so as to implicate them in the institutional processes shown. James Wolcott observed in his review of Welfare, which was made between Primate and Meat, that “Wiseman seems poised to break through the barriers of the documentary approach.”1 Wiseman himself has remarked that with Primate, he was attempting to make a film where the visuals tell the story, which is to say that he approached his material more than ever as cinema.2 Individual shots are often composed with the kind of deliberate mise-en-scène at work in the military films, as discussed in chapter 3. For example, in Primate, a closeup of an ailing, screeching chimp is suddenly obscured by a closing door and fastening lock, which comes to block our view of the animal—a wonderfully precise visualization of how, according to the film, the researchers have blocked out nature in their scientific pursuits. In Meat, some of the shots of the cattle feed being steamed and processed on conveyor belts and sides of beef hanging in cold storage have a symmetrical austerity and consequent thematic weight worthy of Fritz Lang’s distinctive mise-en-scène, along with its ominous overtones (see figure 4.2). Beyond the similarity of the well-composed shot, though, Primate and Meat manifest different but equally ingenious structures. Significantly, Primate took all of fourteen months to edit, the longest period spent by Wiseman editing any of his films. Both films feature a greater reliance on editing within the sequence. Entire, sometimes considerably lengthy, sequences are frequently composed of many shots. According to Liz Ellsworth, Primate contains 569 shots.3 Given the film’s 105-minute length, this works out to an average of about eleven seconds per shot, approximately one-third the average shot length of Titicut Follies, or one-half that of High School or Hospital. My own count of the shots in Meat totals 552 (a 12.28 second average), which is remarkably close to that for Primate.

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FIGURE 4.2  Meat:

The geometric quality of shots such as this one of feed on conveyor belts reinforces the film’s deterministic view.

The two films tend to carry the viewer along primarily through compositional patterns and the rhythm and logic of the editing. Often there are sequences in both films with little or no dialogue. In many, the only sound is ambient noise, for the most part, the sounds of various machines at work. Dialogue, of course, is still important, but it is less crucial in these two films than in many of Wiseman’s other films. In Meat, for example, the “beefkill” sequence, depicting the cattle being unloaded, killed, disemboweled, inspected, and placed in cold storage, contains no dialogue at all (the workers shout and make noise but use no words). It is comprised of ninety-two shots taking twenty minutes of screen time. In Primate, the sequence showing the removal and sectioning of a monkey’s brain (including a cleanup break and cutaways of animals) is comprised of over one hundred shots, lasting for over twenty-three minutes—almost onefourth of the film—yet contains very little dialogue. However, this is not to say that these two films are without long takes or camera movement. During the electro-ejaculation procedure in Primate,

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for instance, the camera bounces back and forth between closeups of the two researchers conducting the experiment, who face toward the center of the frame from either side. Like the animal, the viewer is, as it were, caught in the middle, their pawn or plaything. In the union negotiations with the company personnel director in Meat, Wiseman pans between the parties, seated on opposite sides of the room, as often as he cuts from one to the other, the camera’s movement here expressing the gap between their negotiating positions. It is clear, though, that in these two films, unlike in Racetrack and Zoo, Wiseman uses camera movement and the long take, both essential elements of the observational style, more sparingly and more purposefully than previously, and that he does not hesitate to employ whatever stylistic devices are suited to his overall purpose. Both films also demonstrate Wiseman’s growing sophistication in positioning viewers in challenging ways and closely linking this to their thematic concerns. While Racetrack and Zoo contain scenes that will raise the hackles of any animal activist, the very subjects of Primate and Meat— primate research and meat packing—are topics that are likely to make many viewers somewhat uncomfortable even before the films begin. Some of Wiseman’s earlier films perhaps allow for the consolation of liberal guilt, but Primate and Meat make such a response more difficult. The mounds of ground beef Wiseman shows, just after Ken Monfort’s discussion of morality in meat packing, inevitably speaks to the ethics of our national lifestyle and implicates all of us. Primate is Wiseman’s most openly acerbic film since Titicut Follies and possibly his most extended experiment in the manipulation of viewer response. As one might expect, it generated more controversy than any Wiseman film since his first. Meat, surprisingly, is quite the opposite, so understated and apparently detached that, for many viewers, it is, if anything, merely puzzling or perhaps mildly annoying. Hence the general response to it was relatively mild. In fact, it may be seen as the first in a long string of Wiseman films that generated only a lukewarm response because they lack the “hard-hitting” qualities of the early documentaries. Wolcott, for example, while admiring Meat, found its style too austere, while John J. O’Connor thought it unclear in focus, “unsure of itself.”4 However, the divergent reactions to these two films are actually the result of Wiseman’s different approach in his effort to intimately bind the spectator through the viewing experience to the implications he perceives in the institutions under scrutiny.

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Zoo presents a human menagerie as much as an animal one. Like that film’s title, the titles of Primate and Meat are pointedly ambiguous, suggesting, in some measure, the reduction of human as well as animal life. Indeed, Primate and Meat are among Wiseman’s bleakest, most pessimistic views of American institutional life. Life is alienated, deterministic, and, as in the famous opening passage describing the Central London Hatchery in Huxley’s Brave New World, wholly technological and commodified. “The overalls of the workers were white,” Huxley writes, “their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber”5—a detail that applies to the Yerkes researchers, the Monfort workers, and even the medical team during the operation in Racetrack. Both Primate and Meat feature many closeups of machinery and technology in action, displacing the human element. In Zoo, we occasionally see trained observers with their clipboards recording animal behavior; but in Primate, the animals are constantly under the silent surveillance of the researchers who observe their every action. “We don’t want them doing things sexually when we’re not in a position to see it,” explains one scientist. In Meat, the computerized packing plant looms on the horizon like an Orwellian ministry. After the lengthy but compelling sequence in Primate where the squirrel monkey’s brain is removed, one of the researchers merely concludes, rather anticlimactically, “That’s sort of interesting.” In the muscle experiment, as in Welfare, existence becomes an absurd struggle to reach unobtainable goals. A monkey’s hand is shown in closeup, reaching for the bits of food that dangle just short of its grasp (see figure 4.3). The animals become puppets, their behavior, movement, and sexuality controlled by various wires and electrical impulses (as one scientist boasts, they are now getting readings from “in the brain itself ”). Just as in Racetrack, and to some extent in Zoo as well, movement is consistently regulated for people as well as animals by fences, gates, aisles, highway lanes, and entranceways (blinders prevent the horses from seeing anything off the beaten path—a metaphor of ideology at work), so in Primate and Meat life is constrained by a variety of pens, corrals, cages, and boxes (“a five foot monkey in a three foot space” is how one such box in Primate is described). Ultimately, the animals themselves are transformed into objects in boxes, cartons of steak at the end of Meat. In this film, at the end of the path (the entrance to the plant), the inevitable man waits with a cattle prod and stun gun. The film builds on Dean

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FIGURE 4.3  Primate:

An animal’s hand struggles to grasp food dangling just out of

reach.

Jagger’s metaphor in The Dark City (William Dieterle, 1950) that “People are like sheep frightened by the smell of death in a slaughterhouse. They run down the passageway with the other sheep, thinking there’s freedom, but there’s always a man with a sledgehammer waiting.” The similar scene in Monrovia, Indiana of pigs being led through pens to a semi waiting to haul them away inevitably takes on sinister overtones because of Meat. All of this, however, is not to say that these films are defeatist or nihilistic, for it is precisely in their ability to elicit a vivid response from the viewer that they suggest, for want of a better word, redemption. The strong presence in both films of Wiseman’s characteristic black humor works, in part, as the acting coach says in Model, to relieve the tension of horror. In the face of emotional numbing—the result, as we have seen, of bureaucracy and technology—comedy is a sign of our ability to feel deeply. Neither the experimentation upon nor the butchering of animals would seem subjects appropriate for a humorous treatment, especially in the age of militant animal liberation. Nevertheless, the humor is strongly

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present in both films and, given their subjects, makes, for many viewers, a most uneasy blend of tones that serves to amplify an already uncomfortable viewing experience. In Meat, there is the sight gag of a football game (pigskin!) on television in the plant, and the song “What Kind of Fool Am I?” (“What kind of man am I?/ An empty shell”) plays from a portable radio as workers butcher sides of beef. In the spirit in which Hitchcock views Psycho as a comedy, Wiseman himself claims that Primate “is actually a rather bizarre comedy—I think it’s a riot.”6 Two scientists talk about the copulating positions of gorillas as a photo of two animals in the act hangs on a wall between them, functioning like a cartoon thought balloon (“I’ve some pictures inside,” one says tantalizingly). Later comes the ludicrous discussion about the variables of the electro-ejaculation experiment (“Do we use fresh semen on Tuesday or Wednesday?”). The film also invites us to view the hirsute scientists as “primates” themselves. (Wiseman claims that he chose the opening closeups of behavioral scientists more for the way they look than for their scientific achievements.) This running joke culminates in the scene where the scientist conducting muscle experiments to determine phases of evolution and species divergence has to show an ape how to swing on the trapeze. Primate was shot at the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The film’s ostensible subject is the scientific experimentation and research conducted there using various species of monkeys and apes as subjects. It is on this level that the film’s material generated controversy, for the topic, like abortion, is one that inevitably elicits strong feelings. The emotional response such material is likely to elicit is, if anything, exacerbated by what Patrick J. Sullivan describes as Wiseman’s strategy of giving us “bewilderingly little information about the nature of the experiments, the goals of the research group, the rationale for individuals’ behavior.”7 Indeed, with the exception of that one sequence where the scientist lucidly explains the purpose of his experiments in measuring primate muscular activity, the viewer remains in the dark about the nature of and justification for most of the experiments shown in the film. This, of course, only serves to heighten one’s sympathy for the animals and anger toward the scientists since the experiments are made to seem pointless— eliciting reactions such as Sullivan’s, that the Yerkes Center appears to be “a concentration camp of behavioral research.”8

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Dr. Geoffrey Bourne, director of the Yerkes Center, responded publicly to the film by calling it “grossly misleading,” claiming that much of the material shown was taken out of context. In an irate letter published in the New York Times, Dr. Bourne insisted that “In fact, the film shows no vivisection, no cruelty, no pain caused to any of the animals and no callousness—except the effects deliberately created by the camera tricks used by Mr. Wiseman.”9 Bourne’s letter goes on to describe the film as a “mishmash of synthetic sadism, confusion, misunderstanding, misrepresentation and obsession with sex.” The one specific example he cites is the scene concerning the critically ill epileptic chimpanzee (the film transcript indicates that the chimp is suffering from heat stroke) who is hosed down to reduce a high fever that, according to Dr. Bourne, was in no way the result of experimentation. From his point of view, the chimp’s life was saved by the institution’s dedicated staff, but, unfortunately, the viewer has no way of knowing this because of the material and information omitted by Wiseman. When the scientists express concern that the fever may have damaged the animal’s brain, we are likely to snicker at their apparent solicitude, given that the sequence immediately preceding this is the removal and sectioning of the squirrel monkey’s brain. According to the New York Times, for the film’s scheduled broadcast in December 1974 on New York’s WNET (the station that produced it), Bourne submitted a three-minute videotaped disclaimer that he requested be shown before the film. WNET rejected the request (in the end, the videotape was shown only on WETV in Atlanta) and proposed instead to televise a discussion between Bourne and Wiseman. But Dr. Bourne declined, arguing that it was nothing more than a publicity stunt for the film. He lodged a formal complaint with the FCC, charging the film with “gross distortion” and even threatening legal action. When the film was shown on December 5, WNET reported receiving over 150 complaints from viewers, including a bomb scare and a threat on Wiseman’s life. In the end, only 81 of the 222 PBS stations showed the film that night, and many refused to show it at all. The Nova staff of WGBH in Boston produced a follow-up show, a half-hour discussion entitled The Price of Knowledge? which was distributed to the PBS network. The show featured Wiseman, biologists Richard Lewontin and David Baltimore, Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, science writer and Nova editor Graham Shedd, and Yerkes researcher Adrian Perachio (the primatologist in the

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film conducting the telestimulation experiment). According to Wiseman, none of the participants accused the film of being inaccurate (although Perachio averred that there were “some limitations  .  .  . imposed by the stance and techniques of the film.”)10 Wiseman did not feel obligated to provide full exposition about the experiments in Primate since the specific research activity at Yerkes is not the film’s primary concern. Even as a graduate student in the film remarks to one of the researchers when hypothesizing about the sexual behavior of gorillas, no account, not even a scientific one, ever provides the whole story. Moreover, as one of the scientists notes later in the discussion about pure research, pieces of information take on different meanings depending upon their context—a point particularly appropriate to Wiseman’s mosaic structures. Wiseman himself concedes that he does not have strong opinions about animal research and that he is not an animal liberationist or even vegetarian. He cheerfully admits that while shooting Meat, “I ate steak every night I was up there, usually something I met earlier in the day.” Elsewhere, he states that he saw no animal cruelty at the Yerkes Center and even accepts the argument that such experiments are “vital to research.”11 Rather, for him, the importance of the work at the Yerkes Center is to “question the implication of this kind of research for human behavior.”12 One of his interests in showing the gap between institutional ideology and practice has always been to show how the ideology “is used for the purposes of social control within the group.”13 This is made explicit during the birth of the foal at the beginning of Racetrack. When it is suggested that the pregnant horse be given a tranquilizer, a woman remembers that when she gave birth, she had to have an epidural because her husband “couldn’t stand it anymore.” The Yerkes Center and the Monfort plant are, then, two more cultural “spoors” reflecting contemporary American society. Unfortunately, because Primate deals with such an emotionally charged issue, the publicity it generated, as with Titicut Follies, concentrated more on the sensationalism of its ostensible subject than on the thematic or aesthetic issues it raises. Writers were quick either to take an antivivisectionist position or to defend the Yerkes researchers against unfair treatment by Wiseman. In a review that vents its spleen more on the activities of the Yerkes Center than on the film, for example, Chuck Kraemer said Primate is “grisly, with enough vivisection, exotic behavior modification,

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implantations, vomiting and probing to turn the strongest stomach.”14 Even the relatively lengthy article in Bioscience magazine, despite its generally calm and detached recounting of “the Primate controversy,” echoed Sullivan’s complaint that the film fails to address the political and ethical issues of primate research in any clear way, that the information necessary for viewers to make an informed judgment is lacking, and that it “simply divided its audience on the basis of already formed prejudices.”15 Such responses are interesting when one considers that Zoo devotes a considerable amount of its 130-minute running time to showing similar scenes. There is a gorilla splayed on an operating table; a rabbit killed with a blow to its head, its twitching body plopped into a pail and then given to a python, who slowly and methodically consumes it whole; the mangled and bloody corpses of animals killed by feral dogs that break into the zoo; and the dumping of the carcass of one of them, a pit bull, into an incinerator like so much garbage. A stillborn rhino calf is dissected near the incinerator, its organs laid out on the concrete driveway along with its severed head. There is no explanation at all, no context provided, for the castration scene, with the wolf ’s testes pulled away from the animal’s tissue like marbles in taffy. Yet Zoo, as different from a cuddly nature documentary as one might imagine, generated no such intensity of response. However, Wiseman’s humanist concerns in Primate are successfully translated into a cinematic treatment that is, in fact, precisely controlled. Most obviously, where Zoo at times elicits contradictory responses to animals as either cute or repellent, Primate encourages the viewer’s inherent inclination to anthropomorphize the apes and monkeys and to identify with the animals as if they were feeling human emotions. Some reviewers did note that the viewer’s identification tends to be located with the monkeys and apes. For example, the squirrel monkey becomes, for one writer, the film’s “star,”16 while another critic unproblematically claims that the closeups of the animals’ faces reveal “their feelings of panic, suspicion and open hatred of their keepers.”17 Gary Arnold clearly acknowledges his identification with the animals, noting how their faces “register responses of pain, resistance and frustration” but then checks himself because “such responses are . . . thoroughly unprofessional”—in other words, excessively subjective.18 Having failed to perceive how and to what purpose the film deliberately encourages such “unprofessional”—that is, unscientific or uncritical—reactions, no one has seriously reflected on the implications

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of this spectator position. In context, it is less an instance of the pathetic fallacy on the part of the viewer than it is a central aspect of the film’s strategy and meaning. Wiseman encourages us to endow the animals with human qualities and feelings through, for example, the film’s extensive use of facial closeups. Just as these closeups magnify the faces of the animals on the screen for our visual scrutiny (“bigger than life,” says one scientist about the image of a monkey’s face captured on video in the zero gravity experiment), so they amplify our tendency to project human qualities onto animals in the first place. There are approximately as many closeups of animal faces as there are of humans in the film. Moreover, the animals’ faces are often shot in the same manner as typical human reaction shots that amplify drama, further inviting us to see them as human-like. For example, a doomed squirrel monkey is followed to a table where a blood sample is taken. Wiseman cuts to a closeup of its grimacing face, presumably in pained protest. The cut is obviously motivated by the wish to increase viewer identification with the animal at this dramatic point. Much the same can be said of those typically expressive closeups of hands, so frequent in Wiseman’s work. There are many shots of animal hands in Primate as poignant as the closeup of the monkey tossing the bone in the famous opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). As when a chimp feels a seashell in the language experiment or when a monkey reaches out from within its cage to defend itself from being injected with an anesthetic, animal hands seem as gesturally eloquent as some of the human body movements captured elsewhere by Wiseman’s camera. Because they are almost always either in cages (they are frequently shown standing by the cage doors or hanging from the ceiling, positions that emphasize their entrapment) or subjected to experimentation, our tendency to sympathize makes us feel even more responsive to them and their situation. Several specific shots of animals in the film encourage us to respond to them as if they were human because the images suggest similarities to shots involving people from previous Wiseman films. The shaving of the squirrel monkey’s head (in addition to anticipating the sheep shearing in Meat) reminds us of similar shots in Titicut Follies, Basic Training, and Juvenile Court, and which reappears later in the form of fundraising haircuts in Zoo. A rhesus monkey has a tube forcibly inserted through its nose

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(the same thing happens to a horse during the operation in Racetrack), like Malinowski in Titicut Follies and an elderly patient in Hospital. Surgery is performed on an anesthetized monkey, its arms spread out like those of the patient in the opening shot of Hospital. A newborn chimp’s ability to hang from a bar is timed by a lab technician, like the testing of the girls in gym class in High School and the trainees in Basic Training. Another shot of an orangutan, although not a reference to a specific image from a different Wiseman film, works similarly. The orangutan, shaved so that its muscular activity can be electrically monitored, is photographed with its back to the camera, making it look surprisingly human in physique (see figure 4.4). The species name, from the Malay for “man of the woods,” is itself a linguistic anthropomorphism, like the Judas goat in Meat. This visually undercuts the scientist’s theory of divergent primate evolution, for such shots enhance our thinking of the animals as being “like” people. Within the film, the staff of the Yerkes Center themselves anthropomorphizes the animals. Baby chimps are brought into “newborn reception,”

FIGURE 4.4  Primate:

The shaved back of an orangutan looks surprisingly human.

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like human babies in any North American hospital. They are dressed in diapers, soothingly rocked, and fed with bottles. When they are a little older, they drink from cups. A nurse prattles at them as at human babies, calling them “boys” and “girls” and referring to herself as “mommy.” Some, like the chimp Lana who can sign for candy and juice, have begun to master the rudiments of symbolic language and so are engaged in conversation by researchers. It could be argued that the animals seem more expressive, more “alive,” than the Yerkes researchers. At the very beginning of the film, Wiseman presents a series of eight shots of scientists (identified in the transcript simply as “various famous behaviorists”) followed by another series of four shots of primates in their cages. The scientists, as we see them, are images of images, still photographs hanging on a wall at the center; they are motionless, like the image of Dr. Yerkes himself, ossified in this opening sequence in the form of a bust. By contrast, the animals move about, obviously alive. They touch and hug each other, unlike the humans, all of whom maintain a public, professional distance from one another. The energy of the animals seems even to spill out of the film: With charming impulsiveness, Lana, apparently having had enough conversation, jumps from the table in the direction of the camera, causing it to shake before the shot abruptly ends. The scientists, seeming insensitive and manipulative, compare unfavorably to the animals. One researcher remarks as if surprised that a monkey seems “very sensitive” as an electrode is being fitted into his brain. Later, a woman observing the electrode procedure genuinely wonders if the animal “resents” being restrained.19 The chimp John is literally jerked around as a lab assistant coaxes him over to the bars of the cage with grape juice so that he can masturbate him with a lubricated plastic tube. The duplicitous actions of the people in the film are expressed visually by the fact that in most shots, humans are shown either in profile or wearing surgical masks—in both cases, their faces are partially hidden. Primate, then, clearly provides the spectator with an emotional point of view that is more closely aligned with the animals than the humans. This viewpoint is organized physically and perceptually as well as emotionally in terms of what the animals see and feel and, to some extent, what they must think (in Bruce Kawin’s terms, as both subjective camera and “mindscreen”20). We are placed in a position similar to that of the animals,

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for we know so little about the experiments that the objectives and methods are often obscure. Like the animals, we lack comprehension of what is going on around us. Just as the orangutan is lured with juice and the monkey enticed into its constraining device with a banana, so the viewer is offered at the beginning of the film the carrot of witnessing benevolent research where animals learn sign recognition and language skills, raising a false sense of security which is then increasingly undermined. Like domesticated animals, we place our blind trust in the goodwill of experts, but the film pulls the rug out from under us. In Primate, Wiseman alters his more common practice of following people down hallways in two ways. Compare, for example, how the camera follows the inmate Jim back to his cell in Titicut Follies or the stunning sequence shots in hallways in Blind. In Primate, instead, Wiseman most often places the camera in the middle of corridors in an immobile, fixed position—that is to say, he films these shots as if from a cage. He only pans left or right to follow the researchers as they walk down the halls toward the camera and then past it (see figures 4.5a and 4.5b). Consequently, if

FIGURE 4.5A  Primate:

Camera placement in the film, as in the beginning . . .

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FIGURE 4.5B   . . . and end of this shot, frequently positions the spectator within the space of the research facility (Primate).

they are carrying equipment, as they usually are, in the first part of these shots, it is as if it were being wheeled toward or pointed at us. Alternately, several times when researchers walk past the camera, Wiseman cuts to another position in advance of the person (normally a difficult point of view to construct in observational cinema). It is as if we, like the animals, were already there, trapped, and can only wait for the humans’ unwelcome arrival. In both cases, we are placed, in Nick Browne’s terms, as a “spectatorwithin-the-text,”21 which aligns us with the position of the research animals. Thus, even though the closeups of the animals’ faces may not be more numerous, they carry greater emotional weight, for the techniques of spectator identification are consistently mobilized on their behalf. Moments of animal identification in cinema are rare, as Edward Branigan acknowledges.22 Films almost never ask the viewer to identify to any significant extent with an animal unless it is presented as a dramatic “character” with recognizable human qualities. Hence, what is noteworthy about

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Primate is its attempt to construct a sustained emotional identification with animals without presenting them as rounded individuals. It could be argued that the closeups of animals’ faces in Primate and the numerous shots of them in seemingly helpless subjection (reinforced by the selective presentation of information about the experiments) constitute another instance, like the uncomplimentary closeups of teachers in High School, of Wiseman’s unfortunate reliance on “cheap shots” for easy emotional effect. Primate’s style, it is true, forces the viewer to identify with the animals, but this effect is central to the film’s theme. Primate research exists on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it is supported (as the film’s final sequence aboard the Air Force jet makes perfectly clear) by government funding, obtained by emphasizing the biological similarities between humans and other primates. On the other hand, the argument against the moral objections to such research is that these creatures are, after all, just animals. Therefore, by encouraging us to sympathize with the animals and to think of them as being “like” people, the film pushes us to experience this dilemma directly. Rational argument is necessarily informed by emotional response, for after seeing Primate, a viewer, whether previously sympathetic or hostile to primate research, can no longer think about the issues in quite the same way. In the end, while, of course, we do not really come to know the animals’ point of view, we have felt it to the extent that we have become somewhat estranged from the locus of human values embodied by the researchers. To some extent, the scientists come to seem peculiar, themselves subjects for observation, one among several species of primates, not unlike the zoo patrons in Zoo. In Victor Shklovsky’s sense, they have been made strange. Like the stereotypical mad scientists of countless science fiction and horror films, their quests come to seem unnatural. Interestingly, Wiseman has described the film as a “science fiction documentary.”23 Meat places the viewer in an entirely different relationship to its profilmic events. Where Primate systematically employs subjective camera techniques, Meat is resolutely third-person. Where the tone of the former film is emotional and angry, that of the latter seems cool and dispassionate. As Wolcott so aptly describes the film: “Instead of ham-fisted proles driving screaming blades into Goya carcasses, two young women calmly monitor the grain feeding of cattle from their Space: 1999 control center.”24 Near the beginning of Meat, we see several extreme long shots of cattle in

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FIGURE 4.6  Meat:

The reduced scale of the animals in extreme long shot graphically foreshadows their fate.

the feedlot from a very high angle (see figure 4.6). Visually, this reduces the animals to such an extent that they look like the specks in a Larry Poons painting or similar to the microscopic slides of blood, brain, and sperm cells we see in Primate. This great physical distance from the animals establishes the film’s overall perspective, as do the connotations of omniscience indicated by the angles of the shots. If Primate encourages the viewer to anthropomorphize the animals, Meat, even while it shows us the seeming terror in the eyes of the cattle as they are being herded, scrupulously avoids subjective camera techniques. Here, as in Alfred Hayes’s poem “The Slaughter-House”: “Whatever terror their dull intelligences feel/or what agony distorts their most protruding eyes/ the incommunicable narrow skulls conceal.”25 Only once in the film—as the cattle are being funneled up a long ramp in the depth of the shot—is the camera placed in the pen along with the animals. The film shows the entire process of meat packing—what Ken Monfort, the owner of Monfort Meat Packing in Greeley, Colorado, where

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the film was shot, calls “animal fabrication”—from the animals grazing in apparent freedom to the shipping to market of identical small cuts of meat. Wrapped in plastic, stamped by government inspection, and sealed in boxes, the final product bears little resemblance to the animals at the beginning of the process. Even the language used to classify the animals as products—“light heiferettes,” “ungraded goosenecks in combos,” “tri-tips”—strips (“flays”) them of life. Every part of the animals is accounted for in the process, from hide to intestines. It is nothing if not efficient, seemingly honed to perfection. The work, like the animals themselves, has been sliced into little pieces, each worker repeatedly performing a single task on the disassembly line. There is no room here for what the narrator of Georges Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (1948) calls “the art of flaying,” where everything is done with hand tools or for a master butcher like Henri Furmel to demonstrate his impressive manual skill. Instead, power saws slice easily through the carcasses in seconds, flaying is done by giant machines that effortlessly peel away hides, and hooves are clipped off by powerful, ominous-looking scissor machines (see figure 4.7a).

FIGURE 4.7A  Meat

and greet: The similar framing of plant machinery . . .

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Meat, like many of Wiseman’s films, is concerned with process, although the process examined here is nothing less than processing itself. Animals, workers, and viewers are all processed in the course of the film. Because the work has become so repetitive, so mechanical, workers no longer take pride in their labor as they do in Franju’s film. Meat, unsurprisingly, is the Wiseman film that lends itself most readily to a Marxist analysis of labor within advanced capitalism.26 In the cafeteria, the workers, bored and alienated, eat in rows, arranged on either side of the long tables like the sides of beef in cold storage. Their faces as they stare into the distance, doze, and glance at their watches, seem as expressionless as those of the dead animals moved through the beefkill procedure on hooks. While Wiseman was filming at Monfort, the fortuitously named Governor John Vanderhoof came to campaign for reelection, and Wiseman brilliantly incorporated his visit into the film. He photographs the governor as he proceeds down the rows of workers, automatically asking each how he is today, shaking hands mechanically as he goes (like Gen. Haig in the mess hall in Manoeuvre). The camera isolates the governor’s hand in closeup, repeating the handshake gesture as he moves down a table, emphasizing its similarity to the repetitious work in the plant, in particular to the movement of the cutting machines (see figure 4.7b). That this sequence is placed immediately after the one with the cylindrical egg salesman suggests the extent to which politics has become a matter of salesmanship. The connections between the animals and the workers are established in an understated manner that befits the numbed alienation of the workers. The lengthy beefkill section of the film concludes with a cleanup sequence that begins with the workers punching out their time cards. Their time is slotted and calculated by company management, analogous to the treatment of the animals by the workers. They then hose themselves and their equipment clean, just as they had done previously with the various cuts of meat. The later “lambkill” section of the film, which concludes with the lamb carcasses being washed, weighed, tagged, and put into cold storage, ends with a sound bridge from the coming sequence, the negotiations between the union and company representatives. While we see the lamb carcasses in cold storage, we hear the personnel director say, “I reviewed the area that we’ve talked about,” before the cut to inside the director’s office where this conversation is taking place. This creates

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FIGURE 4.7B  Meat: . . . and the campaigning governor’s glad hand are two examples of the film’s focus on processing.

ambiguity about whether “the area” is one for the workers or the meat. This ambiguity is strengthened by the unintentionally ironic fear of the worker Bill that the company is “gonna start chopping our heads.” The film’s style perfectly matches the alienated, desensitized world shown inside the Monfort Plant. In addition to constructing the point of view of an “ideal” (detached) observer, an “absent one” who in this case is positioned so as to see each step of the process clearly, the camera, in comparison to Wiseman’s other films, tends to move very little. The minimal camera movement the film does exhibit is primarily functional, serving to contain the flow of animals through pens and on ramps or to keep within the frame the various tasks performed by the workers. Long takes generally are reserved for dialogue sequences. Still, on the few occasions when camera movement is employed to any significant degree, as in the previously mentioned union bargaining sequence, it tends to further express this pervading sense of alienation and confinement. But mostly, the shots are stationary, and they accumulate with a rhythmic regularity

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that reflects the stultifying, repetitious tasks of the workers. The one notable exception is the cattle auction at the beginning of the film, where the speed of the transactions is mirrored by the rapid pace of the editing. This sequence is comprised of thirty-eight shots and takes less than a minute and a half of screen time. After this initial excitement, though, the film settles into its steady rhythm. The shots are embedded in a structure that brilliantly conveys in the viewing experience this sense of alienated labor. The film is divided into two parts, each showing the slaughtering and packing process from beginning to end. The first part, which lasts about an hour (roughly half of the film), shows the process applied to cattle. As it nears completion, one cannot help but wonder what else the film can show. The answer, as many viewers are probably dismayed to discover, is that it chronicles the process once again, from the beginning. The second time around, the process, this time involving the smaller sheep, is not only repetitious but decidedly anticlimactic. While the cowhides must be removed by big machines, the sheepskins are peeled away merely by a firm tug of the hand. Similarly, the jaws of the cattle must be pried open by placing them in special metal receptacles, whereas the sheep skulls are unceremoniously squashed, like nutshells, by giant stamping machines, reminiscent of what happens to the diminutive squirrel monkey’s head in Primate. With the cattle, at least there is drama. In one scene, a stubborn cow refuses to be prodded into one end of a holding pen along with the others; several times, the animal must be prodded before it agrees to go along with the rest. The sheep, by contrast, need no such prompting; they move along as a crowd, unquestioningly following the Judas goat without protest toward their inexorable fate. If Primate is structured by a sense of mounting horror, as experiments seem to become increasingly grotesque and violent, Meat, then, works oppositely, draining what it shows of drama, as the animals themselves are drained of blood. In short, Wiseman has strategically placed the slaughter of the smaller animal second to make it seem even less interesting. It may be true, as John O’Connor asserts, that the repetition of the process “adds nothing to our comprehension of the system,”27 but it does not follow that this repetition is without meaning. For the film quickly induces disinterest, even boredom, in the viewer who, given the film’s subject, probably is disappointed by the absence of those “ham-fisted proles driving

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screaming blades into Goya carcasses.”28 How very quickly the film moves from the potential frisson of the abattoir to the dull banality of routine. In the space of two hours, the viewer comes around to the detached consciousness of the workers themselves. The film “prods” us to realize how quickly and easily we, too, may be processed. At the same time, similar to the military documentaries, the film plays with the viewer’s generic expectations by encouraging our awareness of how we have been “processed” by popular cinema. Just as the meaning of Basic Training is, in part, determined by its inflections of the conventions of the war film, so Meat engages our experience of Westerns. The film immediately evokes the genre in its opening shots of bison grazing and cowboys on horseback, and early on, the dialogue mentions a “stagecoach from Denver.” The first shot of the film is a long shot of a small buffalo herd; then come two shots, taken at a closer range, of two or three of the animals. A second or closer look, in other words, reveals a decrease in their number. This is no thundering herd of the Wild West. At once, we are reminded of how the mighty herds of buffalo that once roamed the plains, as “numerous as fishes of the sea,” were brought near extinction by the westward course of empire—that is, by capitalism and industrialism, those forces embodied in Meat by Monfort. Thus, the images of these mighty creatures, that “typical American symbol of rugged strength and independence,”29 isolated at the beginning of Meat in little groups, serve as an iconographic reminder of the passing of the West and an index of the contemporary working conditions the film proceeds to show. (In its depiction of horses as commodities, as “tools,” according to one of the owners, Racetrack works similarly.) As Edward Buscombe notes, “A horse in a western is not just an animal but a symbol of dignity, grace, and power.”)30 Similarly, the shots of the cowboys evoke a mythic past contrasted with the contemporary working conditions inside the plant. Wiseman consistently shoots the cowboys in the film’s opening sequence so that, as in the shots of soldiers drilling in Basic Training, they are silhouetted against the rising or setting sun (see figure 4.8). These shots are reminiscent of the similar and justly celebrated images in Ford’s classic Westerns and evoke a similar nostalgic quality, for, in Meat, the days of the cowboy as the rugged individual of American Western myth are over. In Stagecoach

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FIGURE 4.8  Meat: The Western myth is deconstructed in iconographical images that acknowledge their own artifice.

(Ford, 1939), John Wayne’s Ringo Kid may have been “saved from the blessings of civilization,” but Meat shows that now, in the blunt words of e.e. cummings, “Buffalo Bill’s defunct.” The trucks on which the animals are loaded are also photographed in silhouette against the sun, suggesting how these machines have replaced the horse. Indeed, the only broncos in the world of the film are the professional football players of the state’s NFL team, referred to by a pennant above a computer and watched on television by a worker in the plant. These iconographically loaded shots at the beginning of Meat immediately establish the film’s discourse as self-conscious. The silhouette shots of both horses and trucks call attention to themselves as images since, in many of them, the sun is refracted in William Brayne’s camera, and dust and dried drops of water are visible on the lens. The film forces us, then, to acknowledge the constructed status of such imagery in an industrial world where the values the imagery celebrates can operate only on the level of myth. The low angle shots of the cowboys do not function as images of

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mythic celebration, as in Colin Low’s NFB documentary Corral (1954), but rather as ironic deflation. In these films, the entire life cycle has been commodified, made unnatural, from birth (the caring of the baby chimps in the hospital at the beginning of Primate; the carefully supervised studding in Racetrack; the birth of the baby rhino and the incubating of the alligator eggs in Zoo) to death (experimentation in Primate; animal fabrication in Meat). In the first dialogue sequence of Primate, a scientist tellingly confuses what types of animal behavior are observable in the wild and in captivity. One Yerkes researcher remarks in the planning meeting for the artificial insemination experiment that after artificially impregnating the female, they will “let nature take its course,” providing a howlingly funny punch line. Wiseman follows this sadly short-sighted comment with his own visual joke: He cuts to a shot of the monkey slated for the zero-gravity experiment being wheeled down a corridor in a restraining device, a sort of technological tumbrel, hardly nature taking its course. Incredibly, the line is repeated almost verbatim in Racetrack when, after sequences showing the studding procedure and the birth of a foal, someone remarks, “Ain’t nature wonderful?” In the eerie final sequence of Primate, the zero-gravity experiment aboard a climbing and diving air force C-130 jet, no one—neither the scientists nor even Wiseman’s cameraman—can keep his feet on the ground, and everyone begins to float in the air. Like the effect of the giddy finale of Model, a fashion show where models seem to twirl about endlessly, nature has been violated to the extent that we have lost our footing. The cylindrical egg product in Meat is the perfect found metaphor for the technologization of nature examined in the film. As the salesman says, “We just put a dozen eggs back together again into one convenient form.” (The company, he adds, has “developed” some salads.) Thus, technology has managed to blur the distinction between the raw and the cooked. The egg product’s cylindrical container looks similar to the tubes of ground beef we see being prepared in the film’s final sequence, the similarity of shape reinforcing the thematic connection. It is significant that technology has refashioned even eggs, for it “brings us at last,” to quote Brave New World once again, “out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention.”31 Just as the horses in Racetrack are pampered because they are “worth millions,” and rare animals in Zoo must be purchased through elaborately

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negotiated deals with international “consortiums,” so in Meat, as in the early cattle auction sequence, life is quantified, a matter of weight and dollars (We’re going to weigh ’em in two, sell ’em in one”). Numbers and dollars, in fact, make up the content of virtually every dialogue in Meat: the auctioneer’s patter, the exchange between the feed truck drivers and the computer operators, the tour of the plant given to the Japanese businessmen, Monfort’s conversation with the cattle buyer, the salesmen’s telephone chatter, the union negotiations with the company’s personnel director, the employee benefits meeting, the newspaper reporter’s interview with Monfort. Prices can be cut and scaled, just like animals. Even the weather is quantified (like the “weather inhibiting factor” in Missile), as the feedlot supervisor reports to Monfort the relevant data on the climate at the two feedlots. The worlds of Primate and Meat are, in short, worlds where reason has triumphed over passion, the mind over the body. In our reification of scientific knowledge and technology, we have cut ourselves off from our own physical and emotional nature, just as the squirrel monkey’s head is separated from its body. The extent to which we have become alienated from nature is visualized in Primate in the prophylactic barrier established by the incubator, the surgical masks and gloves, and the padded gloves the scientists wear when handling the animals. Significantly, the image we see of Dr. Yerkes himself at the beginning of the film is a sculptured bust at the center—a head without a body. Bodies are continually violated and deadened in these films—in Primate by the penetration of a variety of devices, drugs, tools, and artificial stimulation, and in Meat, Racetrack, and Zoo by the routinization of activity. In these films, animals themselves become tools to be utilized, as one soldier explains about the army’s approach to K-9 dogs in Canal Zone. The bodies of animals in Primate are anesthetized despite their protest; in Racetrack, a man threatens a spirited horse with castration. But Primate, in fact, suggests that we have, in a sense, castrated ourselves. Similarly, the workers in Meat have grown anesthetized, stunned, like the animals they slaughter. Wiseman’s film practice is, in a sense, analogous to the work of the scientists. As Calvin Pryluck notes in his discussion of ethics in documentary, “Scientific experiments and direct cinema depend for their success on subjects who have little or nothing to gain from participation.”32

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FIGURE 4.9  Primate: The observers observed in framing that shows a more comprehensive view than that offered by scientific knowledge.

Just as the researchers watch their subjects, so Wiseman observes his (see figure 4.9); they dissect the animals, like Wiseman “cuts up” what he films through framing and montage. The squirrel monkey’s brain in Primate is removed and sliced into sections like meat but also like the process of montage. And as in the scene in Hospital where the human brain is examined, the monkey’s brain is assessed in aesthetic terms (“one of the best we’ve seen in a few weeks”). The scientists’ response to the microscopic slides (“shots”) made from the brain samples—we see several fill the entire frame—appears more aesthetic than scientific (“That is beautiful,” they enthuse). Wiseman similarly explores the compositional potential of observational cinema, a formalist tendency that only increases in his later films. In different ways, then, both scientist and observational filmmaker murder to dissect. Clearly, though, Wiseman’s camera is superior as a method of obtaining empirical knowledge. The scientists employ assistants to observe the animals and at one-minute intervals to fill in columns on checklists

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containing a reductive “fifteen or twenty categories of behavior.” At one point, a scientist asks a checker if she recorded her “impressions” in “a short sentence.” Another observational method involves tape recording a verbal description of animal behavior and taking periodic still photos to document actions. But such procedures are inadequate to the complexities of behavior. Thus, Wiseman films the checkers through links in a chain fence, the framing suggesting their narrower vision. Inevitably, we wonder why they don’t use videotape, or film, like Wiseman—like, in fact, the very film we are watching. (Video cameras are employed in some of the experiments; why not here?) Primate shows an orangutan giving birth accompanied by the researcher’s tape-recorded narrative, which clearly provides less information than what we see. Certainly, neither still photos nor words alone can duplicate the power of observational cinema.33 Toward the end of the film, the scientists discuss the relative value of pure and applied research. They profess the superiority of the former, although their claim is suspect since their work (like that of many independent filmmakers, including Wiseman himself) is dependent upon government grants and private endowments. Wiseman acknowledges this economic reality and emphatically undercuts the idea of pure research in the final sequence of the film, the zero-gravity experiment, by focusing on the U.S. Air Force logo on the plane as the van carrying the scientists, monkey, and camera draws near it on the runway. Typical of Wiseman’s approach and in contrast to the behavior modification of the scientists, both Primate and Meat allow viewers to come to their own conclusions. Primate ends abruptly, with the plane in midflight, leaving us, as so many of his films do, “up in the air” with questions. How far will we go in our quest for knowledge? Is our path upward or downward? At the end of Meat, only after being stultified along with the workers is the viewer rudely awakened; the institution is suddenly thrust into a moral perspective when Monfort is asked by a local news reporter about his and the consumer’s (viewer’s) moral responsibility. In Wiseman’s cinema, then, it is not only the filmmaker but the viewer as well who is cast into the role of researcher. The last image in Primate is of the plane in flight shot through crosshairs. In these films, Wiseman has focused on his target, the increasing alienation of people from the world and themselves. Yet, as suggested earlier, these films, while depicting a bleak and seemingly deterministic world, are not without hope. For it is

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precisely our “unprofessional” responses to the animals in these films that at once allows us to perceive them as more than mere tools for knowledge (Primate) or amusement (Racetrack, Zoo) and to redeem us from our contemporary malaise. If we ourselves are to avoid becoming alienated, processed bodies, urge the films, we must feel deeply. It is this emotional openness and the difficulties of achieving it that inform the group of films discussed in chapter 7.

5 WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE Canal Zone (1977) • Sinai Field Mission (1978) • Model (1980) • The Store (1983)

T

he four films discussed in this chapter demonstrate Wiseman’s growing sophistication in examining institutional politics. The themes and methods of these films are similar to contemporary deconstructionist criticism in that they seek to identify cultural myths and ideological constraints at work in institutions, including the institution of cinema. The presence of several American flags during the shooting of the Toyota ad at the beginning of Model explicitly acknowledges that visual images are, in Roland Barthes’s distinction, cultural rather than natural.1 In these films, Wiseman examines cultural institutions while at the same time critiquing his own documentary practice as one of many signifying systems. In this sense, they mark a clear progression from the self-reflexive strategy of Titicut Follies, Manoeuvre, and Meat, in which the spectator’s relation to the filmic text is of crucial importance. These films continue the American theme initiated in the early documentaries, although they proceed differently. Wiseman has said that he picks specific institutions to film because their bounded, definable space helps prevent the films from losing focus, from becoming “too diffuse.” He adds that such a definition of an institution is not to be taken literally but as a “working definition.” In these four films, however, Wiseman eschews his earlier method of finding ways within the text to encourage a reading of a particular institution as a social microcosm, preferring instead to consider American culture itself as an institution. The idea of

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“cultural spoors” thus ceases to have any significant meaning since these institutions are, in effect, “the larger beast,” hegemonic American culture. Although Model and The Store do concentrate their examination on particular institutions—on New York’s Zoli agency and the Neiman Marcus flagship store in Dallas, respectively—they both explicitly relate their own work of documentation to the larger cultural business of image creation and consumption. The four films fall neatly into two distinct pairs, connected thematically, stylistically, and chronologically. Canal Zone and Sinai Field Mission belong to a tradition in American literature that begins with Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), the first American play. It established the convention of pitting the homespun wit of a New Englander against a foppish Englishman, which in these films extends to the more modern Ugly American reversal. In a sense, these two films fit into the tradition of Henry James’s “international theme.” In novels like The American (1877), James throws American culture and manners into greater relief by placing its representatives within established European society. Similarly, Canal Zone and Sinai Field Mission examine American culture by transposing it, by documenting how Americans live, work, and play when abroad. Model and The Store adopt different strategies, the first focusing on advertising and the second on conspicuous consumption, both of which, to a large extent, define American capitalism. Hence, these two films are closer to novels like The Bostonians (1886)—the word itself commodified in The Store as a brand of shoe—wherein aspects of American culture clash internally. Here, Wiseman contrasts the idealized imagery of advertising and consumption with the imperfections of the real world. Canal Zone begins predictably enough by presenting the operational processes of the Panama Canal, just as Belfast, Maine begins with the expected scene of lobster fishing. In the lengthy, carefully composed opening sequence, we are shown what is involved in moving a ship through the canal locks, and we are quickly inundated with facts offered by an official canal tour guide: the amount of water in each lock, the length of time it takes to flood a lock with water, the weight of the lock mechanisms, the toll schedules, and so on. As we soon discover, however, this is not the film’s real focus, for it quickly shifts its attention, devoting most of its nearly three-hour running time to aspects of daily life in the zone.

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The title of the film is thus quite precise, for the canal itself is only fleetingly glimpsed throughout the remainder of the film. As suggested by the many shots of people looking through binoculars and high-powered lenses at the beginning, the film moves from a superficial view, represented by the tour guide’s pre-scripted account of statistics about the canal, to a more revealing examination of life in the zone, magnifying what is already there in order to be seen more clearly. Like the marriage counselor’s method within the film, Canal Zone seeks to “structure an environment in which you can learn something that you already know but experience it more intently.” So it might be said that the film shows two types of apparatuses—the physical machinery of the canal and the intangible machinery of American ideology in the zone. Sinai Field Mission, about the group of Americans who operate a buffer zone monitoring station in the Sinai between Egypt and Israel,2 works similarly. It begins by showing aspects of the monitoring process, although here, the viewer is more puzzled than in the opening of Canal Zone since the operation of the Sinai Field Mission (SFM) is likely more unfamiliar than that of the Panama Canal. Soon, some Israeli officials visit the mission compound, and Mr. Roberts, the deputy director of SFM, serves an analogous function to the Canal tour guide by explaining in detail to them, and so to us, the mandate and function of SFM. After this, though, the film goes on to show us a more penetrating view of what life is like for these transplanted Americans inside the compound, returning only occasionally to the ostensible work of the mission. The Canal Zone, according to Paul Theroux, is “an American suburb in apotheosis, the triumph of banality.”3 Hence the zone we see in the film seems, at first glance, an American town like so many others—Monrovia, Indiana, say. As in the classic city symphony documentaries, we see many shots of people at leisure. Like a warmer version of Aspen, they engage in many physical activities—they jog, ride bikes and skateboards; they play tennis, volleyball, bingo, soccer, and water polo; they fish, swim, and lounge on the beach. Canal Zone’s emphasis on the games these people play also relates it to Manoeuvre, the imperialist connection suggested by the sudden appearance of American paratroopers on maneuvers in Panama near the end of the film. Canal Zone shows almost nothing of indigenous Panamanian culture except for a brief glimpse of local street art and a Panamanian sandlot baseball game (if, indeed, this can properly be

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called indigenous culture). American culture, by contrast, is everywhere: familiar rituals and ceremonies, television shows (Abbott and Costello and Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials are on the TV in the waiting room at the Mental Health Clinic, Panamanians staring blankly at the screen), pop music on local radio, current movies (including the revenge movie Walking Tall, Part Two [Earl Bellamy, 1975], its presence here suggesting a connection between personal vigilantism and Monroe Doctrine politics). James Wolcott faults Canal Zone for a lack of specificity, saying that it could have been filmed in Iowa or Georgia;4 but this is less of a failure on the film’s part than the precise point of the film. Just as the woman who takes the Thematic Appreciation Test (TAT) obviously reads her own marital problems into the pictures she is shown, so Americans in the zone have imported their own social customs and values into another environment and culture. Canal Zone’s method is politically loaded. The film concentrates on bourgeois Americans and relegates the impoverished Panamanians to the margins, just as they have been marginalized economically and socially by the Zonians. Yet they appear with regular frequency, like periodic thorns in the viewer’s conscience. For example, Panamanian workers are shown pricing food and stocking the shelves of a supermarket where the Zonians shop, and it is they who clean up at the Balboa High School graduation ceremony. They work as garbage pickers, field hands, and skeet pullers for Americans. Elsewhere, a shot of a Panamanian man doing menial groundskeeping work as a big American car drives past forcefully emphasizes the disparity of wealth between the two groups. These occasional “cameo appearances” by Panamanians remind the viewer of the position of privilege held by the film’s “major characters,” the Americans (see figure 5.1). Just as the Panamanian people are distinct from the Zonians, so the zone is distinctly separate from the country that surrounds it. The film’s view is consistent with Theroux’s description of the Zonians’ perception of Panama as a “big stupid clumsy world of squinting cannibals [that] begins where the Zone ends—it is right there, across the Fourth of July Highway, the predatory world of hungry unwashed people gibbering in Spanish.”5 Wiseman shows us a public service announcement on Zonian television advising women viewers to keep their car windows closed when stopped at a red light. Elsewhere, reminiscent of Theroux’s anecdote about

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FIGURE 5.1  Canal Zone: Indigenous culture is marginalized, as in this shot of a Panama-

nian worker tending the grounds of Balboa High School.

the librarian who had worked in the zone for forty years but could not speak one sentence in Spanish,6 we see in the film a weekly Spanish lesson television show that, incredibly, is only one minute long. The xenophobic garrison mentality of the zone (in a way, not unlike the besieged welfare center in Welfare) is made explicit in the physical appearance of the compound in Sinai Field Mission. The place is designed like a fort, with several squat buildings huddled together and surrounded by fences and surveillance equipment. Wiseman often films vehicles entering or departing from the compound by showing the gates closing behind them, almost as if the frame itself were narrowing in (a similar effect is achieved with the elevator doors in The Store), emphasizing this sense of confinement or entrapment and cleverly alluding to the geography of the place itself (the Mitla and Gidi Passes, through which all traffic must flow, are described by Roberts as “bottlenecks”). Frequent announcements broadcast over the loudspeakers and the periodic whirring of helicopter blades on the soundtrack recall M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970), a film

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that shares Wiseman’s vision of Americans abroad trying to maintain a neutral humanism. (The paging of “Mr. Roberts” over the loudspeaker system offers another resonant reference: John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy’s 1955 war comedy, Mr. Roberts, where the eponymous hero is played by that icon of Americana, Henry Fonda). As the Zonians block out the indigenous realities of Panama, so the Americans in Sinai Field Mission seem closed to Middle Eastern culture. One man watching a belly dancer on television is about as close to local culture as the Americans get in the film. Some of the SFM staff play video games, suggesting that, as far as these people are concerned, the belly dancer and the blips on the game screen are both simply images to be consumed. In the compound bar, one man tells another about his “R and R” trip to Cairo, averring that everyone should go, yet when asked about his trip, he says he stayed drunk the whole time he was there. These innocents abroad think they can “do” Egypt in “five to six days.” Three Americans from SFM actually do travel into the desert to an old Bedouin burial ground, where they betray their ignorance of local culture. “Is this Mecca?” one of the two women asks, while the other wants to inscribe their names, the graffiti of insensitive tourists on holy ground. This is as far from the mission as Wiseman’s camera ever goes. As in Canal Zone, indigenous culture is largely relegated to the periphery, a reflection of the attitude of the Americans in the film. Sinai Field Mission, too, shows Americans devoted to leisure. We see people play an astonishing variety of games, as well as bike, jog, and exercise on various pieces of gym equipment. Wiseman emphasizes this play aspect of life at SFM, just as Roberts, in his explanation of the function and mandate of the mission, uses an extended metaphor of sport (they are the “referees” who can “stop the action” by calling “infractions”). As in Canal Zone, Americans fill the spaces they inhabit with their own frivolous luxuries, even to the point of imagining complex political realities in terms of their own leisurely lifestyle. Again as in Canal Zone, American popular culture proliferates in the SFM compound. Wiseman shows a Fourth of July celebration, including a hootenanny where several of the staff sing “That Good Old Mountain Dew,” an American flag prominently hung behind them (see figure 5.2). Their feeling of homesickness is made explicit when a trio performs another song with the refrain, “We’re seven thousand miles away from home,” which elicits an appreciative round of applause.

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FIGURE 5.2  Sinai

Field Mission: American culture looms large, as in the hootenanny

sequence.

Other songs heard in the film include Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” and Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights,” both tunes particularly appropriate since E-Systems, the private contracting company that is responsible for the operational and technical aspects of SFM, is based in Texas. As in Meat, Western icons abound. Two of the code words used during radio communications are “Alamo” and “Red River.” There is a barbecue, a favorite Texas pastime, although here, ironically, it is held indoors. In one sequence, the men play football (one of them wears a Texas Longhorns jersey) and drink beer from a cowboy boot: “This is how a Texan drinks,” someone shouts. They sing “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” (“That goes for Israel and Egypt,” a voice interjects) and make reference to “T for Texas” (“Blue Yodel No. 1”), a song recorded by both Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Canal Zone especially emphasizes the rituals and ceremonies of daily life. In Wolcott’s words, the film is “A Macy’s Day parade of ceremonies.”7 The Americans seem to cling to ceremony and tradition as a way of preserving

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their national identity the way the priest clings to patriarchy in his antifeminist sermon. There is a particular emphasis on the flag. In ceremonies such as the observance of Law Day (a judge praises their new flag because it “doesn’t have any spots”), the presentation of new flags to the VFW by the Zonian Women’s Auxiliary (according to the army colonel who officially receives the flags, the ceremony is “a reaffirmation of our great pledge to our country and our allegiance to a great nation”), and the planting of small flags on the gravestones, this icon is repeatedly called upon. Other rituals include a Boy Scouts awards dinner, where a fife and drum corps in revolutionary Minuteman garb play “Yankee Doodle Dandy”; a funeral service where a man recites Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”; and a graduation ceremony at Balboa High School as awful as the one in Basic Training, complete with a turgid valedictorian speech full of platitudes about friendship and loyalty (“Life in America under God is a positive experience”). In a sense, the America of the Canal Zone is like the grotesque middle America depicted in the cult science fiction movie A Boy and His Dog (L. Q. Jones, 1975), released just two years before Wiseman’s film. In this ironic postapocalyptic tale, radioactive contamination has forced most survivors underground to Topeka, a self-contained replica of a midwestern town. Desperately attempting to preserve American culture, the community’s residents cling to familiar social rituals. In this sunless world, they paint their cheeks a rosy hue, broadcast a continuous stream of middle-class homilies over the loudspeaker system, listen to marching bands, and indulge in pie-baking contests. Life in the zone, described by one reviewer as “Middle America in vitro,”8 is similarly dominated by the rituals and social conventions of bourgeois America as a desperate attempt to maintain its traditional values. Such small ceremonies mean a great deal and make the participants feel part of the larger social order, as the colonel says when accepting the old American flags for disposal. The film’s heavy emphasis on such scenes makes the zone seem, in Frank Rich’s words, “a nightmare version of America itself.”9 As for the people of the fictional Topeka, ceremony and ritual have become so important to the Zonians because it is a society in crisis, a result of America’s eroding imperialist power. (It is one of the film’s ironies, after all, that it was made in the bicentennial year.) The community of the zone is plagued by financial cutbacks and morale problems, feeling abandoned by the government that had established it back in 1903. Governor Harold

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Parfitt refers to the current negotiations of the controversial treaty that will turn the canal over to Panama by the year 2000 as “a trauma.” At the civic council meeting, we hear that there is a “mini-exodus” of people back home because “a feeling of desperate hopelessness has spread throughout the United States community.” In the words of the youth officer, “We’re worried about are we going to be here next year and are we going to have a revolution.” The strained endurance of Zonian society manifests itself in such problems as failing marriages and child abuse—the rate of which is “about three times above the national average.” Canal Zone’s closing shots of gravestones, a marked contrast to the opening shots of birds flying in the sky above the canal, constitute a strong editorial comment. In fact, this may be one of the most overtly political moments in all of Wiseman’s cinema, as much a criticism of anti-treaty and big stick foreign policy as it is a comment on the bourgeois rituals of Zonian life. Wiseman’s sense of irony in the film often amplifies the social problems of the zone. He includes, for example, a cutaway shot of a local cinema marquee showing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—“a nightmare version of America,” indeed. Some of the Zonians are upset because they are not allowed to use the American military facilities, while their own are open for use by military personnel. They complain that the situation is “inequitable” and that (similar to the view of some of the staff in Sinai Field Mission about the Finnish detachment of UN forces) they are, in effect, second-class citizens—an ironic complaint given the zone’s imperialist context. Perhaps the largest irony of all is that as the Zonians celebrate their country’s bicentennial throughout the film, marking their own revolution as a colony, they feel threatened that Panama is on the verge of doing the same. The film’s wry tone, then, is generated essentially as a result of the fact that otherwise common American activities—what Peter Sourian calls the “extraordinarily ordinary”10—are shown occurring in an alien environment. There are similar indications of tensions below the surface in the SFM community. We discover that there have been several instances of property damage in the compound by SFM personnel and that the vandalism is getting worse. Several scenes take place in the compound bar (“I have to have my happy hour drink,” one woman says), and in the drinking party scene, the men seem surprisingly drunk and rowdy—a stark contrast to the discipline of the Ghanian troops seen at several points in the film.

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In one shot, a forklift, fully loaded with cartons of liquor, moves dramatically toward the camera, its importance unmistakably emphasized by the forward movement within the frame. In another, a hand truck stacked with cases of Heinekin beer is wheeled into a storeroom, and later we see that the PX is stocked with alcohol and tobacco products. As in Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, such images suggest problems beneath the veneer of bourgeois plenitude. Not surprisingly, the Americans view both the Panama Canal and the SFM essentially as business ventures; after all, as Calvin Coolidge said, the business of America is business. The governor of the zone, who also serves as president of the Canal Zone Company, thinks of the canal as an “enterprise,” speaking about it in terms of capital expenditures, equipment depreciation, and investment potential. His assessment of the Vietnam War is that it was good for canal business, and in the ham radio scene, the navy man from Maryland identifies himself as being “in the torpedo business.” Gov. Parfitt ominously refers to the company as “the combine,” the same phrase Chief Bromden uses for the military-industrial complex in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and it is shortly after this that Wiseman inserts the marquee shot advertising Forman’s film. Similarly, SFM is composed of 163 people, “twenty-three United States government types and one hundred and forty E-Systems people.” However, according to Mr. Thorne, the retiring director of SFM, the two groups have grown closer to the point that “the two aren’t really distinct anymore.” That culture is our business, in Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, is also shown in both Model and The Store. The Zipporah catalog’s concise description of Model as presenting “a view of the intersections of fashion, business, advertising, photography, television, and fantasy” summarizes its concerns rather well. The Store, which Wiseman acknowledges developed as an outgrowth of his work on Model,11 shows the selling of the goods for which the imagery of advertising stirs desire and, moreover, how capitalism and consumerism have shaped our perception and consciousness. John Berger writes that all advertising is geared toward “a single proposal”: “to buying something more.”12 In the film’s first sequence inside Neiman Marcus, a staff meeting of department heads, the vice president echoes Berger in his emphatic declaration that “we’re at Neiman Marcus for one reason, and one reason only”—sales. This, he adds, is their “one purpose in life.” Thus, holidays are defined in terms of

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retailing. Washington’s birthday, for the store president, is “a very meaningful event, particularly in coats,” while Christmas, according to the company buyer who conducts the physical exercises for the sales staff, is nothing more than “a particularly intense shopping season.” Here there is none of the Hollywood fantasy of benign capitalism, as in, say, The Devil and Miss Jones (Sam Wood, 1941) or Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947). On the contrary, business is competition—in the company president’s words, a matter of taking “a share of the market away by virtue of having customers come to our store instead of going across the square.” The beginnings of Model and The Store are indicative of the expanded conception of the institutions that inform them. Both begin with exterior shots, not of particular buildings but of the Manhattan and Dallas skylines, respectively. (Such opening shots would become common in Wiseman’s subsequent films.) Model’s first establishing shot, shown even before the exterior of the Zoli Agency, the locus of the film, is a portion of the Manhattan skyline carefully framed so that the World Trade Center is prominent. Not coincidentally, during the shooting of the Toyota ad, we see models posing against this same part of the skyline. Wiseman again returns to the same view in the film’s closing image at night, as if to say that the institution of “the culture industry” works around the clock. In both films, Wiseman again uses images of the city streets—buses and store windows and the myriad details of daily activity—not merely as transition shots but also as meaningful commentary. In The Store, there is a clear contrast between the ambient noise and activity of the street and the quiet Muzak and orderly aisles of merchandise inside Neiman Marcus. In Model, the bustle of the real world is contrasted with the constructed hyperreality (“artificially arranged scenes,” as Georges Méliès had described his films) of advertising imagery. Before the filming of the exterior shots for the pantyhose commercial, the city streets are deliberately swept clean, and the director fusses over the position of the sun for “natural” lighting. One photographer’s observation in Model of “how little we are in touch with the rest of the country” is shown to be more true than he realizes. Andy Warhol, certainly a voice of authority on such matters, tells a film crew that models are the only ones who look good in the clothes they model, and even they normally do not wear them. Consumer

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imagery in both Model and The Store are as separate from daily life as the transplanted American societies are from local culture in Canal Zone and Sinai Field Mission. The startling disjunction between these two worlds— what one of the models interviewed in the film by the same film crew calls “the dividing line between reality and illusion”—emphasizes the extent to which advertising is ideological fantasy. At first, this aspect of Model may seem obvious, even cliché. Thus, James Wolcott ungenerously refers to one of the film’s cutaways, contrasting advertising imagery and daily life, as “a device worthy of John Schlesinger at his most facilely sour.”13 Yet, this aspect of the film’s structure is crucial and is, in fact, more complex than the simple contrast it initially appears to be. For example, at different times in the film, these street shots include an ambulance and a fire engine coming into the frame. Here, both the aleatory nature of reality and the ineluctability of mortality reassert themselves, intruding into advertising’s fantasy of timeless perfection. Further, if real life and advertising are distinctly separate, they are also intimately connected both economically and socially. The emphasis on bridges in these shots—there are at least three, as well as the Roosevelt Island tramway—suggests such connection, and customer flow in Neiman Marcus is explicitly referred to in The Store as “traffic” during one of the staff meetings. Our first specific view of New York in Model is of a city square where a band is playing. Behind the musicians and the people on the street loom giant billboards advertising Calvin Klein jeans and Brut cologne (see figure 5.3). These images at once introduce the film’s subject and, through both the placement and scale of the ads, indicate the extent to which advertising infiltrates and influences daily existence. These shots show us how, as John Berger has written, “In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently.” (One particular street shot clearly recalls the composition of that final shot in Hospital and its implications of a society inured to the realities of its own functioning.) However, if we are so accustomed to the proliferation of advertising images that, as Berger says, “we scarcely notice their total impact,”14 in Model, because we see ads everywhere—on billboards and bus shelters, on the fronts and sides of busses, and on vans and trucks in almost of all the street shots—we become unavoidably conscious of them.

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FIGURE 5.3  Model: The cultural importance of advertising is emphasized in the miseen-scène of street shots.

Unlike the untidy bustle in the real world, in the imagery of fashion and advertising, as Romeo’s photographer boasts, “everything’s perfect.” In this art that is “too precise in every part,”15 even the slightest disorder brings no delight. Twice in Model photographic sessions are delayed as wayward hair (“just one little hair that’s coming right across”) is removed by these contemporary artists of the beautiful. The director of the Picone commercial insists not only that commercials are an art but also that advertising is “probably the most difficult art form there is.” (Humorously, Wiseman inserts shots of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum at different points in the sequence.) Whereas in movies, things can be stretched out in time, he reasons, “Here your concentration is on the tenths of seconds. And the discipline becomes that much more extraordinary.” In The Store, the fur salesman boasts that a particular sable coat is “a true work of art.” The music played by the band during the film’s opening street sequence is, as Armstrong points out, “the elegant rondo from Mouret’s Symphonic Fanfares, the musical theme of public

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television’s Masterpiece Theater.”16 This is another ironic joke (especially given Wiseman’s attitude toward American public television) in the context of advertising’s conception of itself as art. In a sense, the enclosed, idealized worlds of advertising and exclusive retailing are similar to the psychically self-contained American existence in the Canal Zone and the SFM. In the zone, it is the canal itself that challenges nature. The canal is, in effect, a massive concrete instance of ideology turning culture into nature—“the greatest liberty ever taken with nature,” in the words of Lord Bryce.17 As the ham radio operator points out, the Canal Zone is the only place where he can put out to sea and have his family with him at the same time. The film contains several shots showing the attempt to tame or tether the forces of nature, mundane instances of what the canal represents on a grander scale: a truck spraying chemicals on a lawn, a bull tied by two ropes, a deckhand on a ship golfing with a ball tied to a rope. We see dredging machines lifting rock and silt from the canal, an apparently Sisyphean process challenging the land’s natural state, which Wiseman clearly emphasizes in long takes and lengthy pans. If, as Rev. Kennedy remarks in the opening of the Law Day celebration, “all true law is but a participation in and a reflection of Thy divine authority . . . [that is] revealed to us in the amazingly ordered and unswerving laws of nature,” then the canal itself is a “crime,” a defilement of nature, similar to the tanks in Manoeuvre. Ultimately, the canal’s “unnaturalness” serves as a metaphor for the unnatural balance of power held by the colonialist Americans in the zone. In Sinai Field Mission, the landscape clearly dominates, a vast, imperturbable space oblivious to the petty battles that occur on its darkling plains. Several shots of abandoned trucks and wrecked jeeps, like empty husks in the desert, set an ominous tone, similar to the images of social and ecological protest in Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqaatsi (1988). Here Wiseman’s typical corridor shots are replaced by shots of flat, expansive vistas. In them, the desert possesses a looming presence, which Wiseman emphasizes by long shots and pans as if the Sinai were his Monument Valley. In the beginning, a SFM car driving in the desert is dwarfed by the landscape (see figure 5.4), like the Overland Stage in the famous long shots in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Wiseman’s camera zooms out to make the SFM car even smaller in the frame. At one point, we see a somewhat ludicrous image of one of the men vacuuming a rug outdoors as, all

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FIGURE 5.4  Sinai Field Mission: The Sinai Field Mission vehicle is dwarfed by the landscape.

around, in Shelley’s words, “the lone and level sands stretch far away.” The film’s final images show the Ghanaian battalion of the U.N. Expeditionary Force marching out of the frame, momentarily leaving the landscape for us to contemplate. The point is twofold. First, it puts into a larger perspective the American culture that so many Americans unquestioningly assume as global manifest destiny. Second, it shows that the mandate of the SFM, as laudable as it may be (as with many of the other institutions Wiseman has examined), has become skewed by technology. In the disagreement between the SFM staff and the Israeli colonel, the officer insists he is talking about human beings, not paper and procedures. Wiseman follows his remark with an ironic cut to the ever-present surveillance equipment of the compound. The theme is made explicit in the debate between two of the SFM staff concerning procedure during a medical emergency at the Israeli base. Paul wants to go strictly by the book, but George argues that “meanwhile the guy is bleeding to death.” As in Welfare and Hospital, it is an argument of “technicalities versus need.” Wiseman shoots the disagreement

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between the two men so that they are seen through a barred window in the State Department building, the frame within a frame and the bars suggesting the extent to which such humanistic impulses are trapped within bureaucracy engendered by technological capability. This theme continues in Model, which explores the profession of modeling as the institution that has formalized how people are violated, reduced in importance by labels and stereotypes (a frequent concern in Wiseman’s documentaries). The film shows how the discourse of fashion is concerned with surface looks, with commodification through imagery of emotions and feelings. One male model, for example, is told that he has that “Warren Beatty quality” (actor as image), and a female model is informed that she has all the qualities for the sophisticated “Avon kind of look” (product as image). Models are asked by photographers for a “harder look” or “more punky” quality, for looks of sophistication, bitchiness, youth, and shyness (“kind of like, ya know, aw, shucks”). Another male model is told to “give me that really nice macho  .  .  . a very typical masculine thing,” while in an improvisatory scene, and yet another is coached to “think young executive rather than guy standing on street corner.” Even in The Store, a female department head being photographed dislikes her image because “it looks so business,” wanting instead “to look like a soft, feminine, non-career lady.” Despite Zoli’s protest that people ignorant of the modeling business stereotype models, this is, as we see, precisely what the business itself does in its creation of ideal imagery. So in response to a photographer’s complaint that today’s younger models have no technique, that they simply strike predetermined poses without thinking about them because “they don’t know anything  .  .  . there’s no thinking process going on,” his subject proudly claims, “I don’t think.” Apollonia van Ravenstein, the model who provides the legs for the Picone stocking commercial (also the star of Seraphita’s Diary), is told not to think too much since the leg poses she must strike are “very mechanical.” In the next sequence, three models are told to pose as if they were mannequins in Bloomingdale’s window. The attitude is literalized by the models during the evening affair. They act as living mannequins, displaying fashions and lounging in poses against a wall. During the shooting of the exterior part of the Picone commercial, a model is referred to twice as “doll” by the director; in another photo session, a spotlight shines directly on a model’s face, draining it of definition, making it look like a

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mannequin or an unfinished pod replacement from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The models, in short, are like Bob Walters in High School—only bodies doing a job. Dan Armstrong’s comment that Zoli’s agency is “a kind of fashion model’s meat market” and Wolcott’s description of the reception with the live models against the wall as reminiscent of “sides of beef on a meat rack” acknowledge the ironic connections between Model and Meat.18 Indeed, Wiseman invites a comparison between them, for, in Model, he shows how models are “treated like cattle.” The first shots inside Zoli’s, showing several telephone calls to place models in jobs, is reminiscent of the salesmen taking telephone orders early in Meat. Near the beginning of the film, we are shown interviews with several aspiring models—a weeding out process analogous to the feedlot procedure at the Monfort Plant. The models are “packaged” as types, like the uniform cuts of beef wrapped for delivery at the end of Meat. (In this regard Model anticipates Crazy Horse, as does Seraphita’s Diary.) One client, for instance, wants an “all-American apple pie” girl for a network pilot on models entitled All Those Beautiful Girls. Such categories are the fashion equivalents of the “light heifferettes” and “tri-tips” of meat packing. Sometimes the process changes the models to the extent that, like the animals that enter the packing plant, there is little apparent relation to the final product. “What happened to the girl who came in here?” a photographer asks a model after she has had her makeup applied. As well, the models are frequently treated as sexual objects—as “meat.” Thus, the photo sessions themselves are full of sexual overtones, both in the posing of the models and in the way photographers and models relate. In the shoot with Romeo (the name itself telling), the female photographer provides a continuous monologue of encouragement rife with sexual innuendo (“So tight. Oh, that’s real nice,” she purrs), somewhat a gendered reversal of the famous scene with David Hemmings and Verushka in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). In The Store, a female customer being photographed in a similarly flirtatious way reveals the extent to which the sexual enticement of fashion imagery has infiltrated the less exotic world of commercial portrait photography. What Wilson Bryan Key had called “subliminal seduction” has now become rather overt. In Model, Wiseman echoes this treatment of the models as images in several ways. First, he initially shows them in the form of magazine cover

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photos on the wall of the agency before filming them directly. During the interviews, their actual presence is intercut with images of them from their portfolios. The camera frequently fragments the models’ bodies, just as Apollonia’s legs are used to construct a geometrical pattern described as “a peacock effect.” When they apply makeup, for example, only parts of their bodies are shown. In one big closeup, lotion is applied to a model’s neck, the tight framing accenting its gentle curves, like an abstract sculpture. As images, the models are not whole bodies but rather function as cultural signifiers, forms on which we drape the fabric of our dreams. Hence gesture, so important in films like Essene, Deaf and Blind, and Near Death, is reduced merely to posture in Model. The models’ poses, as in the case of Romeo, are frequently quite unnatural, remote from authentic body language. In The Store, Wiseman continues this theme in his ironic use of mannequins. Everywhere there are store dummies—like the zombies that congregate in the shopping mall in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). The conceit constitutes one of the film’s several ongoing jokes, seen everywhere, from the sales floor to a basement storeroom to the sewing room. At several points, Wiseman presents brief shots of sales staff or customers in stationary positions, mannequins also visible in the frame, so that we are momentarily puzzled as to which of these bodies, if any, is real. In one quick shot, for example, we are unsure whether we are seeing a person touching a ceiling or a mannequin in a pose. In another shot, a man walks from the center toward the left of the frame, and the mirror that divides the image, not immediately noticeable to the viewer, splits him so that his reflected image walks in the opposite direction. In this very way, the desire for consumer goods created by advertising pulls at us, making us discontent with ourselves. In this shot, it is difficult to determine which is the real man and which is the image. In the film, as in postmodern culture, sometimes we are not really sure. The Store, along with Meat and Model, thus may be seen to form a trilogy that explores how we have achieved for ourselves “the packaged soul” that Vance Packard predicted back in 1957.19 Both Model and The Store feature many closeups of faces and hands with makeup and nail polish being applied, images of masks rather than authentic selves, faces to meet the faces that they meet. But Wiseman devotes considerable time to stripping away the seductive appeal of advertising imagery by revealing the processes of its creation. In contrast to the world

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of Zoli’s, where a prospective model’s portfolio is tautologically assessed as being good “because it works,” Wiseman shows us how these images work to be good. Like the scene in Not a Love Story (Bonnie Sherr Klein, 1981) where nude photographer Suze Randall carefully poses stripper Linda Lee Tracey and adds a few drops of “pussy juice” to her vulva, in Model’s photo sessions, we repeatedly see how carefully advertising imagery composes desire. The thirty-second Evan Picone pantyhose commercial takes almost twenty-five minutes of screen time, showing how tedious and meticulous the work involved in making images appear natural and spontaneous actually is. During the exterior shots for the ad, the soundtrack is invaded by the loud noise of nearby construction work, a comment on the fact that what we are seeing is the construction of an image. Later films from State Legislature to City Hall are, as I argue in chapter 11, political in that they directly address the functioning of democracy. But Model and The Store are also political, like Canal Zone and Sinai Field Mission, in that they show how politics is reduced by the culture industry to nothing more than image and style. Politics becomes merely one of many possible “styles” from which models may choose or, as one photographer notes, only a phase one goes through. As John Berger writes, in the world of advertising and consumer culture, politics is drained of political content.20 During one photo session in Model, a woman and girl pose on bicycles with a picture of Mao Tse-Tung hanging on the wall behind them, merely another part of the set’s bric-a-brac. And the vice president of Neiman Marcus, in all seriousness, equates the importance of one’s first experience inside the store with the day President Kennedy was assassinated. The implications of the “Lindsay style” cover of Life in Hospital and Governor Vanderhoof ’s superficial campaigning in Meat here reach their inevitable conclusion in the media saturation of the global village. In the fantasy world of advertising, politics is superfluous since, as McLuhan notes, it offers a utopian vision that “aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors.”21 So in Model, interestingly, unlike most of Wiseman’s other films, there appears to be no gender or racial discrimination. Of course, the images of the ads tend to feature women in visually inferior ways— “men act and women appear,” writes Berger22—but in the production of these ads, it is also true that both sexes are reduced to observed object, to image. At one point, we watch what at first seems to be a feminist

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FIGURE 5.5  Model:

The feminist demonstration as simulacrum reveals advertising’s recuperation of politics.

demonstration, with women shouting and carrying placards (see figure 5.5). Then an offscreen voice is heard giving directions, telling the women to look happy rather than angry, and we realize that this is not an actual demonstration, not another of the film’s many candid street shots, but a setup for a commercial. The same is true of racial issues. In the film, Black and white men and women pose together (although all of the photographers shown are white), and both races are featured on the covers of fashion magazines. So when we briefly see a street demonstration by the National Black Human Rights Coalition, we are forced to wonder whether this is another case of advertising co-optation or the real thing. Significantly, the film never tells us. It is no coincidence that Andy Warhol makes (appropriately) a cameo appearance in Model, being interviewed for a documentary on modeling. His own work in pop art has demonstrated that in contemporary media culture, everything is image. Brillo Soap pads and Campbell’s Soup cans are no different from images of Marilyn Monroe or Liz Taylor once they became

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stars. In a staff meeting in The Store about the new baked goods department, what is stressed is not the food itself but the right image, “an international European attitude food shop.” One of the models being filmed in the same segment of the documentary with Warhol says, “I didn’t shave today because . . . maybe they want real.” Reality itself becomes merely another possible image, like the Middle Eastern belly dancer in Sinai Field Mission. Everyone, in fact, is now a spectacle for visual consumption. So, in addition to the models leaning against the wall like mannequins or living sculptures in Model, there are roving models who roam through Neiman Marcus in The Store advertising sales in other departments. In one shot in the film, notes Armstrong, “a young Black man dances, transistor radio in hand, in front of a department store window, a star watching himself in his own movie.”23 There are people dressed as chickens, elves, and clowns—their clothes only more obviously costumes than those of either the customers or salesclerks. The giant chicken who delivers Margaret Murphy’s birthday message (“Margaret Murphy, come on down”) was likely hired by her coworkers, who make it, like the singing telegram from Mona to Robert in Model, a public spectacle, despite her obvious embarrassment. However, Wiseman’s method makes us question the status of profilmic events in the culture of the simulacrum. Hence the importance in these films of the fashion show. Model is, in a sense, a two-hour fashion show, and fashion shows happen elsewhere in The Store and Canal Zone. During his fashion presentation in The Store, the vice president defines style as “the perfection of a point of view,” which is, in turn, “what society is saying we should look like, live like, act like, be like, what we’re trying to be.” The film concludes with a lengthy, giddy display of new dresses, the excess of which rivals the Ecclesiastical Fashion Show in Fellini’s Roma (1971). One reviewer describes it as a parade of “Caucasian models, Watusi-tall and anorexic, their lips stung closed, as if they’d been eating alum, slouch[ing] past like Bryn Mawr girls.”24 Here, all is beautiful, an ethereal display of the ideal; no one has a “leg problem” like the unfortunate girls in the fashion arts class in High School. The superficiality of the spectacle is reinforced by the balloons that float into and almost fill the screen, like the gems that pile up in the famous credit sequence of Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1958). The musical accompaniment provides an ironic commentary: “Who Could Ask for Anything More?” (“I Got Rhythm”) is a rhetorical question in advertising’s proffered world of plenitude and desire.

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In her analysis of advertising and consumerism, Judith Williamson observes that people and goods become interchangeable (both Warren Beatty and Avon are “looks”) and that products come to replace feelings rather than simply to signify them.25 So in The Store, emotions are attributed to the goods (as in Missile, where weapons are said to have “life” and to “recognize” launch commands). We hear, for instance, of “intimate apparel” and “the Romance bra.” According to the jewelry salesman, a setting with too much gold is said to take “a little bit of life away from the diamond.” At the same time, people themselves become products, just as Neiman Marcus as an institution, including its employees, becomes a product to be sold. The store’s appeal is built largely on its cultivated image as an elite retail establishment, an image that employees, like customers, are constantly sold. In Model, aspiring models are encouraged to fill their portfolios with “lots of smiles”; in The Store, salesclerks begin their day by exercising their smile muscles—part of the store’s image. During a buyer’s meeting, employees are told how wonderful they must be to work there (“If you’re with Neiman Marcus, there’s got to be something really incredibly special about you”). So, too, at the film’s concluding reception for Stanley Marcus, Lady Bird Johnson and Art Buchwald sit at the head table, their special presences functioning as signs attesting to the power and geniality of Mr. Marcus himself. And just as Neiman Marcus sells itself to its employees, so the store’s employees sell themselves to Neiman Marcus. In her interview for an executive position, the hopeful salesclerk Sabrina tells the personnel director both how wonderful the company is and how much she deserves the promotion. Sabrina offers a seemingly well-rehearsed sales pitch for herself, a perfect demonstration of Williamson’s claim that “one of the most alienating aspects of advertising and consumerism [is that] we are both product and consumer; we consume, buy the product, yet we are the product.”26 Exploring in a visual medium the cultural construction of visual images (in a sense, advertising is also a “natural history of the way we live”), Wiseman also logically deconstructs his own work in Model and The Store through consistent self-reflexivity. Along with Crazy Horse, these are Wiseman’s most overtly Brechtian films, and, like Godard, in them, he is more interested in the illusion of reality than in the reality of the illusion. In this sense, the title of Model expresses a significant double entendre suggesting not only the film’s ostensible subject but also a blueprint

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for a kind of documentary cinema that seeks to situate itself outside the dominant tradition of an unproblematic observational empiricism. Most obviously, Model is filled with cameras, more so than any of Wiseman’s other films (most of which contain somewhere someone with a camera). The ubiquitous presence of cameras, light reflectors, boom mikes, and other cinematographic and photographic equipment in the film makes the viewer aware of the apparatus and methods of its own production (see figure 5.6). There are numerous fashion photo sessions, a tourist taking pictures of the production of a commercial, and the documentary being shot with Warhol and the two male models. Another of the film’s self-reflexive strategies is to present images within images, as in the opening montage of magazine cover photos. All of the prospective models’ portfolio shots are shown as images, their edges clearly visible rather than filling the entire frame, as do many of the shots of paintings in National Gallery. Similarly, in the improvised bus stop seduction scene for the Brut commercial, we see auditions both “live” and on a video monitor, the difference inviting us to compare the two kinds of images.

FIGURE 5.6  Model: Devices of production are laid bare during the making of the Toyota

commercial.

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If Wiseman’s own film, like advertising and all other films, is a construction, then what we are seeing is, of course, not an objective document but a personal statement. Model, like any documentary, is a thesis, one of many possible films (“one’s man’s truth,” as Leacock puts it, or, in Wiseman’s terms, a “report on what I’ve found”). The film acknowledges itself as a subjectively constructed text immediately in the opening shots of the band in the city square playing a version of “Strike Up the Band,” a reference to Wiseman’s first documentary film, Titicut Follies, which begins with the same song. The inclusion of the song functions like a signature, announcing the filmmaker’s own shaping presence, just as, in a more humorous vein, Wiseman does the same thing in The Store by including some Christmas carolers in Neiman Marcus singing “Wise men, Wise men.” Wiseman exposes the artifice common to all visual images yet seeks to distinguish his self-aware practice from both the illusionist mode of advertising and the claimed objectivity in most observational film imagery. As Armstrong notes, “Wiseman uses his own camera differently in Model, not to conceal but to reveal” (see figure 5.7).27 For example, when

FIGURE 5.7  Model:

The models are first shown as images, emphasizing the constructed quality of advertising imagery.

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some of the aspiring models are told in their interviews that their portfolios look good and that Zoli will take a look, they attempt to respond professionally, which is to say, without excessive enthusiasm. Wiseman’s camera captures the smiles that beam from their photos but which they now try to repress in the corners of their mouths. More significantly, just as Wiseman includes shots of the production apparatus, so his frame is wider, more inclusive than any of these others, like his shots of the checkers in Primate. During the making of the Toyota advertisement, for example, we see shots of the camera being loaded, a helicopter providing a wind effect, the shooting of several takes, and the lighting being arranged with mirrors. Prior to the shoot, we also see the male model shaving and the female model with curlers in her hair, images that demystify their “natural” beauty. Similarly, during the making of the documentarywithin-the-documentary, Wiseman includes the interviewer’s questions which, as the models are told, will be omitted from the film’s soundtrack. Most of this sequence is shot through the bathroom mirror, showing us the image of an image, although we are not aware of this until near its end. Wiseman not only shows us both the person being filmed and the person filming, but, by pulling his camera back, he also reveals that the model in the shower is not nude but wearing underwear, thus dispelling the other documentary’s illusion. Similar in effect is Wiseman’s use of mirrors in The Store. Armstrong points out how in Model Wiseman composes sequences such as the shooting of the Toyota ad and the interior documentary’s shower scene in mirrors so that the viewer has to work to distinguish between real and imaginary space. This use of mirrors is particularly appropriate to a film about the construction of images, for, as Berger notes, the mirror was an emblem of the body as sight/site of voyeuristic pleasure.28 Mirrors are everywhere in The Store, always available so that customers can view themselves as images when they try on the items for sale. Sometimes customers are shown first as mirror reflections trying on clothes, a suggestion of the extent to which people are defined by their possessions, as in the famous opening of Max Ophüls’s Madame De . . . (1953), where the nameless female protagonist is shown only as a mirror reflection surrounded by her feminine accessories. Other shots, as previously mentioned, are formally divided by mirrors, suggesting the alienating split in consciousness that Williamson identifies as a consequence of

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advertising’s activation of desire. In some of the exterior shots, Wiseman films people on the street in such a way that both consumer goods and their own reflections are visible in the storefront windows. In others, we see the reflections of people going by in windows, images of images. In one scene in the jewelry department, mirror reflections of the customer share the frame with the real salesperson. By continually incorporating mirrors into his mise-en-scène, Wiseman often creates effects in The Store similar to those in Model. Part of the opening street sequence, for example, is a reflection of the street in the store window—although we do not recognize it as such until a bus pulls away in the frame. Similarly, in some of the “split-screen” shots created with mirrors, it is difficult, at least initially, to determine what is reflection and what is real (see image 5.8). The presence of the mirrors serves as a reminder to viewers, preventing them from maintaining the imaginary relationship to the film based on what Jacques Lacan calls the mirror phase of psychic development.29

FIGURE 5.8  The

Store: The frequent presence of mirrors problematizes the distinction between image and reality.

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Such trompe l’oeil effects are aided by Wiseman’s use of black-and-white film stock in Model. The black-and-white cinematography, according to Wiseman, is “more abstract,” “more stylized,” than color and so detracts from the images’ denotative content. Thus, in another way, the viewer is encouraged to perceive the film as a series of images. As well, the absence of color in the film, given its subject, is something of a subversive joke since it drains the advertising imagery of much of its visual appeal. The Store, which is in color (it was Wiseman’s first documentary in color, preceded only by the fictional Seraphita’s Diary), works differently. The film’s rich color, reminiscent of the garish, hyperreal technicolor of so many classic Hollywood musicals, helps to keep the viewer aware of the appeal of the goods at Neiman Marcus and of advertising’s ability to arouse our desire for them. (Color works similarly in Crazy Horse.) The first words we hear in the film, “It’s too orange,” uttered by a shopper about an item of makeup in the cosmetics department, signals the film’s self-awareness of its color. Indeed, such lush imagery is one of the primary elements of advertising’s persuasive power. During an executive meeting, the staff of Neiman Marcus testifies to this power. One executive cites the particularly effective series of stylish Chanel television commercials made by British director Ridley Scott, already a hot director known for his keen visual sense with Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). With advertising, the vice president concludes, “you can do anything” because everybody is “vulnerable” to it. The film suggests our passive receptivity to consumerism in the frequently inserted shots of people being moved by escalators, the high angle from which Wiseman usually films them as forceful a statement about the vacuity of contemporary consciousness as Standish Lawder’s escalator film, Necrology (1970). In his study of consumerism in popular culture, Jeffrey Shrank found that 90 percent of American adults believe themselves “personally immune” to the seductive sway of advertising, yet the same group accounted for 90 percent of the purchases of advertised products. People who believe themselves to be immune to advertising (“a group to which, no doubt, you, the reader, and I, the writer, belong,” Shrank wryly adds) “will not take defensive action.”30 Wiseman’s reflexive style in Model and The Store calls our ability to determine the “status” of images into question, and we are forced to muster a “defensive action” of active attentiveness.

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Wiseman frequently generates perceptual confusion as a result of the uncertainty over the ontological status of images. His methods create an ambiguity about whether some profilmic events (the two political demonstrations) and people (customers near mannequins or mirrors) are real or constructed advertising imagery. Is that man in the street shots simply a man walking quickly, or is he a composed advertising image of “a successful man on the go” (“guy on street corner” or “young executive”)? Is there any longer a difference? In the Brut ad sequence, the viewer does not know until after the seduction scenario that this is an audition when Wiseman cuts to the video crew making the commercial. Because of such consistent ambiguity, it is virtually impossible to view these two films from a passive, unengaged position. Several reviewers were disappointed that Model and The Store revealed nothing new about American culture.31 But as in Canal Zone, Wiseman is not seeking to tell us something we do not already know. In Sinai Field Mission and Canal Zone, he presents the familiar with a penetrating look, isolating it for observation (just as the Zonians watch animals in the zoo) and thus defamiliarizing it, in Shklovsky’s sense, by removing it from its “usual associations.” In Model and The Store, Wiseman achieves similar ends through reflexivity by laying bare devices and by defamiliarization. His wider view allows us to see more than the narrowly delimited field of vision normally presented in our cultural productions. While it may not be absolutely necessary, as Jay Ruby argues, that in all cases, documentary filmmakers be reflexive and self-critical for their work to be politically progressive,32 Wiseman clearly shows in Model and The Store that in the documentation of cultural institutions such a method is of crucial importance. They offer perfect examples of what Ruby calls an “ethnographic trompe l’oeil”: “the development of filmic codes and conventions to ‘frame’ or contextualize the apparent realism of the cinema and cause audiences to ‘read’ the images as anthropological articulations.”33 The four films discussed in this chapter examine not only their subjects and their relation to Wiseman’s own cinema as a signifying practice but also provide a further understanding of American culture. Wiseman continues to strip our masks from us even as he concentrates on showing how artfully they are arranged.

6 THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL The Cool World (1963) • Seraphita’s Diary (1982)

W

iseman has insisted that documentary films can be as complex as good novels, and, of course, his telling description of his work as “reality fictions” emphasizes the fictional aspects of their aesthetic construction. The previous chapters have shown how his documentaries play off of fiction films. “My real interest is in trying to make good movies,” he states.1 In interviews, Wiseman has often spoken of his wish to make a fiction feature using documentary techniques, citing Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) as a model.2 He explains his interest in using documentary techniques in fiction as largely motivated by his view that a documentary “look” invests fiction with both greater credibility and social impact, as in the case of Peter Watkins’s films (for example, The War Game [1966] and Punishment Park [1971]). Pontecorvo’s film has often been mistakenly perceived as a documentary because of its style, even though the film begins with credits and the claim, “Not one foot of newsreel has been used in this reenactment of the battle of Algiers.” Over the years, it has been periodically announced that Wiseman is working on fiction projects. In 1970, an interviewer reported that Wiseman was then at work on a script to be produced in Hollywood, which the filmmaker described as “an adaptation of a novel about a young man who goes AWOL from the army.”3 In the same year, anticipating the later cycle of what has been called “network narratives” or “multi-protagonist films,”4 Wiseman told another interviewer that he was writing a script

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with a grant from the American Film Institute wherein he wanted to use a documentary approach but which would also employ “a mosaic technique so the film will not have the conventional story line with beginning, middle and end, but will reveal the relationships of the characters to each other.”5 Four years later, on the day after the WNET screening of Primate, the New York Times reported that Wiseman was preparing to make a fiction film tentatively titled Yes Yes, No No. The article quotes Wiseman as saying that he has been working on the script intermittently for two years and that the story is “a contemporary murder-and-trial drama set in Boston.”6 Benson and Anderson report that Wiseman worked as cowriter on Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and he also wrote an early draft of the successful 1980 feature, The Stunt Man (directed by Richard Rush), but was uncredited.7 (Although the final film, according to Wiseman, bears little relation to what he had written, it is tempting to speculate about the connections between The Stunt Man’s playful examination of Hollywood illusionism and Wiseman’s exposure of the photographic apparatus in Model, released the same year.) However, the two fiction films discussed in this chapter, The Cool World and Seraphita’s Diary (two others, The Last Letter and Un couple, are discussed in chapter 10), despite their separation by almost twenty years, reveal intriguing connections to Wiseman’s documentary work. At first glance, the two films seem distinctly different. The Cool World is an admirable work of gritty social realism shot on location in black and white and largely improvised. Seraphita’s Diary, by contrast, is an experimental drama, carefully constructed in the manner of an interior monologue and photographed almost entirely in an enclosed interior space in bright color. Despite these differences, the two films share a concern with institutional ideology, and although they approach the theme in strikingly different ways, they both demonstrate an interesting use of first-person narration and reveal a tension between documentary and fictional material. In 1960, Wiseman purchased the film rights to Warren Miller’s 1959 novel of Harlem gang life, The Cool World, for five hundred dollars.8 He invited New York filmmaker Shirley Clarke, whom he had met as an investor in her previous film, The Connection (1960, based on the successful off-Broadway play by Jack Gelber), to direct it, thinking that he lacked the necessary experience to do so himself. In the end, Clarke not only directed the film but also wrote the screenplay in collaboration with

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Carl Lee, who played Cowboy in both the stage and film versions of The Connection. The Cool World was completed in time to be shown at the 1963 Venice Film Festival (along with the official American entry, Martin Ritt’s Hud), where it received a generally favorable response as a powerful socially conscious film. Since then, however, the film has been unfairly neglected in histories of Black American film. Although The Cool World precedes Titicut Follies by five years, it may be seen to have much in common with Wiseman’s subsequent documentary practice. The film maintains an uneasy but fascinating relationship with Hollywood cinema in its mixture of narrative and documentary elements. This is, in large part, a result of its use of the conventions of popular cinema—a method, as we have seen, Wiseman frequently employs in his documentaries. In interviews, Wiseman has stated his dislike of Hollywood fantasies and the failure of Hollywood movies to confront real social issues.9 The author of The Cool World, Warren Miller, is white but makes a sincere attempt to get at the conditions of inner-city ghetto life without condescension. Interestingly, as early as 1949, Miller himself was championing the documentary approach over Hollywood illusionism in films.10 The book and the film clearly attempt to show some of the problems of contemporary American urban life and, given Wiseman’s early optimism about film as an element of social change, seems a logical choice for his first involvement in film. The story concerns fourteen-year-old Black youth Duke Custis (Hampton Clanton) and his struggle to survive in the hostile and violent ghetto environment of Harlem one summer. A member of a street gang named the Royal Pythons, Duke assumes leadership of the gang when the previous president, Blood (Clarence Williams), becomes a junky. He begins to establish a relationship with Luanne (Yolanda Rodriquez), a young whore who has taken up residence in the Pythons’ apartment. Much of the story concerns Duke’s ongoing attempts to raise fifty dollars to buy a gun from Priest (Lee), a local gangster, so that he can make a “rep” for himself during the coming rumble with a rival gang, the Wolves. The gang fight, followed by Duke’s arrest, provides The Cool World’s strong climax. The film is generally faithful to the novel’s narrative and style—indeed, much of the dialogue is retained verbatim—although there are some minor changes in the plot. The book is narrated by Duke in dialect, in the tradition of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, although a closer

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parallel is Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, which was published only three years later. Duke’s story occurred in the past (made apparent by remarks like, “But at this time I tellin’ you about”11) and is being recalled in some present but as of yet unexplained situation. The reader cannot help but wonder about the circumstances of the narration and who it is addressing. Only at the end of the novel, in the final two-page chapter entitled “Where I Am,” is it revealed that Duke has been sent to a reform school where he is being successfully rehabilitated and that, in the narrative’s present, he is recounting these events to a therapist, Doc Levine. This hardened boy from the violent ghetto, as we discover in the book’s only serious lapse into sentimentality, is learning to read and write and now even enjoys tending the institution’s flower beds. (A Clockwork Orange provides an ironic echo of this ending in its last sentence of the penultimate chapter, Alex’s declaration that “I was cured all right.”12) Immediately before this comforting conclusion, Duke is hauled away by police after the rumble with the Wolves. The film, however, wisely ends with Duke’s arrest, the patrol car whisking him off into the Harlem night. This ending is clearly more appropriate to the tone of both the novel and film. It also justifies the cinema’s tendency to narrate in the present tense since there is nothing in the movie to suggest that this story has been, as it were, recollected in tranquility. Also, in refusing to provide narrative closure, the film does not pretend to resolve the problems of poverty, racism, and juvenile delinquency, anticipating the way Wiseman’s documentaries frequently end by presenting the viewer either directly or implicitly with unresolved questions and issues. In its choice of subject, The Cool World may be seen to have developed from the postwar movies of Hollywood directors like Elia Kazan, who, inspired by Italian neorealism, looked at urban and working-class milieus. In particular, it recalls Sidney Meyers’s independent film, The Quiet One (1948), also a fictional account of a troubled Black youth shot on location in Harlem. Stylistically, though, The Cool World resembles observational cinema more than it does the classical narrative style. Rather than effacing its presence, the camera frequently calls attention to itself by its unorthodox (direct style) movement, especially in some dialogue scenes done with a panning camera rather than conventional shot/reaction shot figures.

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In one shot, the camera follows the boys onto a school bus, the lens aperture adjusting for the extreme difference in available light (reminiscent of the famous shot following JFK in Primary). The film was photographed by Baird Bryant entirely on location in Harlem, often with available lighting, a hand-held camera, muddy sound, and (with the exception of Carl Lee and Clarence Williams) nonprofessional actors. (Gloria Foster, who played Duke’s mother, starred the following year in Michael Roemer and Robert Young’s independent production, Nothing but a Man [1964]). According to Wiseman, none of the kids in the film had any prior professional acting experience.13 Clarke’s method of directing the actors was to outline a scene and then allow them to improvise.14 There is, consequently, a strong emphasis on the authenticity of the dialogue, an attempt to duplicate the slang and rhythms of Black urban speech. (The only false note here is the consistent use of the word “motherin’ ” as a euphemism for swearing.) Lee is listed in the credits for dialogue (according to Lauren Rabinovitz, he was denied credit as codirector15), a clear acknowledgment of the importance given to language in the film. Even though a few sequences seem to have been postsynced, in its use of improvised street talk, of parole rather than langue, the film recalls Louis Marcorelles’s claim about the centrality of real speech in direct cinema,16 a dominant feature of Wiseman’s documentaries. The Cool World also makes use of found symbolism, an expressive device of observational cinema and one that Wiseman uses so well in his documentary work. Once when Duke leaves his tenement, for example, there follows a shot of a dog trotting freely in the street—a metaphor of Duke’s “unleashed,” rebellious personality. Several signs in the film resonate with meaning, like the cinema marquee glimpsed while Duke sells reefers on the street. The marquee reads “Adventures of a Angry Young Man,” a grammatically incorrect take on Ritt’s Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962). This mistake is consistent with the ungrammatical speech of Duke and his friends and an appropriate description of his own story. When Duke and Luanne go to Coney Island, we see a “lost children” sign (like the “missing children” sign in Deaf, also a comment on another group of marginalized youths) just before Luanne disappears. The sign serves not only as narrative foreshadowing but also as an editorial comment; in a sense, both youths are “lost” even before Luanne literally exits from the narrative.

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Much of the credit for the film’s authenticity must, of course, be given to director Shirley Clarke, and its style is clearly influenced by her as well. Clarke’s work is frequently informed by a documentary approach. She had been involved with a number of D. A. Pennebaker’s early films, frequently as editor (Brussels Film Loops, 1958; Opening Night in Moscow, 1959) and sometimes as camera operator (Breaking It Up at the Museum, 1960). Some of Clarke’s own early shorts, In Paris Parks (1954), BridgesGo-Round (1958), and Skyscraper (1959, on which Willard Van Dyke, Irving Jacoby, and Pennebaker worked), are variations of the city symphony form of documentary. The Connection, her first feature, employs a mock cinema verité style, even including as characters the two-man documentary film crew supposedly filming the action. Portrait of Jason (1967), a two-hour monologue with a frustrated actor, is in its sparseness of technique rightly considered a classic of American cinema verité. The use of music in The Cool World (both the diegetic rhythm ’n blues and the Mal Waldron score), while as important as the use of found music in Wiseman’s documentaries, is probably closer in spirit to Clarke’s interest in jazz. Skyscraper features a score by jazz composer and arranger Teo Macero, the music for The Connection was provided by jazz pianist Freddie Redd, and Ornette  .  .  . Made in America (1978) is an experimental documentary about jazz alto sax innovator Ornette Coleman. Most of the early shorts make use of rapid editing. As Clarke told Rabinovitz in an extensive interview conducted in 1981, there had been no sound, “and the one thing we couldn’t do was jazz. So I made them all jazz.”17 Reviewing The Cool World upon its initial release, Andrew Sarris acknowledged its sincerity but disliked Clarke’s peripatetic camera, which he described as “visual hysteria blotting out intellectual contemplation.” Similarly, both Gordon Hitchens and Dwight Macdonald faulted Clarke for her seemingly uncomfortable combination of fictional and documentary techniques.18 But rather than being superfluous, the observational style is, in fact, quite appropriate. First, as suggested above, this style signals an opposition to the smooth flow of the classical Hollywood film, just as its subject is one generally avoided in commercial American cinema (certainly in the early 1960s). Second, it successfully captures the subjective perspective of the narrator, Duke. The film periodically allows us to hear Duke’s thoughts (but no one else’s) on the soundtrack, clearly marking the film’s narration, like that of the novel, as first-person. When

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Duke says, “I gotta keep movin’,” the camera visually expresses his feeling; when he scrambles down the street after discovering Priest’s body in the Pythons’ clubhouse, the restless camera and swish pans visually capture his sudden panic. The film and the novel emphasize that Duke is not an inexplicable social aberration but that his sensibility is, to a large extent, shaped by his environment. Hence the network of references to popular culture and the film’s use of genre conventions in particular. Duke’s street name, of course, is itself inspired by the iconic individualist hero established by John Wayne, largely in his Western roles. The gun Duke wants to obtain is a Colt, a weapon of central importance to the Western genre. (In the book, one gang member identifies the Colt as the firearm used at “Cussers Last Stan.”19) Also, Duke explains at length his admiration for the Western hero of a movie he had seen entitled The Baron of New Mexico, probably misremembering Samuel Fuller’s The Baron of Arizona (1949). When Duke and Luanne go to Coney Island, he has a mock shootout with a mechanical gunfighter in an arcade; the machine’s prerecorded voice echoes the word “draw” six times on the soundtrack, an expressionist use of sound in the film that emphasizes the importance of Western myth to Duke (see figure 6.1a). For him, as for several of the people in Wiseman’s documentaries (the acting coach in Model, the officer introducing the training films in Basic Training), the perception of reality is informed, to a significant extent, by popular cinema. “Stand up and shoot like a man,” reads a sign on the mechanical gunslinger. Duke’s obsession with being a “man,” as he understands it, connects with the theme of gender definition, particularly aggressive masculinity, also explored in High School and Basic Training. Duke’s fantasy of what people will say about him—“There goes Duke Custis. He’s a cold killer”— is echoed by Howard Gilbert, the young Black man arrested in Law and Order, who boasts, “I’m a killer.” The pervasive presence of guns in American society and their totemic appeal is also seen in Juvenile Court and even in Deaf, where the children are fascinated more by the deputy’s gun than anything else when they visit the county judicial building. Duke’s overpowering desire to possess the gun is, for him, a way of defining his manhood. His thoughts about the Colt, “all black and oiled, just waiting to go,” is infused with phallic aggression: “Man, a piece is the key. It’s a screwdriver. You get yourself a piece, why, then, everything opens up for you.”

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FIGURE 6.1A  The Cool World: Genre iconography is invoked throughout the film, in the “showdown” between Duke (Hampton Clampton) and the mechanical gunfighter as Luanne (Yolanda Rodriquez) looks on . . .

The closeup of Miss Dewpoint’s purse with the gun in it visually expresses the sexual potency the youth associates with the weapon. Priest’s black suit and white tie constitute familiar attire in the gangster film (see figure 6.1b). His white moll, Miss Dewpoint (Marilyn Cox), is a stock character of the genre. Hardy (Claude Cave), the Black youth who plans to escape the neighborhood by playing basketball at an Ivy League college, and Douglas, Blood’s freedom-rider brother, are variations of the genre’s “Pat O’Brien” figure—representing “ballots not bullets.” Blood’s high-pitched, nervous laughter recalls Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947). The shot of one of the Pythons leaving the gang’s apartment and pausing at the entrance of the tenement building, shrugging his shoulders, and then being flanked by fellow gang members before descending the steps is strikingly reminiscent of James Cagney’s trademark body language in Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) and other gangster movies, employing the genre’s conventional triangular deployment of

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FIGURE 6.1B   . . .

and in Priest’s gangster costume (Carl Lee, left).

gangsters within the frame. Duke’s fantasy of acquiring the gun and being “at the top of the heap” recapitulates the desire of virtually every American movie gangster (particularly as depicted in the famous conclusion of Raoul Walsh’s White Heat [1949], when Cagney yells out “Top of the World, Ma” before immolating himself atop a huge gas tank). The overly stylized and choreographed scene in which the Wolves intimidate Hardy in the schoolyard recalls West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961), while the later fight there on the jungle gym (a sly metaphor) appears to prefigure the stylized combat in The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979). (Clarke had been a dancer and choreographer before becoming a filmmaker and was heavily influenced by the dance films of Maya Deren). Most of these references are to dominant, white popular culture. In Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), when the impressionable and confused Black youth Bigger Thomas goes to the movies, he sees lobby cards advertising two films: “One, The Gay Woman, was pictured on the posters in images of white men and white women lolling on beaches,

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swimming, and dancing in night clubs; the other, Trader Horn, was shown on the posters in terms of black men and black women dancing against a wild background of barbaric jungle.”20 Bigger, like Duke, is overwhelmed by the dominant white culture around him, presenting impossible alternatives as role models. On the one hand, he is offered a lifestyle of the rich and famous that he can never attain, and on the other, a debasing racist stereotype. In The Cool World, Black popular culture emerges only occasionally, as when gospel music plays or we see a poster advertising a James Brown show at the Apollo Theater. By contrast, white popular culture appears everywhere (as it does in Canal Zone)—in the smiling face of a white woman on a large Canada Dry billboard, in the Mr. Freezee caricature, in the white doll held by Black hands in one of the street shots. Duke, like Bigger, is attracted to but excluded from the fantasies of white culture, and both boys express their rage at cultural marginalization through violence. In his influential 1962 article, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” Jonas Mekas explicitly sets the work of several independent filmmakers, including Clarke, against the “official’ (Hollywood) cinema.”21 The Cool World sets itself apart by the unusual observational context in which it deploys genre conventions, a split that embodies aesthetically what W. E. B. DuBois famously referred to as the “twoness” of the Black American experience.22 This “twoness,” as Addison Gayle points out, was necessarily reflected in artistic production: “The black artist of the past worked with the white public in mind. The guidelines by which he measured his production was its acceptance or rejection by white people.”23 Further, according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black writing is marked by a revision of—or “signifying” upon—texts in the Western tradition. It is precisely in this play upon white texts, he argues, that Black texts articulate their difference.24 The Cool World, with its stylistic mix, is, like Black writing and jazz, what Gates would call a “mulatto text.” Thus, what Sarris sees as Clarke’s inability to blend “the materials of stylized melodrama into the network of realistic cross-references” is actually a tension essential to the film’s “counter-cinema” strategy and meaning.25 Racial tensions surface throughout the narrative of The Cool World, beginning immediately in the opening scene with a Black Muslim’s speech on the street about the white man being the devil. The accompanying montage of street shots shows that the only whites to be seen in the

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neighborhood are cops; there is no doubt as to who wields institutionalized power here. The situation anticipates the quick shot of the white manager of the local convenience store with his wad of bills in Public Housing. When the police arrest Duke at the end of The Cool World, they grab him saying, “Get up, you little black bastard.” The glaring presence of Miss Dewpoint, the only white character in the film of any importance, and Priest’s abusive treatment of her are inevitably charged with racial implications. As in Law and Order, Welfare, and, of course, Public Housing, which also focus on ghetto life, race is a burning issue informing all social relations. Just as the film acknowledges a cultural split between Black and mainstream America, so it emphasizes the physical separateness of Harlem (as the American community is isolated from the rest of Panama in Canal Zone or the Ida B. Wells neighborhood of Chicago seems to exist in a world apart in Public Housing). This sense of the ghetto as an oppressive, enclosed space is immediately established in the opening montage of location shots of Harlem street life. Other montage sequences, remarkably similar to Wiseman’s street shots in his documentaries, appear regularly throughout the film. They frequently separate major sequences in the narrative, as they often do the major sequences of Wiseman’s mosaics. The tracking shots of Harlem streets with their rows of tenement houses near the beginning of the film are strikingly similar to the openings of High School and Law and Order, early Wiseman documentaries separated from The Cool World only by a few years. The physically and emotionally sick people who endlessly file into New York’s Metropolitan Hospital in Hospital might very well come from this neighborhood; the woman who has her purse snatched by Duke is, in a sense, the woman who is the victim of the same crime in Law and Order. The film’s treatment of Harlem as both a distinct physical space and Weltanschauung invites one to view the ghetto itself as an institution, the way institutions in Wiseman’s later films become defined as much by the constraints of ideology as by physical boundaries. Wiseman himself has made the connection, noting, “A hospital or a high school is as much a ghetto as central Harlem.”26 The film not only explores life in the urban ghetto as a distinct world but establishes at the outset that this environment exists in the context of, adjacent to, affluent America and capitalism. The poverty of Harlem— Harrington’s “other America,” as mentioned in High School—serves as a

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stark contrast to, but not inseparable from, Wall Street or Central Park South (described by the teacher as “the most expensive residential area in New York City”), the route the school bus takes downtown. In a sense, in this film, Harlem is revealed as a gap between American ideology and its practice. References to business, profit, and purchasing power recur throughout the film. Priest, a gangster cum entrepreneur, like the Canal Zone Company, refuses to do business on credit. As Duke is being taken away in the patrol car at the end of the film, on the soundtrack, we hear a radio news broadcast; a report of gang warfare in Harlem comes between items about “a communist stronghold” (presumably in Southeast Asia) and lobbying by the American Legion to require the first astronauts on the moon to plant an American flag. Duke’s fate is sandwiched between the forces of American capitalist imperialism, like that of the Panamanians in Canal Zone. The first major sequence in the film, the school trip downtown, deserves particular mention because it is crucial to the film and also suggestive in the context of Wiseman’s documentary work. In her review of The Cool World, Harriet Polt cited this sequence as one of the film’s major flaws, describing it as “too blatantly ironic” and “extraneous to the body of the film”;27 in fact, quite the opposite is true. On the last day of school before summer vacation, Duke’s class is taken south by bus along Fifth Avenue to Wall Street in lower Manhattan. Most obviously, the trip demonstrates how very much these boys are out of place outside of Harlem. (“It ain’t the Waldorf, but it’ll do,” says Priest’s henchman later, surveying the Pythons’ apartment.) The sequence further establishes the sense of the ghetto as a bounded space, one which the boys may leave but from which they can never really escape. Their alienation is shown when they pause at the statue of Alexander Hamilton—“standing on the very ground where George Washington, the founder of this country, once actually was,” the teacher observes—but are not the least interested or impressed. As they leave the site, the teacher reminds the boys to take a copy of a pamphlet entitled “Own a Share of America,” after which there is an abrupt cut to Duke back in Harlem stealing a purse. The editing here serves as a comment on the disenfranchisement of these poor Black youths (the Black men in both Basic Training and Welfare who say they have no country are called to mind) and anticipates the ironic use of editing Wiseman employs in his documentaries.

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Additionally, the school trip sequence, coming at the beginning of the film, brings Duke and his friends out of their element into what is probably a more familiar, less threatening environment for white viewers. As Donald Bogle writes, Harlem is a place largely unfamiliar to white viewers, even to most of the liberals among them.28 This initial situation is then reversed; white viewers are placed in a similar position to the boys on the bus, as they are then taken on an excursion into the ghetto. David Eames observes that Wiseman himself would not be interested in a guided tour, that he prefers instead to get inside the institutions he shoots rather than perceive them from a distance.29 Thus, the appearance of the Japanese tourists with their inevitable cameras in Meat counterpoints Wiseman’s more probing camera, just as Canal Zone opens with a voice-over by an official guide of the canal before it penetrates the ideology masked by the cascade of official statistics. The Cool World works in a similar way. The shallow tour offered to the Black youths is contrasted with the film’s more thorough examination, below the physical surface, through its firstperson narration. The film seeks to immerse the viewer in the Harlem environment, just as Wiseman claimed with Titicut Follies that he “wanted to put the audience for the film in the state hospital.”30 Upon the film’s release, Wiseman declared, “I intend to make sure that The Cool World is not exploited as just another picture about juvenile delinquency.”31 The subject was popular in the 1930s in such movies as Wild Boys of the Road (William Wellman, 1933), Dead End (William Wyler, 1937), and Angels With Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938) and reemerged in the postwar youth culture of the 1950s in The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1954), Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955), and Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). But the issue was trivialized in short order by the flood of formula teen exploitation quickies released by American International Pictures, independent producers Albert Zugsmith and Sam Katzman, and The Delicate Delinquent (Don McGuire, 1957) with Jerry Lewis.32 By the early 1960s, Gidget and the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon cycle of beach movies were upon us. It is in this context that The Cool World stands out as a healthy antidote. Nobody is reformed by the film’s end, unlike, say, the Sidney Poitier character Gregory Miller in Blackboard Jungle. In Hollywood, it is possible that Angels Wash Their Faces (Ray Enright, 1939) become the likable Bowery Boys and even go on to save America from a fifth-column spy ring. The Royal

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Pythons might wash their faces, but the blackness of their skin will never come off. The honest attempt of The Cool World to deal with race in an uncompromising manner thus marks Wiseman’s first attempt to analyze the gaps and contradictions of America’s institutions, what becomes his ongoing documentary project. It is possible, then, to see The Cool World as the first work in Wiseman’s institutional series. It is not insignificant that he distributes the film along with his documentaries through his own company, Zipporah Films. However, my purpose here is neither to reclaim a neglected film for classic auteurism nor to co-opt what some would claim as an example of Black film for a white filmmaker or for liberal, white criticism. Rather, this reading foregrounds and seeks to make sense of the tensions and cracks that exist in the film on both the thematic and stylistic levels. The questions raised by the issues of genre and authorship in this collaboration of three different artists (Wiseman, Clarke, and Lee; two male, one female; two white, one Black) reflect the more important tensions in the film that may be understood as articulating part of the Black experience in America. Seraphita’s Diary, although very different from The Cool World and perhaps not nearly as successful aesthetically, also works against the conventions of Hollywood movies. Its very subject is a condemnation of the cult of glamor that Hollywood both generates and thrives upon. The film begins (quite the opposite from the disclaimer in Battle of Algiers) with an insert title informing us that it “is adapted from the diaries and letters of the fashion model Seraphita who disappeared under mysterious circumstances on August 12, 1980.” Seraphita is a woman struggling to be recognized for herself, like Sophia Tolstoy in Un couple, rather than as an image of beauty; the various men in her life—the producer, the elegant Lambert, and the “Banana Republic President,” among others—respond to her essentially in terms of her physical pulchritude. Mr. Juice tells her that “once you are famous you are public property,” like the models in Model, Monroe and Liz for Warhol, or Warhol for Wiseman. The photographer William even refers to her as a “thing.” She gets letters from a young “fan” (comically dressed as a sports fan and wielding a baseball bat between his legs like a phallus) that praise her for her “perfection.” Seraphita keeps a diary, she says, because it is “somebody really to talk to.” She feels trapped by her own physical beauty, like the performers in

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Crazy Horse, dreaming of a world with no mirrors. The narrative is framed by showing an old man picking up and putting down Seraphita’s diary; she never gets to speak directly, her voice remaining contained or trapped within the imagination of the implied male reader/viewer. What the viewer sees, then, is the male’s image of Seraphita’s discussion—perhaps the only justifiable feminist narrative construction for a male artist. Apart from Crazy Horse, the film’s most obvious connections are to Model and The Store, the two films that bracket Seraphita’s Diary chronologically. Its star, Apollonia von Ravenstein, is one of the models who appear in the former film (it is she who provides the legs for the pantyhose commercial’s “peacock effect”). Some of the dialogue in the film alludes to or even repeats lines from Model. For example, Patricia’s remark, “that dimple blows me away every time,” is also said of the male model with “the Warren Beatty quality”). In the film’s tour-de-force centerpiece, the fashion photography sequence, William speaks to Seraphita with the same kind of sexually coaxing monologue used by the photographers in Model, and his instructions to her are, again, as in Model, put in terms of looks (“sexy and sultry,” “that wide-eyed look”). Sometimes his prompting literally duplicates the words of encouragement given to the models in the earlier film (“a little bit more bitchy,” “a little bit more innocent”), and in one instance (“now wet your lips again”) also recalls the scene in the photography studio in The Store. Dolls and mannequins are scattered throughout the film, a self-conscious visual reference to both documentaries. In one scene, Seraphita carries a doll, an appropriate embodiment of her “statuesque” beauty. (In the Picone commercial in Model, the director more than once refers to the model as “doll.”) Later, the producer speaks to the doll lying on the bed as if it were Seraphita herself. During the fashion photography sequence, the hair stylist makes up a dressmaker’s dummy with no head, all the while talking to it as if to Seraphita. As such imagery might suggest, Seraphita’s Diary continues, although in a radically different way, the deconstructionist project of Model and The Store. Interestingly, this film works quite differently from either The Cool World or The Battle of Algiers, the film Wiseman often claimed would be his fictional model, for rather than seeking to encourage the suspension of disbelief, it consistently acknowledges itself as artifice. The diaries and letters are read by Apollonia, who performs all the roles,

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FIGURE 6.2  Seraphita’s Diary: Seraphita (Apollonia) “in role” as William, the photographer.

so that the viewer is denied the possibility of easy entry to the narrative through the mobilization of character identification. And while she wears different makeup and clothes for each character, Apollonia makes no attempt to submerge her own identity within these various roles (see figure 6.2). She is clearly acting and doing so in a manner that, judged by conventional standards of realist narrative film, is rather poor. Apollonia is somewhat wooden on the screen, and her noticeable accent never entirely disappears (except perhaps when in the role of Gwendy, the superficial makeup person whom she seems to portray with deadly satiric accuracy). But what would normally be perceived as a failure in this regard is, in the context of the film, paradoxically an asset, for it serves to undermine the creation of what E. M. Forster calls “round” (as opposed to “flat”) characters. Indeed, it is not only the characters that are flat in the film. As in what Brian Henderson calls the “non-bourgeois” camera style of Godard’s Weekend (1967),33 Seraphita’s Diary flattens out virtually every aspect of

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illusionist pleasure typical of the Hollywood film. With the exception of the brief narrative frame, the action (what little there is of it) is spatially restricted to a small apartment and shot with a camera that is, for the most part, stationary. The film is, in effect, an instance of minimalist cinema. A dance, for example, is rendered essentially as an assemblage of signifiers—Apollonia’s body moving rhythmically, music playing, disco lights flashing. The film makes no pretense of realism, no attempt to disguise the fact that there is no one else in the discotheque. Later, imagining herself in a scenario inspired by her reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Seraphita is shown in animal-like poses, wearing sunglasses and sticking out her tongue, accompanied by drum music and jungle sounds—a parody through excess of the conventional signifiers of steamy (“Latino”) sensuality. (One of the film’s final credits, humorously, is for “hair, makeup, and animals.”) Similarly, the scene where Seraphita recalls a traumatic experience as a child in Amsterdam is presented simply in a darkened shot, her face lit from below by a flashlight, perhaps the most rudimentary signifier of horror or terror in the classical narrative cinema. The one time the film opts for visual excess, for spectacle rather than simplification, occurs toward the end of the photography sequence when Seraphita begins to model the latest fashions. But this sequence ultimately distances the viewer in a similar way because it grows so excessive that it is impossible to take seriously (see figure 6.3). Seraphita appears in a series of costumes that begins more or less realistically but becomes increasingly ludicrous. We see her in a ridiculous grasslike outfit (described by Emma as “a perfect blend of Southwestern, Navaho, and English influences”), an outfit that makes her head look like an eight-ball or a lamp base, and another literally “screwy” costume that suggests a corkscrew. A rubber chicken hanging from a wire (a reference to the surreal silliness of Hellzapoppin’ [H. C. Potter, 1941]?) provides an ironic comment on the whole affair. The film’s nonbourgeois style is, finally, a grand joke, perfectly suited to the subjects of fashion and beauty since it presents them as superficial images. Seraphita wants to be loved for herself but is instead one of those victims of fashion examined in Model. Echoing the sentiment of Essene and the Deaf and Blind series, she defines true friendship as getting out of oneself and really understanding another, but her physical beauty

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FIGURE 6.3  Seraphita’s

Diary: Seraphita’s excessive costuming deflates the appeal of

fashion.

functions as an obstacle, and she remains an enigma. Her friends perceive her in terms of what she means to them rather than what she is for herself. One friend says that she was generous with her money, and another says exactly the opposite. Like Charles Foster Kane, she was a different person to different people. “You just feel sucked dry,” Seraphita remarks about having tried to live up to everyone’s image of her. Ultimately, she disappears, like Anna in Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), because, in effect, she has already been erased by society’s disregard of her as a person. While Seraphita feels no one truly perceives her for herself, she is at the same time tired of her inauthenticity, of performing “the way that they expect you to perform.” The viewer, though, is prevented as much as possible from voyeuristically viewing Apollonia as a sexual object. Instead, we are forced to attend to her complaint rather than recuperate it visually. Among the first images of Seraphita we see are shots of her in curlers putting on eye makeup—images that, as in Model, reveal the work involved in looking beautiful. In these shots, she holds a hand mirror, her eye reflected

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in it. The scene anticipates the network of looks exploited in National Gallery as she looks back at us looking at her, the relay of gazes here undermining the viewer’s typically privileged position as an invisible spectator. Toward the end of the film, we see her taking a beauty treatment, wearing cold cream and cucumbers on her eyes—a mask/masque. At one point, Seraphita presents herself as a parody version of Rita Hayworth in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), underscoring her presence on the screen as an image of potential sexual pleasure. All the while, flashes from William’s camera accompany her performance, a further reminder that we are looking at a sight displayed for our pleasure. Thus, when one of Apollonia’s breasts works free and becomes visible as her strapless dress slips (?), the sight is hardly erotic; rather, her body is demystified by the camera’s steady, unblinking gaze.34 (Wiseman returns to this strategy in Crazy Horse.) Seraphita’s Diary may be seen, too, as a meditation on the signifying power of visual imagery, particularly documentary imagery, a theme frequently explored in Wiseman’s other work. Seraphita herself is like an inkblot for other people, in a sense, similar to Wiseman’s documentaries at the level of reception. In the film, Wiseman uses an interview structure, as in a conventional news documentary, to allow Seraphita to speak directly. However, she is shown interviewing herself (just as she writes in her diary to have “somebody really to talk to”). The stylistic conventions of the documentary interview are employed to convey an interior monologue or stream of consciousness. This content would seem unsuited to a documentary style, yet this is, in a sense, exactly the way Wiseman’s documentaries, his personal “reports,” function. The testimonials from Seraphita’s friends at the end would appear to enhance the film’s documentary authority, much as the interviews with the “witnesses” do for Warren Beatty’s otherwise conventional historical drama, Reds (1981). But the friends’ comments are undercut by the costumes they wear, some of them as bizarre as the outfits Seraphita models earlier. These apparently documentary talking head shots, then, address that essential issue of observational cinema about whether people act in front of a camera. One of the film’s points, as demonstrated everywhere in Wiseman’s documentary work, is that this distinction is largely false, for the presentation of the self in everyday life, to borrow Erving Goffman’s phrase, is already a social and ideological construction. We are all models, the only difference being that some of us are more professional than others.

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Like The Cool World, Seraphita’s Diary employs documentary elements in the service of fiction. The reference to One Hundred Years of Solitude is especially significant, for Marquez’s technique of magic realism, like Wiseman’s sense of reality fiction, is a combination of fictional and documentary elements. Whereas the documentary quality of The Cool World works, in part, to enhance the suspension of disbelief in its fiction, the fictional aspects of Seraphita’s Diary challenge the authority of its status as documentation. Ironically, while Wiseman’s keen observational style invests the profilmic reality of his documentaries with meaning, making the world rich with signification, his approach to fiction in Seraphita’s Diary is to drain the diegesis of the kind of superficial significance normally encouraged by narrative cinema. Certainly, Seraphita’s Diary was not what Wiseman’s admirers—nor, for that matter, his detractors—expected. Perhaps this accounts for both its critical and commercial failure, although its single-minded pursuit of illusionist deconstruction undoubtedly was a significant factor as well. The film played only at one local Cambridge cinema, the Beacon Hill, for three weeks, then quietly closed “with the muted sputter of a Roman candle that goes off without going up.”35 But it is clearly a personal film (its credits are as if handwritten), addressing several of the issues he also explores in his documentaries. In fact, for this film, Wiseman assigned the responsibility of recording the sound, a job which he has done himself on all of his documentaries, to someone else because he wanted to concentrate his attention fully on the task of directing. Seraphita remarks about her diary that she wishes to write things simply “and not try to phrase them well.” Similarly, the film’s minimalist style is a simple kind of écriture in comparison to the polished prose of classical narrative cinema. Seraphita’s Diary, despite its stylistic one-dimensionality, shows not only that Wiseman is an independent filmmaker stubbornly working outside the commercial mainstream but that, just as he condemns the easy stereotyping of people in his documentaries, he refuses to be pigeonholed as a certain kind of artist.

7 YOU AND ME Essene (1972) • Blind (1986) • Deaf (1986) • Adjustment and Work (1986) • Multi-Handicapped (1986) • Aspen (1991)

I

n the appendix to his novel The Devils of Loudun, a short discussion about the varieties of transcendence, Aldous Huxley writes, “The worship of truth apart from charity—self-identification with science unaccompanied by self-identification with the Ground of all being—results in the kind of situation which now confronts us. Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”1 In Wiseman’s films, such unfortunate worship clearly finds its strongest expression in the detached quest for knowledge by the scientists in Primate. The justification of pure research would seem, indeed, to constitute “the worship of truth apart from charity,” the sacrifice being our closeness to the natural world and to each other. This condition frequently manifests itself elsewhere in Wiseman’s cinema, although perhaps not as dramatically, from the labeling of patients in Titicut Follies to the nightmarish adherence to procedure in the world of Welfare—instances of what Wiseman refers to as “the demeaning way in which words, which are essentially clichés, are used to categorize a person, so that as a result he will be treated as a member of a category, not a person.”2 Chuck Kraemer notes in his review of Primate that the film inevitably raises questions not only about science but also about “the eternal tension between the rational and spiritual sides of man’s nature.”3 This tension, as explored in chapter 4, is articulated in the conflict the film raises in the viewer between a detached, scientific viewpoint and an emotionally charged identification. The group of Wiseman’s films examined in

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this chapter—Essene and the four films that constitute the Deaf and Blind series, as well as Aspen—also explore this tension. But they examine institutions that offer the promise of an antidote to a world desperately in need of charity, understood in the spiritual sense of love, of deep feeling and compassion for one’s fellow men and women. They do so by employing a style that encourages empathetic response. Along with In Jackson Heights, Belfast, Maine, and Monrovia, Indiana, Aspen concentrates on one specific community by name and so fits with those films discussed in chapter 11. But below the surface of its apparent tourist gaze of an affluent vacation city in Colorado, Aspen focuses on the tension between the spiritual and material, making it just as appropriate to consider here with Essene and the Deaf and Blind films. Aspen was Wiseman’s first film after Near Death, so it is not surprising that a spiritual element suffuses the film. It begins with church bells over a montage of views that includes monks in silent prayer and concludes in a church (see figure 7.1). A hymn is sung, then there are two shots of the

FIGURE 7.1  Aspen:

The opening shots establish the film’s spiritual concerns.

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mountains followed by the film’s credits, with the hymn carrying over on the soundtrack. (In the sermon, the priest says that God is everywhere and that we have to learn to be aware of God.) Even though the town is a haven of material indulgence, it is also the case that, as Harry F. Waters noted in his review of the film, “Aspen throbs with spiritual yearning.”4 This tension is explicit in Club Paradise, where a band performs an execrable version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Breathless,” and in the shop named Esprit. A men’s discussion group seeks to reconcile the Bible with divorce, and, in another scene, there is a sermon on “God and Global Economics.” Sunbathers cavort to the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?” (in Racetrack, a priest observes, “Life is rushing by and sometimes we wonder whether we grasp its meaning”) while the Bible is said to be the glue that brings people together in a community.5 Essene, shot in a Benedictine monastery in rural Michigan, shows a spiritual search for this binding glue even as the monks battle that tension between the rational and spiritual aspects of being. This tension is made explicit at the end of the film when the abbot invokes the biblical story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38–42) to represent the “dichotomous relationship” of being in the world that exists in us all. On the one hand, says the abbot, there is “the Martha quality of egoism,” which seeks to grasp the world through rationality: “It takes it apart, or it leaves it apparently fragmented.” On the other hand, there is Mary, characterized by a “wisdom” that does not depend on the material world: “You don’t possess things, and they do have a unity, they have an ecology.” In Essene and the Deaf and Blind films, one finds a struggle to realize the Mary quality in an urge toward self-transcendence, an attempt to escape from what Huxley calls “the shell of the ego” and “the horrors of insulated selfhood” through charity,6 in the Christian sense of selfless love of others (“Charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself ” [1 Cor. 13:4]). Huxley identifies three kinds of transcendence—upward, downward, and sideways. The last of these is “horizontal self-transcendence,” where the ego is subsumed by a larger idea or cause. In both subject and style, the films examined in this chapter explore this spiritual aspect of community by emphasizing the importance and the difficulty of minimizing one’s ego within a larger social context. To some degree, of course, all of Wiseman’s films are concerned with the difficulties of establishing or maintaining a genuine sense of community,7 but these five films stand

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apart in their embrace of that charitable selflessness Huxley terms “theophany.” In so doing, they express—in a more general, secular sense— an optimistic humanism that counters the bleakness and pessimism that otherwise pervade Wiseman’s films before Near Death. This sense of community animates the examination of democratic communities in the later films discussed in chapter 11, but in Essene and the Deaf and Blind films, he is more concerned with the spiritual aspect. The central informing conceit of these films’ sense of charity is heightened awareness through the senses: vision, hearing, and touch (signaled explicitly by the titles Deaf and Blind). In Un couple, Sophia Tolstoy tells us that “most people live as if they are blind.” By detailing the daily life at these institutions and giving us a personal understanding of the handicapped through his film style, Wiseman allows us to transcend the shell of the self and to experience the world as other people experience it—some very differently. Essene seems to stand apart from Wiseman’s other early documentaries not only because of its transcendent vision but because, unlike the others, it does not take as its subject a public, tax-supported, urban institution. Instead, as Wiseman himself notes, the film looks at a private, voluntary community, an Anglican monastery associated with the Episcopalian Church in southwestern Michigan.8 (The film’s title comes from the name of an ascetic brotherhood founded in the second century BC). However, the film remains similar to Wiseman’s other documentaries in its examination of institutional organization and so, like those others, may be understood as yet another cultural spoor. According to Wiseman, “The bureaucracy in a monastery, I’ve found, is quite similar to that in a high school or a hospital.”9 Essene is not primarily animated by a Christian worldview or, in fact, by an orthodox religious vision of any kind. On the contrary, as Wiseman himself acknowledges, Essene is very much concerned with the secular—although it would be flippant to describe the conflicts and tensions upon which it focuses, as one reviewer has, as “an ecclesiastical Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”10 The film is not melodrama but rather a philosophical investigation of a pragmatic struggle to erect a true spiritual community, with all the potential and difficulty of achieving human contact that such a goal inevitably entails. Thus, as Stephen Mamber so aptly puts it, Essene is both Wiseman’s “most specific and most universal work.”11

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This is not to deny the importance of religion as a theme in Wiseman’s cinema, however. Wiseman says that he “is interested in the role religion plays in everyday life,” a claim borne out by the fact that this is a subject to which he returns regularly. In fact, Christian ritual appears in some form in almost all of his films, most simply because it constitutes such a significant part of the way we live. The films view orthodox Christianity as, at best, an apparently necessary palliative for some people in the face of hardship and, at worst, a self-serving institution for preserving the ideological status quo. Religion as the opiate of the people in Wiseman’s cinema frequently takes the mild form of preaching a vague sense of acceptance, as in the church service in Sinai Field Mission, but, just as often, it is overtly political, as in the hysterically antifeminist sermon in Canal Zone, where women’s liberation is described as “Satan’s way of breaking up homes, destroying what God has set up and his plan.” Canal Zone, in fact, emphasizes the extent to which church and state are intimately connected (the film’s penultimate sequence, for example, features a band playing both “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”), even while the Christian preaching of brotherly love is expressed, ironically, in the oppressive context of colonialism. People in Wiseman’s films sometimes use religion in bad faith, for their own purposes, like the boy in Juvenile Court who embraces the Christian Teen Challenge program for the second time, apparently as a convenient way of finding favor with Judge Turner. But Wiseman would agree with Huxley, for whom “herd-intoxication—even if it is done in the name of religion . . . cannot be morally justified.”12 It is indeed interesting that Wiseman has cited Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) as his favorite novel. Apart from its similarity to Wiseman’s work in presenting a broad panoply of American morals and manners (a “congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man”13) and its microcosmic ship of fools (analogous to the director’s approach to institutions), the book’s black humor, particularly its treatment of religion, undoubtedly appeals to him. The narrative situation of the devil disguised as a good Christian and testing the morals of men by spouting orthodox moral precepts, pointing out the hypocrisy of seemingly good Christians in the process, is the kind of dark joke consistent with the humor and the uncomfortable challenges to the viewer found throughout Wiseman’s films. The tone is established already in Wiseman’s

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first film, Titicut Follies, which associates Christianity more with death than life. The film’s two scenes of Christian ritual are of last rites and a funeral service, presumably for Malinowski (although this ambiguity is also to the point). Wiseman introduces Christian elements rather sardonically, cutting from a physically dysfunctional inmate picking his nose to the hand gesture of the priest, Father Mulligan, performing the last rite. Elsewhere in the film, one inmate stands on his head, singing of sacred glory; the upside-down closeup of the man’s face suggests Christianity is an inversion of values, specifically in that it asks us to endure the miseries of this life for the promise of a better one in the hereafter. Wiseman’s critique of the function of Christianity in American society is particularly trenchant in the military films. At one point in Manoeuvre, several of the men pause to pray with the chaplain before entering into “battle.” The sequence comes as a surprise since nothing before it is concerned with religious belief but only with war preparation and strategy. The startling suddenness of this scene encourages us to consider the ritual in context, bringing to mind Melville again, this time in the form of his narrator’s musings in Billy Budd: Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War—Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the alter at Christmas. Why, then, is he here? Because he indirectly serves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.14

The chaplain in Basic Training (whose impatient glance at his watch while counseling the hapless Hickman is a vivid gesture of the hereafter compromised by the here and now) explicitly acknowledges the co-optation of Christian thought in his comment that “the Church has represented a crutch to us. A way of soothing our feelings of guilt.” Unfortunately, even as he tells his men that he is going “to kick the crutch from under you,” he actually reinforces it by declaring that God can give them the inner strength necessary to survive in the army. Hence the sharp irony of the ending of Missile: In the context of a training program where people learn the procedures for destroying the planet with nuclear weapons, the last words in the film, uttered by the commanding general

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in his speech to the trainees, is that “we’re a people who are concerned about God.” Still, Wiseman’s critique of Christianity is perhaps nowhere more powerfully expressed than at the end of Hospital. After all the physical suffering we see people enduring in this film, a priest exhorts his congregation in the hospital chapel to forget about themselves and their fleeting physical existence because God is all. But again, in emphasizing the hereafter over the here and now (“We personally must resist the secularization of our time. We must be wary of placing God second,” says the priest in Racetrack), orthodox faith hardly motivates us to do anything to improve our earthly existence—not just physical suffering but the socio-economic inequities that have created an institution like Metropolitan Hospital in the first place. All we can do, the priest suggests, is carry on stoically through this vale of tears, like the people in the film’s last shot racing by the hospital in their cars. Enduring social conditions as God’s will obviously goes against the reformist impulse of the documentary tradition generally and Wiseman’s interests specifically, at least at this early point in his career. Because institutions are human, not divine creations (“God is not a man like, uh, social service,” says one client in Welfare), they are what we make them. In the material, alienated world presented in most of Wiseman’s films, what real significance can God, understood in the general sense of spiritual value, have for us? It is this question that Essene seeks to explore in its quiet, intimate style, so distinctly different from the typical Hollywood religious film, with its emphasis on burning bushes, casts of thousands, and visual spectacle. Wiseman’s film is more philosophical, closer in spirit to the venerable tradition of American utopianism. With its vision of harmony among society, technology, and nature, Essene belongs to the utopian tradition in American art, but, as in this tradition’s best works, community and harmony are not easily achieved. Nathaniel Hawthorne succinctly summed up the difficulties facing such attempts when he observes in The Blithedale Romance (1852), the novel about his experience at the experimental Fourierite community, Brook Farm, that “persons of marked individuality—crooked sticks, as some of us might be called—are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot.”15 Appropriately, the very first image in Essene is of a monk raking the grounds. We see another monk raking later, and in his final sermon, the

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abbot makes reference to tension in the community with the specific example of someone having left the rake out overnight. The brethren, in other words, are a group of distinct individuals, like Hawthorne’s “crooked sticks.” Everyone there, as Sister Alice points out, comes with a different background and influences, making communal harmony difficult. Yet this religious order, like so many earlier groups from the Fourierites to the Woodstock nation, is a community of Americans optimistically seeking to improve a more perfect union. What they have in common, and what keeps them together, is that they have renounced material values and are genuinely seeking to discover selfless love. At several points in the film, there are short montages of vocationers or monks alone—one stands in a field, another walks in the woods, a third rakes leaves, and so on. The connection between these shots, established by the editing and their similar temporal duration, suggests that even as these people are, at times, physically apart, they are nevertheless connected by a common endeavor—partaking in the community, even in their moments alone. This idea is reinforced by the sequences of rituals, such as the vigil and compline, where brethren gather to sing and pray together. In these sequences, closeness is shown by the common activities being performed, the physical proximity of the participants, and Wiseman’s long takes and moving camera. Some shots are composed in depth, like the one that shows at least five monks praying simultaneously and receding into the background of the image (see figure 7.2). In the short haying sequence, three of the brethren are seen at work but only in silhouette so that we cannot identify them as individuals. Difference is thus subsumed in harmonious collective activity. Early in the film, Brother David identifies the problem when he says that people are both Christians and individuals and that the latter “is the one we have difficulty with.” The conflict is embodied by tension between the young reformers and the old guard. On the one hand, there is the postulant Richard, who, in his zeal to lead a spiritual and moral life, vigorously seeks to escape the bounds of the “insulated self.” Richard cries and is deeply troubled by the absence of true connection among the brethren. He and others pressure the community toward reform, which they see as a new, “God-given direction,” in the words of Father Anthony. Already the Mass is conducted in English, and the daily prayer meetings are more like group therapy or sensitivity sessions than traditional prayer. The

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FIGURE 7.2  Essene: Composition in depth suggests the intimate community of the brethren.

similarity is explicitly acknowledged by the vocationer Robert when he compares their meetings to the individual and group therapy sessions he had participated in while living in New York. On the other hand, there is tradition, even egotism, as represented by Brother Wilfred. He is suspicious of change and reactionary in attitude (“There is so much a tendency today for something to be taken up at once,” he complains to the abbot). Driving back to the monastery from town, he is framed with the rear-view mirror distinctly visible by his face, the image expressing the orientation of his vision in the past, in tradition. In his discussion with the abbot, Wilfred rails against people calling him by his first name, considering it an act of disrespect (“except among my very close chums, of which there were five”). He is defensive and hostile, literally seated up against a wall, feeling trapped and cornered by the abbot’s gentle argument that the mutual experience of Christ is analogous to childhood friendship. The camera moves into a closeup of Wilfred during the discussion, articulating his feeling of being entrapped by the abbot’s

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Socratic rhetoric. His hands are tightly folded across his chest for most of their conversation, and he frequently bites his lip—body language directly opposite the open, expansive gestures characteristic of the other brethren throughout the film. Wilfred rationalizes his position by claiming that confusion would arise in using first names since, for example, there are now two Davids at the monastery. For him, the homily “familiarity breeds contempt,” which he cites, is the gospel truth. Tellingly, he takes out his frustrations by swatting at flies in the room before folding his arms across his chest once again. Clipboards hang to one side on the wall behind him during this discussion, suggesting his emphasis on the letter rather than the spirit, while the telephone hanging at his other side ironically counterpoints his stated refusal of intimate contact. While the rest of the brethren seek spiritual community, Brother Wilfred, “the implacable loner,”16 sets off by himself on a trip to town, the only brother to do so in the film. In both the supermarket and the hardware store, Wilfred is flanked by aisles of consumer goods, emblems of the daily world’s emphasis on the material over the spiritual. The contrast between the two worlds is emphasized by the juxtaposition on the soundtrack of the harmonious singing in vigil with the blaring pop tune on the radio as Wilfred walks down the street toward the supermarket. This lack of spirituality in the material world is also suggested rather humorously by the background music heard while Brother Wilfred is inside the market—a Muzak version of “On the Street Where You Live,” a pop debasement of spiritual epiphany in terms of romance (“Oh, the towering feeling . . .”). Comically, the friendly hardware store salesman addresses the monk by his first name as he delivers his sales pitch, and the joke is compounded by the fact that he uses the wrong name, calling him Herb. Curiously, though, Brother Wilfred seems perfectly at ease, amicably chatting with the salesman despite his jocular barbs. The salesman worries that Brother Wilfred might purchase an inferior potato peeler: “Anything I hate to see is one of the brothers prostrate on the floor bleeding from their fingers.” When the salesman kids him about their ascetic lifestyle—“All on tap? All answer the roll call? All come forth?”—Wilfred shoots back, “Damned if I know, by gosh.” The only evidence here of his cantankerous personality is his finding fault with every model of peeler proffered by the salesman, and he remarks that, despite his choosiness over the utensil, “I’m not going to peel them so I couldn’t care less.” Ironically, in a later brief shot, we see

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Wilfred cleaning vegetables—a shot that is funny but also suggests the greater strength of community. This sequence at once reveals that Brother Wilfred, the only one in the film shown outside the monastery grounds, is more comfortable in the material world and that our daily social interaction is pleasant but superficial, lacking the substance of true contact the younger brethren so devoutly desire. Between the viewpoints of Richard and Brother Wilfred is that of the abbot. It is he who maintains the apparently tenuous hold of the community, who prevents it from splintering, by seeking to steer a middle course between the letter and the spirit, between Martha and Mary, Wilfred and Richard. Some of the monks meeting with the abbot complain that Wilfred is “a very divisive element,” even a misanthrope since he seems to like no one. Father Anthony worries that their efforts to achieve community “are hopeless” since Wilfred fights everyone. Father Leo adds that this opposition has been the case with “our dear brother” from the beginning, the slight irony in his choice of words revealing the seriousness of the rift. Patience seems to be wearing thin, the community reaching a point of crisis. The abbot is keenly aware of both these tensions and his crucial position in relation to them, several times referring to himself as a mediator. The inevitable clash of egos is nothing less than a battle. At one point, he uses military metaphors (“shifting the troops,” “blow the bugle”) to describe it. In the chapter meeting that opens the film, the abbot describes his ultimate authority as “a shared responsibility,” “more and more a community awareness of what we are doing,” and “a corporate approval of our life.” Thus, he sees his role as seeking to discover “the unity behind what is being said” by the brethren. His sense of a corporate consciousness invokes an ideal socialist democracy in opposition to the materialist corporate existence of consumer capitalism (the town supermarket and hardware store). Richard tells a lengthy and extraordinary parable of a man who wants everyone to dance the same dance because he finds different dances chaotic and confusing. The elders, in response, simply nod and do nothing, but the man finds the dancing—“all these legs and arms and all this trouble and chaos, and all this noise and confusion”—so intolerable that he ends up crippling his beloved and destroying himself. In the parable, as in the various institutions depicted in so many of Wiseman’s other films, the individual is made to march in step (“If you don’t have discipline you’ve

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got chaos,” according to Father Leo). The abbot, however, acknowledges the unique spirit, what he calls “the Divine Mystery,” of each individual and seeks to establish community without imposing the crippling “Pharisaical answer” wherein “you don’t really deal with man, you simply impose a Sabbath or system or letter upon him.” But, he admits, the problem remains for “family charity”; the brethren have no clear blueprint for achieving it. Richard, tears rolling down his cheeks, talks in the garden with Sister Alice about the difficulty of transcendence, of truly opening oneself up to others. At their meetings, he says, one is “laid wide open,” all one’s foibles and faults revealed in the process. “It’s like taking all the hard skin that was on the outside and ripping it all off and you have all that nice fresh skin underneath.” (The school principal in Blind, worrying about a boy named Dallas whom he has tried hard to reach, similarly describes his frustration by saying “it tears your insides out.”) These metaphors of flaying, of being opened, seem particularly resonant, referring as they do to images in Hospital, Primate, and Meat. The emphasis in Essene, though, is on healing. Richard’s prayer for Father Anthony, to “make him whole,” invokes a completeness that is in opposition to the atomizing, the dismantling, of the self and the body in Primate and Meat. But the self is only whole in contact with others: “No man is an island, entire of itself,” a speaker says in a eulogy in Canal Zone, quoting John Donne. In the scene in the garden, Sister Alice responds to Richard with a simile of her own, telling him that to be open, to truly love, is “like being an open channel.” Richard picks up on the image, saying that despite the difficulties involved, “There is always the ‘river of joy’ underneath.” Significantly, this sequence is followed by what is probably the most genuinely moving one in the film, when Richard sings the hymn “Deep River” at the piano. During a meeting with the senior monks, the abbot remarks that the achievement of that sense of community, that corporate consciousness that is their goal, is obtained by “listening to one another and then looking for the unity behind what is being said.” This, he adds, is an art that must be learned. In his discussion with the entrenched Brother Wilfred, he emphasizes that what he is trying to do is simply to “illuminate” what others mean to say. The film ends with the abbot asking not only the brotherhood but also the viewer, “Will you listen, really deeply? . . . Will

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you listen?” The abbot’s question is fundamental, for to do so is to directly counter the “strategy of withdrawal” that characterizes human affairs in, say, Welfare or Hospital or Missile. Wiseman picks up the challenge of the abbot’s concluding question and passes it on to the viewer in the Deaf and Blind films. The crippled state of the man in Richard’s parable becomes, in these four films, a variety of literal physical conditions. Listening and looking are crucial to these films, both as subject—the films were shot at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind (AIDB) in Talladega—and theme. Just as in many ways the handicapped people in the films triumph over their physical limitations, so analogous spiritual success may be achieved by the viewer through attention and empathy. The Deaf and Blind films seek, in Siegfried Kracauer’s terms, to redeem physical reality, but only as a step in attaining a forgotten spirituality. Toward the end of the last of the four films, Multi-Handicapped, a Black house parent sings a spiritual about “One More River to Cross”—another reference to the channel that must be traversed for community to be achieved. The experience of Deaf and Blind becomes, as it were, the bridge. On the simplest level, the Deaf and Blind series requires a great commitment from viewers. The four films together possess a running time of almost nine hours. Wiseman views the four feature-length films (their proper sequence is Blind, Deaf, Adjustment and Work, and Multi-Handicapped) as independent works “but also working as one nine-hour film.” He says that he went to AIDB initially intending to make one film but soon realized that this would be insufficient because the different handicaps are so distinct. In one film, he would be able to devote only about twenty minutes to each with the result that all would be “trivialized”; even at its present length, he adds, “It risks being trivial.” But the combined length of the films and the complex structure of four separate yet connected works suggests that for the filmmaker, the topic contains significance beyond their ostensible subjects. The series chronicles the daily life of teachers, administrators, and students (both children and adults who seek to enter the workforce) at AIDB, one of the nation’s better institutions of its kind. With only a few notable exceptions, the films eschew the extraordinary to concentrate on the normal, the daily. When, for instance, a deaf and blind girl, a student in the Helen Keller school, is strapped into her seat for lunch in

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Multi-Handicapped, there are no hysterics and flying silverware, as in The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962), only an orderly, “uneventful” repast. The pace of the films is extremely leisurely. The establishing montage at the beginning of Deaf, for example, is composed of thirty-two shots— the last a slow pan to the AIDB campus—taking almost three minutes of screen time. Such “undramatic” sequences, their unhurried pace exacerbated by the very length of the series, have caused some to perceive the films as boring and aimless. Typical of this response is the ungenerous preview by Jeff Jarvis that appeared in People magazine prior to the PBS screenings. He says that in Blind (apparently the only film of the series he managed to sit through), “We can see uninterrupted, unending scenes of cars going by and then of a train going by. I wanted to go bye too but had to keep watching, becoming more irritated with every long minute.” He concludes that the film is indistinguishable from what millions of Americans are now doing themselves with their home video cameras.17 But along with the more astute Robert Coles, the attentive viewer must seriously wonder, “Exactly who is ‘bored’ by these films?”18 The answer, it seems, is those who have been conditioned by Hollywood cinema to expect more drama in movies. Like Essene, though, Deaf and Blind minimizes the easy pleasure of spectacle. Significantly, the first montage of Talladega shots in the first of the four films, Blind, includes a shot of the marquee of a defunct movie house, the sign of an exhausted conventional cinema to which Deaf and Blind announces its opposition. When they decline overt drama, the films renew, for our eyes and ears, the simple sights and sounds of the world that most of us, unlike the students at AIDB, have the luxury to take for granted. In doing so, they restore a sense of connection and proportion that all but gets lost in the rush of contemporary life. In several ways, the Deaf and Blind series gives us the time, the opportunity, to rediscover such simple joys. In short, Deaf and Blind encourages us to look and listen with an intensity that takes us out of ourselves and connects us both to the natural world and, through admiration for their stoic bravery and strong will, to those deprived of the senses to do so. Perceiving in this manner, the viewer moves and is moved beyond the boundaries of the insulated self, becoming what Emerson called “a transparent eye-ball” where “all mean egoism vanishes.”19 In this important sense, the Deaf and Blind series is strikingly different from Wiseman’s earlier school documentary, High School, although much

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invites comparison. They both show dance and cooking classes, discipline scenes with teachers and principals, and numerous hallway shots as transitional devices. However, in the Deaf and Blind films, these moments consistently seem both less dramatic and more caring than those in High School. If the hallways in High School are filled with peripatetic movement and a constant din, in Deaf, the hallway shots are quiet, orderly, uncrowded. Whereas High School features narrow-minded teachers who impose their values on their students, the pedagogical philosophy of AIDB is commendably flexible, more like that of High School II. It is “a program of instruction, not a set of guides and not a set of constraints,” says one of the teachers at the beginning of Multi-Handicapped. Unlike the vice principal in High School, who moves aggressively forward toward a student and toward the camera, the principal in Deaf and Blind invites problem children into his own space. And instead of the martial music that calls everyone to keep in step in High School, in these films, students in one class are told to “let the music go inside you,” while another student during a piano lesson is advised to take his time practicing, even if he has to forget the time signature to get the notes right. The simple fact that the films are shot in color serves as a constant reminder of the world around us, offering a lovely pallet that we may often fail to appreciate. In the art class near the beginning of Aspen, the instructor tells his students to “use every color in the box”; a similar aim motivates the ravishing insert shots of produce and other consumer goods, landscapes, and skies that appear in montages in some of the later films. Beginning immediately with Blind, we are constantly aware that we can see things many of the people in the film cannot. The difference between the viewer’s perceptual ability and that of the people at AIDB is made clear in the film’s first classroom sequence, where children must follow the instructions on a recording: “This is a story about colors.” The children are assigned colors and must stand up and sit down when their color is called. As we see, for them, this is a difficult task, and several are clearly at a loss. At the beginning of Deaf, too, a student learns to sign the words for different colors, and the first classroom sequence in Multi-Handicapped involves color recognition. As well, several objects in Blind serve as especially forceful reminders of the world of color to which we are privileged, including the bright red Crimson Tide jersey worn by the blind boy Jaimie during his long talk with the principal, a child’s sky blue Toronto

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Blue Jays shirt in the music therapy class, and the prominent sign in the school gym that identifies it as the “Home of the Redskins.” Continually, the Deaf and Blind series brings us back to the delight of color. When the house parent turns out the light at day’s end in Blind, for a moment, we are suddenly cast into the darkness that these blind people experience constantly. As night falls at the end of the film, we may be disappointed that the world is temporarily without light, but we take comfort in the knowledge that the light will return with the morning sun. Moreover, our hearts may leap up to behold the luminous silver of the moon shining overhead in the exterior shot before the Halloween party—elsewhere, another shot even presents a beautiful field of flowers, Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils”—but at the same time, we are fully aware that the people in the film are deprived of witnessing this pleasure. Both our reliance on light and the films’ emphasis on dailiness are forcefully established early in Blind in one of the film’s most stunning sequences, technically and emotionally. Jason, a young blind student proud of his schoolwork, wants to go to another classroom to show his paper to Mrs. Williams, another teacher. To do so, he must find his own way out of the room, along the hall to the stairway, down the stairs, and along another corridor to Mrs. Williams’s classroom. Then, of course, he must reverse his path to return to where he began. Wiseman patiently follows Jason through the entire process, which lasts over five minutes, the duration of the event emphasized by the lack of editing. There is only one cut as the boy leaves the first classroom. According to Wiseman, this cut was motivated purely by technical considerations, as John Davey had to juggle the camera to keep up with the boy as he went through the doorway, a jarring movement that he felt would have distracted the viewer. But Jason’s pluck and resolve are so impressive that the cut is hardly noticeable, its effect negligible. The camera remains tightly framed on Jason, which not only underscores his achievement but also duplicates somewhat for the viewer his sightlessness, as we are not allowed to see much of the physical space surrounding him, nor, indeed, even the faces of the teachers. Several other sequences in the films work in a similar manner, including an even lengthier sequence showing a girl named Charlotte being taught how to get around with the use of a cane. This sequence takes about fourteen minutes, almost three times as long as the one with Jason. It

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contains only four cuts, and two of the shots are approximately five minutes long. Charlotte first appears at the end of the sequence with Jason, saying she wants to go down to Mrs. Williams’s class too, but when asked by the teacher, she admits that she is not yet capable of doing so by herself. All of Charlotte’s subsequent hard work involved in negotiating the school space with the cane reveals how much learning and effort it had taken Jason previously to be able to do what we have seen. Thus, our admiration for the boy grows even greater. In Adjustment and Work, a blind man gets a detailed lesson in the geography of a kitchen, learning where the different drawers and cabinets are, the utensils that are in them, and how to put them away. The sequence, composed of five shots, takes as many minutes. There is also a lengthy sequence that parallels the one with Jason, showing the subsequent difficulties the boy will inevitably face when he is older. A blind man attempts for the first time to negotiate some streets in downtown Talladega as a teacher gives him periodic instructions. The man must make several turns and cross several streets, one a four-lane thoroughfare, finding curbs in the process, all the while careful to avoid the traffic—emblems of the workaday world speeding by. As in the sequences with Jason and Charlotte, the camera focuses on the man’s feet and cane as he makes his way, emphasizing the challenges of each step. For all of Jason’s success, this sequence reminds us that his hard work is by no means over. Thus, whenever we see people feeling their way around a hallway in any of the four films, however briefly, we can appreciate the obstacles, if not the terror, they must occasionally experience at not being able to fully perceive their environment. The films encourage us as well to listen deeply, in the words of the abbot. During Charlotte’s cane lesson in Blind, she must concentrate on the sounds of things and learn to distinguish between similar sounds. She correctly identifies Miss Reed’s classroom by the sound of the piano but then wrongly deduces her location because she confuses the noise of the water fountain with that of the clothes dryer. The girl’s honest joy at now being able to move about with a cane (“I deserved a drink of water for that, didn’t I?” she asks, after finally finding the fountain) is infectious; we cheer her on and are disappointed at her mistakes. When Charlotte and her instructor briefly step outdoors, moving from one building to another, the rush of ambient street noise dominates the soundtrack, as

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also happens with Suzanne in Multi-Handicapped, suddenly putting her achievement into perspective. One of the methods with which the blind man negotiates the busy Talladega streets is to listen for parallel traffic. With him, too, we listen attentively, hoping he makes it (“If you’re lucky,” says his instructor). So, just as the blind people in the film must listen carefully to the world around them, viewers, through the mobilization of identification, find themselves doing the same. In Deaf, the emphasis on sign language requires the viewer to pay particularly close attention to gestures. We learn that many signs (such as those for “tea bag” and “milk”) are not arbitrary but precise gestures, like mime. Early in the film, along with some of the parents, we are given a lesson in signing where we discover that, to some extent, we all use sign language—a codified system of gestures—without understanding it as such. In another lesson, we learn that different places have different signs for the same word or concept (“ugly,” “Coke”), which is to say that the language is rich enough to sustain a variety of “dialects.” There are many shots of students conversing in sign language, but the film provides us with no translation, and so the viewer must be extremely attentive in order to get a sense of what is being communicated. During the field trip to the local courthouse and jail, there is a particularly astonishing moment when a prisoner suddenly thrusts his hand between the bars of his cell, signing something to the children about why he is there. The viewer ignorant of sign language is especially frustrated at this moment; surely, the man is saying something of significance. When the children are introduced to the judge in his chambers, his insistent nervous laughter betrays his discomfort—and likely our own—at being unable to converse with the deaf. The importance of such communication, and the unfortunate result of its lack, is made devastatingly clear in the sequence with the fourteenyear-old Peter in Deaf. It is forty-five minutes long, or about one-third of the film. Its length and central placement attest to its significance. Because of his deafness, Peter has been rejected by his natural father, and he also feels rejected by and angry towards his mother. In his anger, he refuses to look at his mother, who continues talking to the principal and the teacher, Dr. Meecham. Only after several minutes does the viewer realize that the mother has no signing skills, a fact that she explains and justifies by saying that she has three other children and cannot find the time to learn. Whether this is true or not (according to Dr. Meecham in the lesson on

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friendship shortly after, if someone really wants to be the friend of a deaf person, it is a necessary part of that commitment to learn to sign), the mother and son have become locked in a self-defeating dynamic wherein they neither look at nor listen to each other. The fundamental importance of communication is constantly reiterated in the films. Dr. Meecham tells Peter that what is important is “to communicate with each other and to communicate with people here at school.” Elsewhere in the same film, she suggests to the students that if they see a lonely person, they should approach him or her and offer their friendship. One of the coaches reminds his team before the football game in Deaf, “You gotta pay attention and remember to communicate with each other. . . . All of us here love each other.” Even Washington Irving’s classic story “Rip Van Winkle,” discussed in a lesson in Deaf, endorses the point, for it offers the moral that one cannot escape the difficulties of a relationship with “a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle’s flagon” (through a strategy of withdrawal, as in Welfare).20 At the end of the lesson about the richness of sign language, Wiseman cuts to a closeup of an electronic learning tool as its prerecorded voice states, “I have a limited vocabulary.” That is to say, there is no adequate substitute for the depth and contact of human communication. Touch, as the physical emblem of communication, is also emphasized in these four films (see figures 7.3a and 7.3b). Its importance is established early in Blind in the sequences where Jason and Charlotte feel their way around the school. Charlotte also learns about the different kinds of canes by feeling them. The blind man learning to cross the streets is told to “feel” the traffic coming across his chest, and the teacher responds to the boy who wants to play with the other children on the fire engine in the schoolyard by telling him to follow the sounds of their voices and to “get that feeler out.” In the first scene in Multi-Handicapped, the driver touch signs with a deaf and blind man as he gets off the school bus. In the wrestling lesson in Blind, the students learn by empathic touch (“I want you to feel the position he’s in,” the coach instructs them), and in the music therapy class, body awareness is emphasized through touch. In Deaf, a teacher gives a speech lesson to a deaf boy by touching his throat box. Often, students are rewarded with hugs or kisses instead of or in addition to verbal encouragement, reminiscent (but without the therapeutic ambiguity) of the holding therapy in Allan King’s Warrendale. For

FIGURE 7.3A  Multi-Handicapped: The importance of sympathetic contact is shown throughout the Deaf and Blind films . . .

FIGURE 7.3B   . . .

and Essene.

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example, the principal explains that while the boy Peter was depressed and suicidal, he “hugged him a lot,” and the meeting ends with Peter being encouraged to hug his mother. In short, the four films are filled with gentle, exploring, and touching hands: the hands of workers in Adjustment and Work putting dishes away or screwing nuts to bolts, the hands of students talking to each other and combing each other’s hair, the hands of pupils feeling out solutions to puzzles in Multi-Handicapped. Several of the children in the films cry out for the contact of which they have been deprived. One boy, Dennis, disrupts his class because of his desperate need for attention. Another is afraid of his mother, who also drinks and would rather stay at the school than go home for visits. What he needs, says Dr. Meecham, is “people who really care.” Peter wants to see his real father, who, according to his mother, has rejected him and does not love him. The “missing children” sign, visible in the courthouse during the school trip in Deaf, also refers to the many abused children, not only in Deaf and Blind but elsewhere in Wiseman’s cinema, from the beginning in The Cool World (the sign at the beach), and in Law and Order, Hospital, Juvenile Court, Canal Zone, Public Housing, and Domestic Violence. The subtle force with which the Deaf and Blind films prompt us to look and listen more deeply than usual raises the rhetorical question about who exactly is deaf and blind. As Dr. A. G. Gaston explicitly acknowledges in his closing speech in Deaf, the idea of “handicap” can be taken metaphorically on many levels. His point is essential to the project of these four films. Frequently, the films play on the idea by creating ambiguity about whether people shown in the films are, in fact, handicapped and even question the term itself. In the opening raceway sequence in Blind, for example, it is not clear that the kids in the band are blind until the announcer identifies them (although we might suspect it, given the film’s title and the AIDB sign briefly visible on the side of a school bus). Nor is it clear that the announcer himself has a physical handicap until after his introduction, when the camera pulls back slightly to reveal that he lacks an arm. Similarly, in the painful sequence in Adjustment and Work where the slow-learning Donna tries to comprehend that fifty cents equal half of a dollar, it is only toward the end that we realize her patient instructor, too, is blind. When we see people signing in Deaf, often we do not know if they are deaf or if they are hearing people who have made what Dr. Meecham calls “the necessary commitment” and learned sign

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language. The blind Willy protests to his supervisor in Adjustment and Work, “We’re not sick; we’re just people.” So in sequences like these, as in the interviews with Vietnam veterans in Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds (1974), we are forced to attend to the people first before we categorize them and relegate them to the status of “handicapped.” Significantly, staff and students in both Blind and Adjustment and Work frequently speak of seeing, despite their physical limitations. In Blind, one child wants to “watch” the other kids playing on a fire engine. When Jason heads out of the classroom to find Mrs. Williams, he calls back, “See you all later.” A blind man learning his way around the kitchen says, when coming across the potato peelers, “I’ve seen them before.” Teachers frequently tell students when giving them instructions to “look” and “see,” while the students say, “I see,” when they understand instructions. Indeed, these handicapped people sometimes demonstrate a deeper perception than many persons of “normal” sensory ability. Several times in the films, we are reminded of how people who can see often do so only superficially, relying on surface appearances. In Blind, for example, William, who wants to become an auto mechanic, is advised by his supervisor “to at least look busy” in order to satisfy his foreman. Similarly, while his goals are certainly laudable, the principal in Deaf dubiously attempts to reconcile Peter and his mother by forcing the boy to alter the unhappy expression on his face. “I don’t see you smiling,” the principal declares, and holding a mirror to Peter, he says, “I want to see your teeth,” as if putting on a happy face will necessarily change the “very depressed” way the boy really feels. The Deaf and Blind films, shot in the South, are (with the exceptions of Essene, Model and the later dance films) possibly the only Wiseman documentaries in which race does not appear as an important issue. In Wiseman’s films, racism is seen to pervade the way Americans interact. (For one writer, even Primate features a strong racial theme. In the film, he says, “There are four groups: white researchers, machines, apes and blacks, in roughly that order.”)21 However, if one believes the extreme utopianism of Dr. Gaston’s speech in Deaf, racism is merely a curse of the unenlightened past. In a sense, this is true for the blind, for whom race is hardly an issue. Unlike many people with sight, they have the insight to disregard, to see beyond, the veneer of skin color. In all four of the films, the handicapped of different races are shown to communicate, to touch, to live with one another seemingly as equals. As Essene reminds us, what

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the abbot calls “the divine mystery” in each person, his soul, and what Father Leo calls “the treasure,” “the pearl,” is hidden within the shell of the body, beneath the surface. Despite Wiseman’s admitted cynicism about the affective capability of cinema, there is a sense in these documentaries that film, in fact, can be instrumental in effecting empathy and understanding. When, in Essene, the abbot asks Father Anthony for specifics about Brother Wilfred’s intimidation of the younger men, the latter replies that he cannot offer direct proof because he was not there “with a little pad and a camera.” Wiseman, however, is, and the specifics offered to viewers in these films provide ample evidence of the struggle to transcend ego and be truly charitable. The very style of the films encourages us to participate in the quest for community. In Richard’s parable about dancing, what had looked like chaos to the man becomes beautiful patterns from a different vantage point; so Wiseman’s mediating camera and his editing make profilmic reality more vivid and meaningful. In the austerity of its construction, Essene seeks to capture the spiritual values that inform the order. As Sullivan notes, Essene contains fewer sequences than any of Wiseman’s previous documentaries,22 thus establishing a slow, deliberate pace (“like watching a flower blooming through a process of slow motion,” as Brother David defines spiritual growth). As well, the film eschews montage within sequences for long takes, mirroring the quiet asceticism of the brotherhood. Generally, the camera moves slowly and gently, as if caressing the people it is filming, just as they embrace each other. In one prayer meeting, the camera, in one lengthy, rapturously fluid shot, slowly circles the group as if a participant in their communal embrace. During Mass, the congregation embraces in the kiss of peace, and the camera slowly moves down the line as the embrace is passed to over a dozen people. The film is intimate in style and is dominated by closeups of hands and faces radiating spirituality more than Wiseman’s other films. The hands we see in this film are quite different from, for example, the aggressive, probing fingers of Primate; the mechanical, repetitive hand movements in Meat; or the frequently ironic hand gestures in High School. Instead, the hands here seem gentle and, in keeping with the emphasis on contact, eager to touch others. When the abbot talks about the importance of community, his fingers are knit together, expressing the values he invokes;

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FIGURE 7.4  Essene:

A monk’s knit hands express the hope for community that moti-

vates the Order.

when he speaks of intuition opening him up, making him sensitive to the needs of the brethren, they spread as if in supplication (see figure 7.4). Frequently hands are seen folded in prayer or touching others, as in the vigil for Father Anthony or after Richard’s parable. Richard’s embrace of Sister Alice after their talk about the pain of loving is a beautiful moment, shot in a bucolic, sunlit grove, as if a visualization of Hopkins’s line, “Glory be to God for dappled things.”23 The dominance of facial closeups in Essene is, of course, typical of many documentaries but also, given its subject, reminiscent of Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). The films share a common religious subject as well as what Paul Schrader has called “the transcendental style,” a manner of expressing “the holy,” a sense of unity beyond the individual self but in which the self participates. According to Schrader, “day-today reality” is first solidly established and then undermined, serving as “a prelude to the moment of redemption, when ordinary reality is transcended.” Schrader argues that the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson,

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and Dreyer generally avoid techniques of expressive stylization in order to present everyday reality more straightforwardly. There is then introduced a “disparity, “a growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality,” so that the viewer begins to sense some greater force in life than daily existence. This crack in everyday reality becomes “an open rupture,” leading to some sort of “decisive action” that, in turn, culminates in stasis, “a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it.”24 In Ozu’s films, for example, there is frequently a coda, a final still life image, that expresses oneness. Clearly, documentary possesses great potential for expressing the transcendent. Although Schrader discusses no documentary films specifically, he acknowledges their importance to his thesis. In his analysis of Bresson, Schrader remarks on the documentary film’s ability to record reality’s surface and quotes the director’s intention in Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (A man escaped, 1956) to create a documentary tone that is “a celebration of the trivial.”25 Bresson’s minimization of dramatic plot, acting style, and avoidance of expressionist camerawork and montage, all of which act as screens to reality, seem remarkably close to Wiseman’s observational style in these films. Schrader also quotes Susan Sontag on Bresson, who argues that Bresson’s style is a challenge for the viewer because it eschews the “easy pleasures” of conventional cinema26—again, very much like Wiseman. Yvette Biro expresses a view similar to Schrader’s, although she uses the terms “profane” and “mythic” to refer to cinema’s transcendent possibilities. More than Schrader, however, Biro emphasizes the role of documentary in achieving cinema’s mythic potential, man’s urge to “go beyond himself ” by mythicizing everyday life through the camera’s observation, magnification, and celebration.27 If, as Schrader states, for Bresson, “The raw material taken from real life is the raw material of the Transcendent,”28 then Wiseman’s cinema, at least in these five films, functions similarly. The disparity between documentary realism and spiritual passion that characterizes Bresson’s work is true of Essene and of the Deaf and Blind series. Wiseman’s editing in these films may not be quite “deadpan,” as both Schrader and Sontag say of Bresson, but he always connects his shots with basic cuts (as opposed to process shots like fades, dissolves, or wipes); certainly, he avoids the kind of shock editing he earlier employed in Titicut Follies or the heavily ironic montage of High School. Like the three directors Schrader discusses,

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Wiseman frequently presents static, well-composed images of the environment, particularly in the exterior establishing shots that have become a stylistic trademark. This creates a disparity between the implacable surfaces of physical reality and the spiritual depth of the people who dwell within these spaces29—a direction, it would seem, in which Wiseman was moving since that final shot of Hospital. The attainment of stasis, suggestive of transcendent unity, may be seen in the Talladega shots at the beginning and end of the Deaf and Blind films. Ozu, says Schrader, often ends his films with an image of stasis that “is the same restrictive view which began the film: the mountain has become a mountain again, but in an entirely different way.”30 Similarly, the shots of the people of Talladega going about their daily business on the street or in cars take on a profoundly different quality at different times, as in the final shots of Blind. These shots bring us back to the short montage that opens the film and frames the other three films. At the end of Blind, the shots are at night, and what is likely to strike us most is a new awareness of our dependence on light. We see a riot of lights—automobile headlamps, traffic lights, the garish neon of stores and restaurants on the town’s main strip—lights that now possess the importance of beacons because we rely on them to guide us through the darkness. Here, the disparity between common activity and what we have come to know about blind people makes nature seem more impressive, our little goings to and fro pettier. Similarly, Richard’s parable in Essene features one quite lengthy shot that begins with a harmoniously composed triangular composition of Richard flanked by two other monks and ends with an almost identical composition (the only change is that Richard is embraced by a fourth monk). The tour de force cinematography in this sequence wonderfully expresses the unity of which Richard speaks and the transcendental style’s “return to the mountain” (see figures 7.5a and 7.5b) Schrader further suggests that the three filmmakers he discusses in his book share the use of irony as “a temporary solution to living in a schizoid world,” a world of disparity. Irony and a black sense of humor are, as we have seen, characteristics of Wiseman’s work.31 But with the exception of the sequences concerning Brother Wilfred in Essene, these films seem markedly less ironic in tone than Wiseman’s other early documentaries, focusing as those do on the gap (“disparity”) in institutional theory and practice. Both Mamber and Armstrong view the monastery in Essene as

FIGURE 7.5A  Essene:

FIGURE 7.5B   . . .

Richard’s parable . . .

is an extension of transcendental “stasis” (Essene).

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another institution of social control,32 seeking perhaps to fit this film into patterns that apply to the other early documentaries. But neither the film’s style nor its emphasis on the abbot, in fact, support this view. Similarly, while we see the AIDB staff in Multi-Handicapped reach for and stumble over generalities that hardly describe the impressive work with the handicapped they actually do—and the film moves back and forth between such sequences to heighten our perception of this disparity—this is hardly the central focus of the series. This unfortunate exercise in administrivia is more than balanced by the patient, caring work of the teachers and house parents chronicled throughout the four films. If anything, then, we smile rather than snicker at these scenes. “So it goes, the bemused filmmaker seems to be telling us,” writes Coles in response to this aspect of the film,33 echoing the tag phrase of Kurt Vonnegut’s wry acceptance of the transcendent in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Here, Wiseman’s irony is less pointed, more understated, than elsewhere. But Wiseman does unleash his irony upon one particular institutional disparity in the Deaf and Blind films, one which itself transcends this particular institution, for it is nothing less than the distance between the function of AIDB and the ideology of the American Dream itself. This emphasis on national values as an institution follows from those documentaries (Model, The Store) made prior to Deaf and Blind that, as discussed in chapter 5, redefine the concept of “institution” from an ideological perspective. They also look forward to the later films about democracy, such as State Legislature and City Hall. The Deaf and Blind films are filled with exhortations and reminders about the greatness of America (“The American Dream is Alive and Well in the School,” says a sign on a classroom wall in Deaf), but Wiseman consistently juxtaposes them to the more somber realities confronting these handicapped people. In a sense, the difficulties of job training emphasized in Adjustment and Work and Multi-Handicapped work in counterpoint to Blind and Deaf, undercutting the Algeresque optimism of the first two films. At the end of Deaf, Dr. Gaston delivers a speech about the greatness of America, a country where individuals can triumph over their “handicaps” (in his case, being Black) and achieve success. Gaston himself was born in poverty, his grandparents slaves, yet now he owns several companies worth over $50 million. According to Dr. Hawkins, the man who introduces Dr. Gaston, it “probably couldn’t happen in any other country in

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the world, that a gentleman could accomplish so much, so much, from such a meager beginning.” In the speech, the value of individual effort is stressed; yet all along, these films insist on the importance of human interdependence for success. In Blind, students mouth the same conventional patriotic sentiments, speaking of limitless educational opportunity and potential in America. But the speeches ring somewhat hollow, for they are comprised largely of cliché (like the valedictorian’s speech at the end of Basic Training). And, of course, the claim is undercut by what follows. For example, Chris, a thirty-seven-year-old Black man in Adjustment and Work, wants to withdraw from his job training program and seek immediate employment in order to earn some money. He has been a student most of his life, and, as he tells the interviewing staff, his friends are all working. Even though he is described as having “scores in the upper average range of intelligence,” whenever he goes somewhere for a job interview, his application is rejected because he is blind. Chris is motivated less by fantasy or a dream than by hard reality, and he simply wants to get on with his life. Then, too, there is William, who wants to work in auto mechanics, although his supervisor reports that this does not seem a feasible vocation for him because of the obstacles involved. “Looking down the road ten years from now . . . he will probably still be a mechanic’s helper,” he predicts. Despite the anomalous success story of Gaston, the choices for most handicapped people are limited, and there is little hope that with the right combination of pluck and luck, they will rise in their fields of employment. Tellingly, during the class visit to the county judicial building in Deaf, Wiseman inserts a shot of the lobby newsstand vendor, a blind man, sitting motionless and alone. Toward the end of Adjustment and Work, in the Industries for the Blind building, we see the work so many blind people actually end up doing: bending file folders; making brooms, mops, and ties; or making first-aid and M-16 equipment pouches for the army. “They do that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, sometimes on Saturday. And that’s work,” the guide explains. Wiseman emphasizes the point by having the droning, repetitive sound of the file folder machines carry over the film’s final credits, similar to the sound bridge at the end of Welfare. The fact that the workers are making brooms and mops is especially significant in the context of Wiseman’s cinema; in so many of his films, we see the disparity between rich and poor concretized in the contrasting images of white- and

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blue-collar workers, of professionals and janitors. Indeed, the last image of Adjustment and Work is of someone sweeping up. “Everyone makes at least minimum wage, and some of them with fringe benefits are making as much as $5.25 an hour,” someone proudly explains to Dr. Gaston. While it is true that employment will give some of these handicapped people self-respect, many do not feel fulfilled, and absenteeism is identified in the preceding scene as a major problem. The opening sequence of the first film, Blind, preceding even the typical expository montage that opens the other three films in the series, acts as a prologue or prelude, establishing this crucial aspect of the series immediately. At the Talladega Raceway, the school band of the Alabama School for the Blind prepares for a performance during a day of stock car racing. Impressive customized cars sponsored by large corporations (Busch, Winston, Coors, and Goody’s headache tablets, “the official pain reliever of NasCar”) parade by, with bathing beauties (including Miss Montgomery International Raceway) perched atop them. These beautiful cars and women serve as compelling icons of the wealth and beauty that characterize the American Dream. (Even Gaston later depicts success in terms of cars: “the fellow who drives an automobile, he is somebody,” he declares, adding, as proof of America’s greatness, that his gardener drives to work in a Cadillac.) The camera is positioned so that the women are waving at both the raceway audience and the film audience, implicating the viewer in our culture’s typical emphasis on material over spiritual values (see figure 7.6). By contrast, the marching bands in the same sequence are shown from a variety of perspectives. The American Dream, as presented at the racetrack, is a dream that the children in the band, because of their handicap, can never attain. They are situated in the center of the track, surrounded by—that is, inside, yet outside—the dream. The only race cars we see them drive are those in video games, as shown at one point in Adjustment and Work, or by servicing the vending machines along life’s highway, as one man with failing vision hopes to do. The band proceeds to play “America the Beautiful” and “Gonna Fly Now,” the theme from Rocky (John Avildsen, 1976). But the tune teeters off-key, then finally collapses—a telling failure. As “the cosmopolitan” so appropriately asks in The Confidence-Man: “What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love?”34 The Deaf and Blind films remind us that we

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FIGURE 7.6  Blind:

Miss Coors seems to wave to the camera and the viewer.

need others to help us achieve selfhood, just as Martin Buber (specifically referred to by Robert in Essene) claims, “The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. . . . I require a You to become; becoming I, I say you.”35 Brother David expresses a similar view at the beginning of that film when he says that you are “endeared” to someone you watch “becoming,” because you are “becoming” at the same time. In these films, Wiseman forces us to attend to, to endear ourselves to, people becoming. In Essene, the vocationer Bill draws attention to a poster on the wall in Father Anthony’s office showing a naked man crouched in a corner with the caption, “Because you are afraid to love, I am alone.” Without love, these films say, we are all isolated and vulnerable, handicapped. One of the most moving sequences anywhere in these films occurs in Blind, when blind children pretend to walk on a tightrope, keeping their balance with heart-shaped objects the teacher calls their “magic heart.” “Don’t forget to hold your heart up,” the teacher reminds the children as they pretend to walk the tightrope between dependency and selfsufficiency. If they succeed, they “walk way above the crowd”; with the

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encouragement and charity of others, they may attain the heights of personal achievement. If it is true that in our daily lives, as Emerson says, “we never touch but at points,”36 Wiseman attempts in these films to bring us closer together through an empathetic, transcendent experience. It is perhaps only through such experience that we become “balanced,” restoring the footing lost at the end of Primate. For Bill Nichols, Wiseman’s early films are primarily sociological in focus, if not voyeuristic, but “his later films—especially La danse (2009), Boxing Gym (2010), National Gallery (2014), and In Jackson Heights (2015)—radiate a profound respect, appreciation, and even love for their subjects.”37 Essene, the Deaf and Blind films, and Near Death, the subject of the next chapter, are the pivotal films in this change.

8 LOVE AND DEATH Near Death (1989)

N

ear Death (1989) and Central Park (1990) were broadcast on PBS within a few months of each other. Central Park was shot in 1988 and released in 1990, with Near Death, one of Wiseman’s greatest achievements, released in between. Central Park examines how that rectangle of public green space in the middle of Manhattan, while apparently natural, is in actuality carefully designed, groomed, and otherwise maintained like any other part of the city. As a member of the park board says during a meeting, the park is “man-made and man-tended.” The park’s illusion of natural space is expressed by Wiseman’s parody of Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970) within the film (“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”), complete with an awful Jimi Hendrix imitator trying to pick the strings of his guitar with his teeth. The labyrinth of roads and walkways periodically shown winding through the park, almost never empty of traffic, testifies to the incursions of culture upon nature. Early in the film, we are shown what is, in effect, a cutaway view of masonry work being done within a pedestrian tunnel, while above all seems natural. The park, then, is shown to be simply one more social institution Wiseman has turned his camera upon. Like Canal Zone, Primate, Racetrack, and Zoo, Central Park shows culture’s dominion over nature. This is also one of the themes of Near Death, which gathers together many of the concerns examined in his previous films. Shot in the intensive care unit of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, the

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concerns of Near Death are, in fact, similar to those of Central Park in the sense that it reveals the extent to which, as Arthur Kleinman puts it, “Death is no longer regarded as a natural event.”1 Near Death combines the humanist ethic of Essene and the Deaf and Blind series with the institutional and technological structures that, as seen in so many of the earlier documentaries, threaten it. In doing so, it marks a dramatic turning point in Wiseman’s sensibility. As preeminent documentary film theorist Bill Nichols observes, in fiction films, “death is imitated; it is presented as fact but not in fact.”2 Fiction films cannot show actual death and dying, but documentary images, however they might be manipulated subsequently, can and do show real death because of their “indexical bond,” their origin in our world.3 The sight of actual death or dying, when it appears in the documentary film, is always sobering and in a way that fiction films, however naturalistic, can never be.4 Thus, scenes of actual death in, for example, Las hurdes and The Spanish Earth (Joris Ivens, 1937) are unforgettable. Some documentaries are notable for their focus on the process of dying and its medical management, such as Dying at Grace (2003) and On the Bridge (1992), in which fiction filmmaker Frank Perry documented his own unsuccessful battle with cancer, and films about AIDS victims such as Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993). But certainly, the most penetrating is Frederick Wiseman’s monumental 1989 film Near Death. If Wiseman’s previous films have documented “a natural history of the way we live,” in Near Death, he examines aspects of the way we die. Actually, death and mortality have come up before in Wiseman’s films, from the images of Malinowski’s fate in Titicut Follies (echoed in Near Death by the lengthy closeup of the intubated face of one of the patients, Mr. Gavin), to the somber, startling invocation of Vietnam in Basic Training to the suddenly flaccid carcasses and useless eyes of the animals in Meat to the grisly business of Missile. (Indeed, many writers connect the modern avoidance and technologizing of death as a reaction to the threat of an impersonal, meaningless extinction made possible by our ability to wage nuclear war.) Many of the films include shots of cemeteries and gravestones, often near the end. As discussed in chapters 9 and 11, images of death appear periodically in the later cycle of films on different communities, and ambulances frequently appear in the transitional montages in them. Here, though, in Near Death, Wiseman confronts death

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squarely for the first time. Like such monumental documentaries as Our Hitler (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1977), Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), and Wiseman’s own Deaf and Blind, Near Death is “less a viewing experience than a total immersion”5—a tactic for once again increasing viewer empathy and one to which Wiseman would return in his later films on local government. In the course of its gripping six-hour running time, we become familiar with the patients, their families, and the medical staff, the multiple perspectives steeping us in medical and ethical dilemmas. Throughout the film, death is foregrounded, neither romanticized nor avoided. “This is you. It’s sad and it’s frustrating and it’s anger-provoking, but your lungs are about as bad as they can get,” a nurse bluntly tells a patient early on. Alas, death is as omnipresent for the viewer as it is for those whom Wiseman’s camera records. The film focuses on four specific patients—John Gavin, Bernice Factor, Manuel Cabra, and Charles Sperazza—whose different cases provide applied variations of the ethical issues involved in decisions concerning life-support treatment. The four cases are presented sequentially, each taking about an hour of screen time. There is the occasional overlap, as when Mrs. Factor’s situation is briefly discussed within the section devoted to the case of Mr. Cabra. Preceding them is an overture sequence of approximately the same length that establishes the routine activities of the medical intensive care unit (MICU), introduces the inevitably knotty ethical issues subsequently explored in more detail, and emphasizes the looming presence of death. Within each of these four case studies, Wiseman alternates between sequences featuring the patient (either with medical staff or family members) and sequences featuring the medical staff discussing the patient among themselves. Twice sections are divided by brief sequences showing parts of regular nurses’ ethics meetings in which discussions of theoretical moral questions highlight or contradict what the medical staff actually does. Each case is punctuated by brief montages of exterior shots (periodically reprising the last shot of Hospital) that alternate between night and day. On the simplest level, these provide an awareness of passing time—such awareness, of course, being crucial to a work dealing with the stark fact of mortality and the crucial timing of any interventions. Dr. Weiss tells Mrs. Factor, “You’ve got as much time as you want”—but even in the best of circumstances, this is hardly the case. Indeed, several

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FIGURE 8.1  Near

Death: Clocks are often visible in the hospital, a reminder of our mor-

tality.

shots of medical personnel talking in the film are framed so that clocks can be seen on the wall behind them, sometimes in full view over their heads, at other times lurking in the borders of the frame—time’s winged chariot, as it were, is always at our backs (see figure 8.1). John Gavin, the first case shown in detail, is suffering from terminal heart disease with end-stage cardiomyopathy (an enlarged heart) and other complications. Dr. Weiss’s bleak prognosis is that, at best, “we will probably be able to drag it on for a couple of weeks probably.” Gavin’s case foregrounds the ethical dilemmas of maintaining life support when meaningful recovery is unlikely and the problem of defining what meaningful recovery is. As we learn, his case is “ironic” because some of the drugs he is receiving have the effect of counteracting others. Dr. Weiss agrees that the man’s condition would be the same without any of the treatment he has had, and his preference would be to stop further therapy and give him morphine to make him “comfortable.” (The significance of this term is discussed below.) The issue of informed consent is also raised by the question of Gavin’s mental competence. Dr. Weiss questions

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whether Gavin should be involved in decisions regarding his treatment since the high dosage of his medications may be clouding his judgment. To the surprise of all the medical staff, however, Gavin rallies and is able to be moved out of the ICU to a regular ward, trundled away in a wheelchair with his belongings stacked on his lap. The second patient, Bernice Factor, has suffered a stroke with complications of pneumonia, and her prognosis is clearly poor. She has been intubated five times in the last six months, and this time she has been on the ventilator for two weeks. For Dr. Weiss, the goal of her treatment is the inevitable “comfort,” and he reaches the conclusion that he will have to confront Dr. Kurland, who disagrees on the matter. Both doctors later discuss Mrs. Factor, but they interpret her responses differently according to their own opinions: Dr. Weiss thinks she has agreed not to be reintubated, while Dr. Kurland is not convinced. As Dr. Weiss says when discussing the meaning of informed choice, “the problem is that, you know, it’s always ‘informed’ in quotes.” But by the time we are near the conclusion of this section of the film, Mrs. Factor seems to have decided to be given a tracheostomy (the implantation of a permanent tube in the throat) if necessary, even if “it would mean an institutional existence in a nursing home or a hospital” for the rest of her life. Like John Gavin, Mrs. Factor eventually comes to agree with the decision of the medical staff. Manuel Cabra’s case receives the shortest screen time of the four cases chronicled, but it is perhaps the most powerful nevertheless. In one scene where Cabra is being examined, Wiseman holds on his face for several seconds in silence, allowing time for spectatorial empathy to engage. But with each scene, Cabra seems to deteriorate further. The man is dying of lung and heart failure and has been on the ventilator for three weeks, a relatively long time. He is the youngest of the patients shown in the film— only thirty-three (“he’s a young man and he’s otherwise quite healthy,” as Dr. Taylor says), with a wife and three children, whose “heart-breaking” letters to “Dear Daddy” adorn the hospital room. Cabra was first seen for a genital infection that became cancerous, and although it was a “highly curable” form of cancer, he developed pulmonary fibrosis as a rare reaction to his chemotherapy and antibiotics. Dr. Weiss refers to his illness as “the Andromeda Strain” and muses, “What a horrible way to die.” Because Cabra’s outlook seems so “hopeless,” his chances of survival are “maybe one in a million.” The question in his case is not whether but

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when to terminate life support and how to broach it with his wife. The doctors are in agreement that Mrs. Cabra understands what is happening, but it is not at all clear that she comprehends what Dr. Schulman means when he says that there is not much they can do other than to keep him “comfortable.” She confesses to Dr. Taylor that she could not bring herself to make the decision to withdraw life support, although subsequently, we find out that she has agreed that there should be no CPR or shock if he were to experience cardiac arrest. Only a week and a half (but within a few minutes of screen time) later, Mrs. Cabra, initially opposed to withdrawing further measures, has come to agree to “comfort measures only.” The moment of Cabra’s death is not shown; we merely hear about it, as if in passing, during one of the rounds discussions when a doctor says, “By the way, Mr. Cabra died yesterday about 5 p.m.” The seemingly casual, understated manner in which he reports the news of a death that earlier was said to be of “tragic” proportions is likely to shock us. Yet a greater shock follows as we next witness some of the mundane considerations that necessarily follow death. Cabra’s body is wheeled down the freight elevator and along a hallway to the morgue, his few personal effects stacked on his chest. In the morgue, prosaic instructions are posted on signs: “Place body feet first” and “Use middle compartment when available.” Thankfully, we do not see the autopsy itself, but the postautopsy examination forcefully exacerbates our inevitably conflicted reaction—a reaction that mirrors the double bind of the staff. Some of Cabra’s internal organs are arranged neatly on a metal tray like an artful collage (see figure 8.2). (The reference to images in the earlier Meat is unavoidable. Similar images appear in Zoo in the scene in which the stillborn rhino calf is dissected.) Of course, the physicians have to examine the fibrotic condition of the patient’s lungs in the hope of being able to find the cause and prevent it from happening to others, but the moment has an unavoidably ghoulish quality as hands reach in from all sides of the frame to touch the strangely hardened organs like one of the grislier scenes from Night of the Living Dead (1968). The discrepancy between this simple sum of bodily parts and the person to whom they once belonged cannot help but strike viewers. The first image of Charles Sperazza, the fourth case Wiseman presents, shows him supine in readiness for emergency treatment, inevitably recalling the opening of Hospital. No fewer than fourteen caregivers mill around

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FIGURE 8.2  Near Death: A deceased patient’s organs are displayed for medical examination.

the patient, working frantically to revive him. The man’s heart and lungs have failed, and while his heart function has been resuscitated, he has not been able to be weaned off the ventilator. He still has a blocked heart valve and aortic stenosis (narrowing of the aorta), and his kidneys are also in the process of failing. Further, since he had been without oxygen for a while, Dr. Weiss seems certain that Sperazza has lost some brain function (“I don’t think he’s got everything there”), although later, Dr. Taylor says the brain scan showed no abnormalities. Then Sperazza surprises everyone when he is able to breathe without the ventilator, although Dr. Weiss still does not give him more than six months to live. Dr. Taylor’s talks with Mrs. Sperazza are likely to seem ambiguous, given the discussions about the nature of informed consent earlier in the film. The immediate question concerns whether to do a valvuloplasty for a blocked heart valve when the patient is already in serious difficulty, and there may be no hope for meaningful recovery anyway. Now awake, Sperazza is informed that on this day, he will finally be taken off the ventilator. After extubation, his wife at his bedside, we hear his raspy but regular

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breathing, and he seems to be doing better than anyone had expected. From this point on, Sperazza’s condition seems, happily, to progressively improve. Having survived one close shave, he sits up and is shaved and combed by a nurse. His eyes, taped shut earlier, now flare wide open for the first time as he glares ferociously at the nurse because of her obviously rough manner of shaving. The moment recalls the rough shaving of one of the patients in Titicut Follies, of animals in Meat and Primate, and of the recruits in Basic Training—all images of forceful institutional processing in Wiseman’s work. After the shaving scene, we never see Mr. Sperazza again, except briefly in the coda when he is being taken out of the MICU, but in the final credits, we learn that he died a week later. At the beginning of the film, we are shown a scene of CPR in progress, the patient failing to respond and another patient, Mrs. Weiner, expiring. “Okay, she’s dead. 7:53,” the nurse announces in a matter-of-fact tone, seeming simultaneously professional and indifferent. After a nurse explains that one patient’s family wants to be called only if the father dies, Wiseman follows with one of his typical transitional shots, a janitor mopping a floor. But dealing with death is seldom so tidy, especially, as Near Death goes on to show, given the technological capacity to prolong life that is central to modern medical treatment. The body remains stubbornly, palpably present. When Mr. Cabra’s body is taken to the morgue, it requires the effort of four people—one of the nurses wipes her brow from the strain—to put him in a morgue drawer. When does “he” become “the cadaver”? one is encouraged to ask, forcing the viewer to contemplate the meaning of death. One recalls the scene toward the end of Hospital in which a woman has suffered a severe heart attack. The attending physician attempts to get the woman’s medical history from her daughter, who responds with confusion and suspicion, delaying emergency treatment. Perhaps she is simply in shock at the possible loss of her mother, but because she does not cope well with her mother’s imminent death, she hinders rather than helps the medical staff in their efforts. Similarly, one of the doctors remarks at the beginning of Near Death, presumably to a patient’s spouse but of course to the film’s audience as well, “I know this is a very difficult topic for you.” Indeed, Mr. Gavin’s wife wants to avoid discussing the likely possibility of her husband’s death because, as she says, “It’s a touchy subject.” Later, another doctor observes (commenting as much on the rationale

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for the film’s structure as on his own situation) that if people fail to hear what’s being said to them the first time because it is so frightening, then they have to be told over and over, honestly, so that eventually they will understand. It is only after several lengthy discussions about the fate of her husband and the choices she must make that Mrs. Sperazza asks what the respirator actually does. Dr. Taylor, with impressive patience, repeats the explanation yet again. Once more, we are reminded of the ending of Hospital, a sequence of such crucial importance in Wiseman’s cinema. If we avoid confronting death, Wiseman wants to shed light on its dark dominion. According to him, “Ordinary people don’t have enough information to deal with the choices that high-tech medicine presents.  .  .  . Yet more than half of us will die in a hospital. So, in a sense, Near Death could be regarded as a rehearsal.”6 Certainly, the high cost of dying is a central part of American life, begging for such scrutiny. According to Dr. Weiss in Near Death, a full two-thirds of one’s entire healthcare costs in the United States are incurred during the final twenty-one days of life. Yet, as several writers on death and dying have noted, the subject is a difficult one to address because of its taboo nature.7 Hence, Near Death may be, to return to Bill Nichols’s description of Wiseman’s work, his most “tactless” work. The film’s structure expresses several tensions—between interior and exterior, day and night, staff and patients—embodying, on a formal level, a double focus that further reflects the ambivalence, identified explicitly by Dr. Weiss as a split between intellectual and emotional response. This split is further thematized in the film as a tension between technology and humanity. In this sense, Near Death clearly builds upon Wiseman’s previous work. The intensive care unit, with its battery of machines, is yet another impersonal institution (frequent shots of computer screens monitoring vital functions suggest this view) that moves its clients through a process, the outcome almost entirely predetermined. The distinctive, periodic exterior shots of the hospital and of local traffic, as well as Dr. Weiss’ discussion of the hospital budget and state health care legislation, serve to establish the hospital ward as another cultural spoor (death, in Avery D. Weisman’s words, is “an extended personification of the suffering we have endured”8). And, as in so many of the other films, the merit of the process is called into question. As Dr. Weiss puts it: “More technology for unclear benefit.”

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Beth Israel’s ICU is one of the most technologically sophisticated hospital units in the country.9 Wiseman emphasizes the overwhelming presence of this technology in several montages of the equipment at work. As explained in one of the ethics meetings shown in the film, this technology is used largely to maintain life support in order to give families time to accept the likely possibility of death. The very first comment in the film by a doctor concerns instructions to change a patient’s respiratory “settings” so that it “doesn’t look like he’s breathing so hard” because it is disconcerting to the family. In several cases, the technological interventions (“these powerful medications that can only be given here in the Intensive Care Unit”) are said to do little more than prolong the inevitable. “It’s like a peashooter against an atomic blast,” is Dr. Weiss’s vivid metaphor. Dr. Schulman’s comment to Mrs. Cabra about her husband, “There may be very little that we can do,” echoes the refrain of the police in Law and Order. But this sophisticated technology creates ethical problems by, in effect, confusing the boundary between life and death (like the boundary between nature and culture in Central Park). Dr. Weiss, grasping for words, explains that moral dilemmas result because there is no longer a satisfactory definition for “terminally ill.” In one of the ethics meetings, a nurse identifies the difficulty wrought by the increased sophistication of medical care. Because technology now can keep a patient’s heart beating, even though that person is technically dead (“dead but alive”), the consequence is confusion for the family. The alternatives of, as one doctor puts it, “life in an institution with a tube in your throat on a machine” or dying tomorrow inevitably raises the question posed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and others as to whether medicine is to be a humanitarian profession that reduces suffering or an impersonal science for prolonging life.10 A short montage early in the film inside patients’ rooms in the MICU features a series of closeups showing details of the various machines used in the unit—the ventilators, computers, and IVs that provide continual monitoring and life support for the critically and terminally ill patients there. The first of many such images of monitoring machines, computer screens, tubes, and IVs, it is accompanied on the soundtrack by bits of easy-listening instrumental versions of Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” and the theme from The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973), presumably carried over the unit’s sound system, the lyrics of the latter

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about the past taking on extra significance in the context of people who likely have no future. The counterpoint between the soft arrangements of these romantic tunes we hear and the cold, clean technological devices we see creates a disjunction between the sound and image tracks that express the confluence of love and death and the sad irony that life carries on even in the face of death. Opposing the cold comfort of the machinery and the resultant ethical complexity is simple and direct human contact—what Kübler-Ross calls empathy.11 As far as the film shows, the primary function and concern of the doctors is giving comfort. They constantly speak of “making people comfortable” and “maximizing comfort.” This extends even to the physicians and nurses themselves, who, as Dr. Weiss puts it, must “feel comfortable” with their choices. In fact, we see the doctors involved in virtually no medical procedures at all in the film. Rather, they are more like counselors, gradually moving patients and their families toward the acceptance of death and serving as a sounding board for grief and pain. Mrs. Sperazza says that Dr. Taylor is “not only the doctor, he’s my friend.” Perhaps much of the actual medical treatment was omitted from the film because we have seen this already in Hospital, but its relative absence suggests that despite sophisticated technology, it is human contact that is of paramount importance (“I’m a human being, not a computer,” asserts one nurse). Throughout the film, there are shots of hands touching people, as in the Deaf and Blind films. Doctors, patients, and relatives frequently touch each other as they talk. Dr. Schulman touches Mrs. Cabra’s hand when she cries, and as the Cabra family goes off together to consider their choices, their arms are entwined in mutual support. When a nurse discusses with Mrs. Sperazza the condition of her husband, she touches the distraught woman’s leg; her friend, seated on her other side, also touches her (reminiscent of some shots of prayer and contact in Essene). Sperazza himself is asked at different times by a nurse, his wife, and his son to respond with a squeeze of the hand, while Mrs. Factor is so weak that she cannot talk but can communicate only through feeble hand gestures. One of the most genuinely moving moments in all of Wiseman’s cinema is the shot of Dr. Factor gently stroking and kissing his wife’s hand as he intones “more healing time” over and over again. Throughout the film, then, touching becomes the physical emblem of the fact that,

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as one patient says, “we need each other to survive,” whether it be the difficulties of life or its end. Wiseman underscores the importance of these gestures of contact in several ways. Sometimes images are carefully composed so that they are positioned in the middle of the frame, clearly the center of visual attention. This is the case when, after a lengthy and frank discussion with another patient, Mr. Torres, about the state of his lungs, Nurse Burke signals her move to leave by touching his hand. Wiseman also uses editing to emphasize these gestures. For example, he moves to a closeup of Mrs. Sperazza holding her husband’s hand (“Here I am, honey”) when she tries to soothe him and again when Dr. Taylor does the same to comfort her. When Dr. Taylor speaks with Mr. Gavin’s family, the camera refocuses from Mrs. Gavin in the left foreground of the frame to her husband in bed in the right background and back to her again, underscoring their bond and the shared responsibility of their decision. The importance of human contact is further emphasized in the film by the expression of its opposite, isolation. When a nurse says that Mrs. Weiner cannot hear anything, the camera reverse zooms, moving away from the patient to show the terrible distance between people (as it does again later when a nurse speaks with Bernice Factor). When Gavin’s doctor departs, the camera zooms in to a brief, tight closeup of the dying man’s face; despite the solicitude of others, he, like everyone, inevitably must face his own mortality himself. At one point, Mr. Torres also realizes this, telling a nurse, “This isn’t your body.” When Dr. Taylor seeks to solicit Mr. Gavin’s own view of his situation (“Could you share with me your thoughts?” he asks), the two men are divided diagonally within the frame by the bed rail. This works as a graphic representation of Gavin’s understanding: “I’m on a borderline. I could pass away or I could survive.” Elsewhere, two doctors use similar metaphors, referring to patients “walking a tightrope” and being “on the edge.” At one point, Gavin is framed so that he is partially obscured by a drawn curtain, another image of his “borderline” status. Similarly, when Dr. Kurland talks to Mrs. Factor— apparently, this is the first frank discussion anyone has had with her about the likely possibility of her death—his hand rests on the bed rail in the center of the frame. The touches of the doctors and families, who are, of course, powerless to prevent death, are capable of making death easier to cope with by providing a reassuring anchor to the world of the living (see figure 8.3).

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FIGURE 8.3  Near

Death: Touch transcends the barriers of our common isolation.

Of course, the bed rail motif represents not only the borderline between life and death but also the barriers that separate people. On one level, this barrier is the very technology employed in the service of prolonging life—an irony suggested, for example, by the image of Torres’s face under an oxygen mask, his voice muffled by it. But it is also the psychological barrier of avoidance, of people not wanting to deal with the impending death of a loved one, as Mrs. Sperazza says of her son. Several times, Dr. Taylor refers to the failure of families to talk openly and frankly as “a barrier”—the identical word used by thanatologist Avery Weisman in the same context.12 Bernice Factor is “disgusted and frustrated” because neither the medical staff nor her husband has as yet spoken openly with her. Her husband, although identified as a doctor of some kind, refuses to acknowledge her likely death; he is described as being uncooperative with the medical staff and not “free-flowing with his feelings.” Another patient’s death is said to be unfortunate because of the “unresolved issues” still hanging between the members of the family. These barriers are precisely imaged by the shot of Mr. Cabra, his mouth taped closed, family

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members on either side of his bed behind the handrail; people may be in physical proximity but not necessarily close. When it is remarked during one of the nurses’ ethics meetings that nobody is comfortable with the decision to terminate treatment, several voices speak at once, the babble confirming the truth of the statement. The striking shot of a large window reflecting a brilliant white with an immobile elderly person on either side can be read as either a gentle Lubitsch-like image of death or a horrifying Melvillian notion of “dumb blankness” that bespeaks death’s emptiness.13 During one of the rounds discussions, as the staff considers whether intensive care treatment would have mattered in Gavin’s case, the camera roams around the group as if, like everyone involved, seeking a proper perspective. Wiseman himself has quipped, “I’m against death, but I don’t know any remedy for it.”14 The joke, like much of the humor in his other films, is, in part, a defense against the unpleasant reality his camera records. But in the film itself, Wiseman noticeably restrains his own sense of humor. Instead, he leaves its therapeutic power to those he films, like Mrs. Sperazza, who consoles her husband by reminding him that he wants to lose weight anyway. Wiseman in Near Death maintains “a gentle neutrality of quiet dignity, seeking to learn, to understand, to participate.”15 This perspective dominates in the later films about communities. Interestingly, this reticent, even respectful, tone, in this case, complicates the viewer’s reactions to the film. This, in addition to its subject, make Near Death as challenging a viewing experience as any of Wiseman’s other documentaries. The viewer is presented with the same emotional/ intellectual split as the people involved—much like the conflicted experience offered by Primate. Doctors and nurses acknowledge that there is a transference of anger against the abstract implacability of human mortality to the more concrete target of the medical staff. A nurse explains that, in one case, a family viewed her as having killed their mother since “I was the most visible person.” “Who else is there to be angry at?” asks Dr. Weiss elsewhere. “It’s a lot healthier to be angry at the doctors.” The film is structured so that, at first, the medical staff is likely to strike the viewer as callous. The rough shaving of Sperazza by a nurse—his eyes suddenly, and for the first time in the film, open wide in an angry glare when his face is cut—recalls, as mentioned above, the treatment of Jim in Titicut Follies. But such powerful images of staff mistreatment in Near

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Death are rare; rather, it is the language of the staff that frequently seems to betray an indifference toward the fate of patients. At the very beginning of the film, Wiseman encourages an initial antipathy toward the doctors and nurses by showing a doctor remarking that a patient “may not fly” when extubated, as if the patient were merely a machine. Later, Dr. Weiss wonders if Dr. Factor should “call it a day” and agree not to reintubate his wife; another choice is “whether to get trached or just to bag it.” Like the withdrawal that characterizes the workers in Welfare or the trainees in Missile, the doctors employ euphemisms to describe situations. Attacks are “episodes of pain,” reconsidering the possibility of meaningful survival is “reassessing goals,” and so on. “We shy away from the word ‘experiment’ ’cause it sounds like we’re treating you like a guinea pig,” Gavin is told. Most importantly, the word “death” is virtually never used between medical staff and patients and their families. In one meeting, a nurse is emphatic in her claim that it is better to give families the news directly, though this does not seem to happen in practice. Mrs. Factor is not explicitly told that she will die if she is extubated for a long while, despite the fact that she is characterized as a strong woman, the dominant member of her family. More pointedly, the staff decides that they may have to keep her husband out of the room if he continues to behave in an uncooperative manner and “decide how things are going to be handled in terms of care.” “Well,” Dr. Weiss remarks with apparent flippancy, “you know what Freud said, neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.” Because of such comments and behavior, the staff seems somewhat dishonest, if not devious, in its indirect strategy of coaxing patients and families against sustained dependence on the respirator. According to Kleinman, one of the distinctive features of Beth Israel’s ICU ward is the physician’s emphasis on bringing patients and families into the “decision-making process.”16 Dr. Weiss explains in the film, “Everything here is sort of built on the Quaker concept of consensus,” but he adds that difficulty arises when “one of those elements is out of sync.” Doctors continually ask patients and families whether they would want to go back on the machine if it becomes necessary, and while it is commendable that the doctors seek such ongoing consultation, it sometimes appears as if they are badgering people into submission. For example, the fact that Mrs. Cabra’s personal physician gets her to agree to withhold CPR should her husband’s heart fail again is assessed as “some small victory.” In a sense, the choice these patients and

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families are offered is merely “the guise of real choice,”17 little more than a kinder and gentler version of the double-bind confronting the students in High School. One wants to protest that these doctors—“endowed with magic and mystery”18—are abusing their positions. Patients are pushed through the process as inexorably as Robert Singleton in Juvenile Court. As the film goes on, however, the spectator’s initial response is inevitably modified, as various members of the hospital staff genuinely wrestle with the ethical questions involved. These lengthy discussions can themselves be understood as a method of avoidance or coping19—the latter likely to make one feel more sympathetic toward them. We see that they are only human, after all, placed in an extremely difficult position. Certainly, they seem quite aware of their professional personas and the consequent crucial influence they have in the decision-making process. Also, the more we see, the more likely we are to think, as Weisman asserts, that to insist upon full disclosure is “as dogmatic and inexcusable” as avoiding discussion.20 The constant talk by doctors in the film, their refusal to express hopelessness to families even when they admit it privately, is explicitly said by Kübler-Ross to be of great support at a time when people feel particularly helpless.21 So Dr. Taylor comes to seem the embodiment of patience, particularly when he gently repeats basic information about the respirator to Mrs. Sperazza or tactfully waits until Mrs. Gavin is ready to identify the inevitable decision she must make. Dr. Weiss observes that there are few situations in life that require a more careful rhetoric; the initial humorous impression he creates because of his manic logorrhea is inevitably modified. Perhaps his annoying habit of almost never finishing a sentence before he begins another is his way of coping with the emotional strain of working in intensive care? (“Well, you know I mean I am quite nihilistic about you know what you what actually happens,” he stammers at one point.) In short, the film encourages the viewer to oscillate between conflicting views of Dr. Weiss and, by extension, of the entire medical staff, much the same way we look at Hickman in Basic Training. Similarly, in each case, the doctor is shown to embody the paradox of being both “a healer and someone equally baffled by inexorable death.”22 So, patients and doctors alike resort to faith rather than science as a response to death’s unfathomable finality. Dr. Weiss himself clings to hope; at one point, he asserts that they should extubate a patient, “Leave it in God’s hands, and see what happens.” Mrs. Gavin and Mrs. Sperazza

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(“I don’t know what else to do, just hope and say a prayer for him,” admits the former) also submit to fate. The doctor depicts life as an inscrutable Shakespearean scenario in which the medical team is destined to play only bit roles: “She was called, and we’re minor actors.” Doctors, too, we learn, suffer from a sickness unto death; our response to them is softened, as toward the police in Law and Order. Finally, the film raises several crucial questions. What constitutes an appropriate death? When should technological intervention cease? Is euthanasia morally justifiable? With whom does responsibility for such decisions rest? These are crucial, consuming questions for the staff, patients, families, and viewers. Of course, the issues surrounding the quality of death really concern the quality of life—what Weisman calls “the practical significance of mortality.” He declares: “If we can discover more significant and more acceptable ways of facing death, then perhaps we will also find a method of accentuating the values and goals of life.”23 A shot of a nurse’s image reflected in the window over the Boston cityscape suggests the importance for living of how we deal with death. The life-affirming implications of thanatology are asserted by the film’s opening shots of scullers and the final shot of sailboats on the Charles River, the bright cityscape connoting vibrant and teeming life. Dr. Weiss is fully aware of the limits of his work (“If you wanted to give people quality of life, you could like be a furniture salesman or something—it’s easy to fix things that are fixable”), but he perseveres at what he terms a Sisyphean task anyway since sometimes patients do recover. Wiseman periodically inserts into the film brief shots of Dr. Factor sitting, keeping silent vigil over his wife. Our sympathy is evoked for this man who cannot accept the death that everyone else agrees is inevitable. Yet, in a title at the end of the film, we learn that Mrs. Factor survived and was living at home with her husband. As Susan Sontag has written, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all the photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”24 Near Death is no exception. Yet, in the film, life inevitably shines through the paraphernalia of death (humorously, in the form of the nurse who comically sneezes, wipes her hand on her lab coat, and then scratches her armpit during one of the rounds discussions). The difficulty of making

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an informed decision about whether to withdraw life support but being required to do so is emblematic of Wiseman’s approach to documentary. The ethical questions raised by filming actual people and situations, transforming them into aesthetic objects,25 are surely answered by Wiseman’s method. The film’s cinematographic content is a symbolic challenge to death. Since it is the patients and their families who command attention, not the technology that surrounds them, certainly Wiseman’s film is itself a testament to their affirmation of life that will remain long after they have shuffled off their mortal coils. It is for this reason that, as Jay Neugeboren observes, “although Near Death is a movie in which death is omnipresent and hope rarely rewarded, it is an antidote to the two other Wiseman films set in hospitals.”26

9 THE NEVER-ENDING STORY High School II (1994) • Public Housing (1997) • Domestic Violence (2001) • Domestic Violence 2 (2002)

M

ore than two decades after his first remarkable cycle of films, from Titicut Follies in 1967 to Welfare in 1975, Wiseman made High School II, the title explicitly referring back to High School, released in 1968. This second film about high school, though, is just one of four films—along with Public Housing and the two Domestic Violence films—that Wiseman made within a span of eight years, which, along with Belfast, Maine (as discussed in the final chapter), seem simultaneously to look back to the filmmaker’s earlier films even as they look forward to those to come. The other three films discussed in this chapter similarly invoke the earlier films. Public Housing, with its overarching theme of a crushing and ineffectual bureaucracy, recalls Welfare, and Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence 2 bring to mind aspects of Law and Order and Juvenile Court, respectively. In Public Housing, the director of the Child Family Preservation Center speaks to a group of women about “the very sad cycle” of family neglect and abuse, and in High School II, a teacher finds “the whole cycle of life” with her students in a discussion of King Lear. These four films, too, are a cycle, one more in Wiseman’s career. Together, they show some of the continuing social problems depicted in the earlier films even as their style is different, moving toward a sense of community that becomes central in the last group of films discussed in this book.

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High School II, chronologically the first of these four films, was shot in the spring of 1992 at Central Park East Secondary School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in Spanish Harlem and released two years later, in 1994. Apart from Near Death, which marked his return to a hospital, High School II is the only other time in Wiseman’s career that he revisited a different instance of the same institution. (Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence 2, as discussed below, are focused on different aspects of the same problem and so shot in different places—a shelter and the courtroom, respectively; and the Deaf and Blind films were made as a group at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind in Talladega.) Where High School looks at a predominantly white suburban school, the student body of the inner-city Central Park East is racially more diverse, with white students in the minority.1 The inequities between these two kinds of schools are addressed explicitly during a staff meeting in High School II about Central Park East’s difficulty in competing with “kids from private schools and suburban schools.” Nevertheless, High School II draws many parallels between the world of high school then and now, even as it underscores the differences. As Stuart Klawans puts it, the latter film is “an optimistic counterpart to the sardonic, Vietnam-era High School.”2 Emphasizing an individually customized approach to education, Central Park East is an alternative school that has had considerable success, with a high percentage of its graduates going on to college. In the film, a variety of subjects are shown being taught, and, unlike the earlier film, High School II contains several scenes of students talking among themselves, allowing them to have a voice as the school strives to develop their abilities as independent thinkers. (No “thought for the day” here.) The first words we hear from a teacher in the film is an invitation to a student researching politics to speak “from your perspective”—which happens to be socialist. Soon afterward, the teacher Richard similarly asks a boy who is feeling racial animosity what the difference would be if his teachers were Black instead of white, “from your point of view.” And when the boy’s mother interjects her concerns, the school’s codirector, Paul, is quick to defend the student’s feeling as “real.” The contrast to the squelching of individual expression in High School is striking. Even the students who might say, “basically fuck you . . . I’m going to do it my own way,” as one teacher puts it during a staff meeting, “should be supported and strengthened.”

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In High School, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is limited to one discussion group. While Wiseman was filming High School II, the trial of the four white Los Angeles policemen accused of assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force in the beating of a Black man, Rodney King, a year earlier, concluded with an acquittal, despite the apparently incontrovertible evidence of a videotape showing the beating. (A subsequent federal prosecution resulted in the conviction of two of the officers.) Anger at the verdict erupted into widespread violence in South Central Los Angeles, and the ensuing tensions, which rippled across the country, surface throughout High School II. The students meet to discuss strategies for peaceful protests, aware of reinforcing racial stereotypes through violence. A visiting choir of white students from Michigan, who seem to have dropped in from another world, has to be put at ease and students reminded by their peers that “they’re not our enemies.” The opening lesson shown in the film, involving wealth inequity, invokes Michael Harrington’s The Other America, touched on only in passing in High School but discussed here (and foregrounded in Public Housing) as the student seeks to apply socialist theory to the situation around King’s beating and see it as class conflict rather than race. There are many such telling contrasts between the two High School films. For example, the exterior shots that open High School II show a door painted, obviously by some of the students, with bright colors—a marked contrast to the factory-like building the camera approaches in High School. Talking to the student Lev about his mean practical joke on another student, Paul asks, “Now when you say playing around, what does that mean to you, Lev?” Their meeting inevitably recalls the scene with Rona and her mother in High School where the teacher tries to pin down what the girl means by “messing around” in the classroom. In another scene in High School II, the teacher, Shirley, acting as guidance counselor, advises a student named Tyrell and his mother about his college plans, recalling the similar scene in the earlier film where the counselor coldly distinguishes a student’s “dream schools” from “some college of last resort,” but Shirley is much more constructive in her planning advice. “It’s his decision and I’ll respect it,” his mother says. And, of course, the scene of condom education—so humorous in its clinical detachment that it cannot go unmentioned—contrasts notably with what passes for sex education in High School. In the earlier film, students are advised to refrain

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FIGURE 9.1  High

School II: The teaching staff is accepting of student sexuality.

from sex until marriage, and the lecture is wincingly conservative and repressive. In High School II, teachers receive training in sex education with the goal of making sexual activity safer for teenagers rather than convincing them to abstain (see figure 9.1). The staff articulates their collective goal as, according to director and founder Debbie Meier, “to have various viewpoints, to have arguments, to get kids to do some investigation.” In the classes we see, students are typically encouraged to find answers, gather evidence, and ask questions (another difference from High School, where students have no questions) rather than just to repeat information. One of the teachers says that, apart from their lofty goals of changing the world, one of their immediate aims is “to prepare kids to live in the world”—after which Wiseman cuts to a high-angle exterior shot of the school and the surrounding neighborhood followed by a shot of an intersection with an ambulance speeding by, siren wailing. A siren is heard again toward the end of the film in the meeting between Paul, the student Killis, and his mother. And the street sounds, including another siren, carry over the final credits of the film. The world

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out there is fraught, indeed: it is a world, as we see in the film, of students becoming pregnant, bearing children, being threatened and beaten up by police and peers, going missing, and even being shot. Hence the most striking comparison between the two films may be in their endings. High School ends with that implied question addressed to the viewer (“I think you will agree with me,” the principal says). High School II ends with Debbie explaining the school’s pedagogical philosophy and the goal of empowering students in the real world to a group of visiting teachers. She concludes by asking, “Now, do we succeed? . . . So that’s, that’s the idea that we’re struggling with. How to create a school that’s powerful enough to turn kids on to the possible power of ideas in their lives.” It’s another question to the viewer, but this one couldn’t be further from the model citizen offered by Bob Walters in High School—only a body doing a job. Contrast between the two films also functions at the level of style. The pattern of framing and camera movement in High School II is quite different than that in High School, the difference reflecting the difference in the culture of the two schools and the films’ respective attitudes towards them. In the earlier film, teachers tend to be shown in closeups or medium shots apart from students or their classes, expressing the gap and “lack of communication” between the groups. Some of these shots, as discussed earlier, may be read as exploiting the physical features of the teachers for editorial purposes. In High School II, by contrast, in most of the teaching or counseling scenes, students and teachers are shown together in two-shots or connected at some point by the panning of the camera (see figure 9.2). Students even do peer mediating, with coaching from a teacher, all parties treated equally by the camera as they sit around a table. The scene where the teacher, Shirley, meets with Tyrell and his mother about his college plans relies on two-shots and panning rather than cutting. One might contrast this to the scene shortly after of the staff discussion about grading standards and what should go into a literature essay, which features more cuts and shots of teachers individually. In the class debate about immigration, organized as a competition between two groups representing contrasting policies, the camera pans back and forth between the two sides as the students excitedly speak, eagerly participating in the debate. The following scene, a discussion of racism and the Rodney King situation, is composed as a two-shot that, after a while,

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FIGURE 9.2  High School II: Teachers and students share space, unlike the earlier High School.

zooms to a closeup of a student, pans back and forth three times, and zooms out to the original two-shot position. Stylistically, High School II shows an appreciation of a teaching and learning environment that is less authoritarian and more collaborative than in High School. It is the same perspective that, in the more political context of the films discussed in chapter 11, promotes a sense of democratic egalitarianism. Public Housing was shot at the Ida B. Wells Housing Development in Chicago in the spring of 1996 and released the following year. The development was first built by the Chicago Housing Authority in 1941 on the city’s South Side and named for the Black activist and cofounder of the NAACP who lived there. For many years, the Ida Wells Project was one of the country’s poorest inner-city neighborhoods, and the film documents the area before the subsequent process of gentrification began. In 1994, two preteen youths dropped a five-year-old boy to his death from a fourteenth-floor window at Wells.3 If this housing project is “a relatively successful one,”4 as one reviewer writes, one wonders what the many other public housing developments across the country that Ron Carter says

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he is also involved with are like. Wiseman chose Chicago as the setting for the film because he thought of Chicago as “synonymous with public housing” and Ida Wells specifically because its seventy-five acres included low-, medium-, and high-rise buildings.5 Another Chicago public housing neighborhood, Cabrini-Green, is specifically mentioned in Public Housing by the director of the Child Family Preservation Center in her talk to resident women. In the horror film Candyman (1992), which is set in Cabrini-Green, a Black graduate student at the University of Chicago doing her thesis on urban legends decides to research the legend of Candyman. Her first trip to Cabrini-Green is presented as if she is entering a completely alien world, although it is only eight blocks away, indicating the distance of the privileged academic world from “the other America.” In a later transitional montage in Public Housing, a brief shot of downtown’s Sears Tower visible in the background haze is, as one reviewer put it, “just five miles away and yet impossibly distant.”6 One might argue that these initial transitional images of the neighborhood and its residents seem as if the film is exoticizing them because, for many middle-class white viewers, the living conditions of the people in the Wells community are likely to seem impossibly foreign. As Trinh T. Minh-ha bluntly puts it, “The silent common people—those who ‘have never expressed themselves’ unless they are given the opportunity to voice their thoughts by the one who comes to redeem them—are constantly summoned to signify the real world. They are the fundamental referent of the social, hence it suffices to point the camera at them, to show their (industrialized) poverty, or to contextualize and package their unfamiliar lifestyles for the ever-buying and donating general audience ‘back here.’ ”7 Tellingly, the still from the film accompanying the review in the New York Times is captioned “Another World.”8 The film meets this challenge by showing people struggling to maintain their neighborhood order and their own lives in a community that is teetering on the edge of collapse, like the building we see being demolished. People are losing control of their lives because of drugs and poverty. The career counselor tells her female audience that when the cuts to some social programs come because of new legislation, “It’s gonna be like a war zone.” Nevertheless, people carry on, tending little gardens, volunteering to help the project’s youth, and doing good works. The long, quiet take of Ms. Cheatham, examining and preparing her cabbage leaves in the

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kitchen while the plumber works in the bathroom, gives her a quiet dignity, not unlike the gentle respect with which the plumber treats her. The same might be said of the scene in which two police officers gently move a confused and infirm man who can no longer take care of himself out of his threadbare apartment. In the film’s first dialogue sequence, Helen Finner, president of the residents’ advisory council, is on the telephone trying to get help for a pregnant teen; her first words, the first in the film, are, “But this is an emergency,” setting the tone for all that follows. Even before this, in the film’s very first shot, the sound of a siren can be heard, as in the neighborhood of High School II. The later scene with the birth control counselor talking to a group of women suggests that in the case of Ida B. Wells, it may be too little too late. There are toddlers and babies everywhere: on the floor, in their mothers’ arms, and in carriers on the desk. Their cries and wails punctuate the entire presentation. (In High School II, the white woman giving the presentation uses a large black dildo as a visual aid; in Public Housing, the Black woman presenting uses a smaller white one. A comparison of the two scenes resonates with the sexual imaginary of American race relations.) Mrs. Finner’s missing and decaying teeth reveal the lack of services available to the people of this community that we see evidenced repeatedly. Her pleading on the telephone for help recalls the psychiatrist’s desperate call for assistance in Hospital for the gay Black man he has diagnosed as schizophrenic. And like Dr. Schwartz in that film, who says he always files a complaint when improper procedure endangers the health of a patient, so Mrs. Finner says she gets “flusterated” when “I see things shouldn’t be that-a-way . . . I just have to go off.” In a later scene, again on the telephone, regarding some neighborhood violence, she says, “It doesn’t make sense,” repeating the ambulance driver’s comment toward the end of Hospital. In that film, the doctor speaks to Miss Hightower, her name suggesting her remoteness, while Mrs. Finner speaks to someone named Joy, her name ironic in the context of the somber urgency of the situation. Despite the continual problems that Mrs. Finner faces (we see her dealing with issues twice more in the film), though, the crucifix hanging on the door over her left shoulder and the slogan on her T-shirt proclaiming “community strength” express her faith in her commitment to working for those she represents (she tells Joy she’s been doing this job for twenty years).

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The most urgent problem residents of the neighborhood face is the pervasive presence of drugs. Illegal drugs are everywhere and part of the residents’ daily lives. After the scene with Mrs. Finner comes the first of several situations involving drugs, this one with two policemen questioning a woman loitering on the street who seems to be waiting to score. One of them warns the woman that if she continues to take drugs, soon “all your teeth gonna be missing, you gonna have one eye hanging down.” Later in the film, a man hiding from the drug dealers to whom he owes money sits on the steps of the local police station, a policeman talking amicably with him. The policeman is unable to provide the man with anything more than a sympathetic ear. (“If they can’t get their money, they’re gonna beat it out of you. . . . Well, all I can say is, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you feel safe  .  .  . eventually they’ll catch up with you.”) Another man being assessed for admission into a drug treatment program chronicles his history of drug and alcohol abuse to the interviewer, who says that Black men like him constitute “the only group of people in the whole industrialized world whose life expectancy has fallen in the last ten years.” Ron Carter, former NBA shooting guard and now working for HUD (Housing and Urban Development), tells a group of aspiring entrepreneurs that when he was growing up in Pittsburgh, drug deals were done secretly, but now it is out in the open, and Wiseman even manages to catch several people on camera openly snorting cocaine on the street. Even in preschool, the children watch a puppet show with a puppet policeman who warns them about the dangers of drugs. At the end of the sequence, the children are shown leaving the center wearing their bright yellow “Kid’s Day” T-shirts and clutching their balloons, innocents abroad (“down with dope, up with hope”) in that dangerous real world for which the teachers of Central Park East High School are trying to prepare their students (see figure 9.3). Children are everywhere in Public Housing, beginning with the Ida B. Wells welcome sign shown in the opening montage: “Drive carefully and watch out for our children.” Significantly, they are included in every transitional medley of neighborhood life. They play in groups or alone, ride bicycles, and sit on front porches. Mrs. Finner describes the pregnant teenager she is helping as “a baby with a baby,” and the film inserts several cutaways of the girl during the telephone conversation, each time in the same position, swaddled in her coat like a child in a

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FIGURE 9.3  Public

Housing: The innocence of neighborhood children is threatened by the pervasive presence of drugs and violence.

blanket. Children even factor into the meeting of the “Men of Wells” volunteers, as one man explains that he hasn’t been able to participate of late as much as he would like to because his first obligation is to take care of his own children. The film associates the children with violence and the police, emphasizing the extent to which they are at risk. More than once in the transitional montages, Wiseman cuts from police cars or officers patrolling on foot to shots of children crying, playing, or drinking from baby bottles.9 In one shot, two little girls look offscreen in response to what sound like gunshots, after which there is a cut to two policemen patrolling on ATVs. In another shot, a boy flees from two policemen across a busy street. A shot of three policemen searching three men against a wall is followed by a shot of children playing basketball in the courtyard. And there is the puppet policeman talking to preschoolers. The association works in the framing of images as well as in the editing. The woman loitering

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suspiciously in a “high drug area” is detained by police while kids play in the background. Children are also seen playing basketball in the background of another shot as two policemen in the foreground apprehend and question two men about a refrigerator they may have stolen. The soundtrack strengthens the association. At one point, the police detain and frisk two men, a scene preceded by a shot of a crying child. The sounds of children playing nearby carry over the scene. Ambient sound and music come together in the aural motifs of inane calliope music from the ironically named Sunny Day ice cream truck and the wail of police sirens that recur periodically, like refrains (see figure 9.4). The two different sounds mark the contrast between childhood innocence and adult experience that informs the film as a whole. The film begins with a siren on the soundtrack over the opening title credit, followed by the ice cream truck’s rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Later we see the ice cream truck going by playing Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” The siren at the beginning

FIGURE 9.4  Public Housing: The ice cream truck appears periodically in the film, along with police cars.

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is audible over the first four shots of the opening montage, all of which are high-angle long shots, and fades away only in the fifth shot, the first ground-level shot of Wells, as if to say that the siren is wailing for the entire neighborhood. The film ends with the music of the ice cream truck playing “Turkey in the Straw.” This last song, heard over the final credits, leaves viewers with a deeply sardonic irony, as it has a history of being performed as “Zip Coon” and other racially demeaning variations in minstrel shows.10 As in Welfare, possible help for Wells involves a bureaucratic nightmare. Mrs. Finner’s comments that apartment units sit vacant while people are in need of them, that it’s “ridiculous” and “not fair,” evoke the ambulance driver’s “it doesn’t make sense” comment in Hospital. One woman complains to the exterminator that she’s been asking for a rear screen door for three years and is “tired of filling out requisitions for the same darn thing.” Another woman complains to Ron Carter that the “hassle” one has to endure to get supplies is “unbelievable” and that she has been waiting for copier ink cartridges for four months. Carter promises his audience that if they are residents, they won’t have to fill in applications for business startup funding but admits in his first talk that “what I like to do is take things that appear to be negative on the surface and try to turn them to a positive.” He says he has to work with the Chicago Housing Authority “and try to figure out why eighteen people got to sign a work request.” In the film’s concluding scene, the second talk by Carter, he seeks to make the point that this is an opportune moment because people of color are in many important positions in government (“from you, to me, the present, and it ain’t nothin’ but minority people. We got the shot of a lifetime. Right now.”), but he inadvertently underscores the layers of bureaucracy involved: “My boss is a Latino woman. Her boss is a brother. His boss is a brother, and his boss is a Latino man.” A disillusioned voice in the audience says, “I’ve heard some of this before.” For one reviewer of Public Housing, the film’s “resolute” pace captures the “listlessness” of the people who live there.11 This may be, although the pace is no slower than many of Wiseman’s other films. Perhaps the film’s enervated mood is amplified by the fact that filming happened during a hot summer, and in the transitional shots, people are often seen sitting by their doors or in courtyards just hanging out, not doing much in the heat. Still, Public Housing does depict the neighborhood as entrapping. One man is briefly locked in his own apartment as he struggles to open the

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padlock on the inside of his front door to admit the exterminator. Locking others out, he has locked himself in. Boarded windows, barriers, and fences abound in the film’s mise-en-scène—there are bars on apartment windows and iron gratings around the common balconies of the highrises. Children hang on them, looking out as if in cages. The doors of the local convenience store, O. T. Food and Liquors, are locked at night, and customers have to order through a revolving glass partition, their faces tightly framed when Wiseman shoots them from inside the store. One of the most telling images in the film is a brief insert shot of the white store owner or manager, traces of a smile on his face, counting a thick wad of bills from the cash register (see figure 9.5). The shot speaks to the point raised by the NAACP organizer in his talk with Boston mayor Marty Walsh in City Hall, “The problem is many of us don’t know our history. So we think that the poverty rates in our communities is an accident. People just decided to be poor or our health disparities is an accident.”

FIGURE 9.5  Public Housing: This brief insert shot of the local convenience store manager suggests much about the economics of poverty.

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A girl in a teen discussion group reads from a newspaper article about family abuse, acknowledging the experience of some of these children. Anticipating the two Domestic Violence films, she reads about the cycle of family abuse: “With the child having this example and no other discipline, the child does what he or she has seen.” Often children are seen following behind adults, and at a block party, young children twerk to the music in imitation of their elders. In a transitional montage, after the apprehension of the two men with the refrigerator, there is a shot of a small boy repeatedly smashing a metal object on the concrete. This is followed by a little girl slapped in the face by a belligerent, cursing woman who threatens a man offscreen as well before Wiseman cuts to the rather more peaceful grannies’ sewing circle. The theme of domestic abuse in the film is foregrounded in the two Domestic Violence films, the first of which focuses on victims and their attempts to break away from violent partners and regain control of their lives with the help of the Spring of Tampa Bay, the largest shelter of its kind for victims of domestic abuse in Florida, while the second concentrates on the subsequent court appearances of the arrested and accused perpetrators. Domestic Violence is structured, roughly, to show us the process from police intervention through intake interviews at the Spring and then the various programs that the people participate in there. Domestic Violence 2, shot immediately after the first film, shows us the court appearances of those charged with domestic abuse and their victims together to determine the status of injunctions, child support, and other legal matters. Wiseman has said that violence “is a subject that cuts across a lot of my movies”—one thinks immediately of the proclivity toward violence examined in Basic Training, for example, or the choking of the Black woman in Law and Order—and that he has “always” been interested in domestic violence specifically.12 Recall that the much earlier Law and Order begins and ends with police answering calls involving domestic violence. Near the end of that film, a man is being interviewed for a job as a police officer; the interviewer asks him, “Under what conditions do you think you might be able to handle a gun and shoot someone?” At that moment, Wiseman ends the scene with a cut before the answer, leaving the question, like others, with viewers. At just under six hours, the two Domestic Violence films together have a running time that almost matches that of Wiseman’s longest film, Near Death, an index of the subject’s importance to him.

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Wanting to place the brutal reality of domestic violence up front, Wiseman presents the film’s most graphic sequence very early in Domestic Violence, as the last of three responses by police to calls involving domestic arguments that open the film. The female victim is covered in blood from a knife attack by her partner. One of the police officers remarks that the woman was cut so deeply that her teeth are visible through her cheeks, and we see that her face is covered with a cloth to soak up the blood until she can be treated at the hospital (see figure 9.6). Any curiosity the viewer may have about the woman’s facial wound is unfortunately satisfied when she adjusts the cloth as she is being taken away on a stretcher, and we get shocking confirmation of the cop’s appraisal. The moment cannot help but have an impact on the viewer, but as Mrs. Finner says in Public Housing, “You can’t close your eyes to the real picture.” Once viewers are aware of the seriousness of domestic violence, the film introduces us to its various forms, including sexual and physical abuse of partners and sexual

FIGURE 9.6  Domestic

domestic violence.

Violence: Viewers are quickly introduced to the brutality of

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and physical abuse of children by adults and by other children in the family. The victims suffer from and speak about their mental and physical trauma. We hear stories of, among others, women locked up by their partners without money or ID, an abusive husband who, as a child, was tied to the bedpost by his mother, a woman who has endured cigarette burns from her partner, another who had been beaten with a hammer, and a woman who has been abused by her husband for fifty years. The women, along with the viewer, learn, as the leader of a group discussion says, that there are many types of abuse—emotional, financial, and physical. A guided tour of the Spring facility with a community group of older women functions similarly to the tour in Canal Zone, handily allowing for some basic statistics and information (how accurate is questionable) and also acting as a counterpoint to the more intimate tour offered by the film, which shows scenes involving clients to which the tour group could never be privy. The women on the tour function as surrogates for many viewers, who are shocked when told how pervasive domestic violence is. We see astonishment register on their faces as the staff guide reels off the facts: the Spring handles 1,650 adults and children each year; two-thirds of the children have been abused; the average age of the women accepted is twenty-six, with two or three children; the average time for a victim to gather their belongings and leave an abusive situation is five minutes; prenatal battery is the largest cause of birth defects in the country; and, perhaps most shocking, as many as one in three women in the United States has been subject to domestic abuse. The woman giving the tour also notes that domestic violence cases take up one-third of police time, and we have already seen the impressive response for victims of domestic abuse with the woman whose face was slashed—after she is taken to the ambulance, a parade of police officers and paramedics file out of her apartment door to four waiting police cars, an ambulance, and a fire engine. While the victims of abuse are mostly women and children, we learn that men also are sometimes abused (“the knife cuts both ways,” says the woman leading the tour, with ominous connotations). Although none are shown in Domestic Violence, in Domestic Violence 2, several of the accused perpetrators appearing in court are women, and two of the men charged with domestic abuse are ordered explicitly to participate in rehabilitative programs at the Spring. Still, the overwhelming majority of victims are women, and for those who criticize Wiseman’s approach for not providing

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background context in his films, consider that Domestic Violence clearly situates domestic abuse within patriarchal culture. The film opens with shots of the Tampa skyline from a distance, and in several quick succeeding shots, the view moves closer until the gleaming office buildings seem to loom over the camera with connotations of phallic dominance—the same repressive power the women at the Spring are struggling to overcome.13 The women must be reminded that, as one of them says during a group session, “Just because they have a penis doesn’t make them have a crown”—a comment that elicits laughter of recognition from the group. In the group meetings, the women sit in rows at school desks rather than in circles, as one might expect, but the classroom space is appropriate, for they are learning about themselves and their abusive relationships. In some instances, cinematographer John Davey employs rack focus to direct our attention from one woman to another sitting in front of or behind her, either speaking or listening (see figures 9.7a and 9.7b). Variety’s Ronnie Scheib complained, astonishingly, that the changing focal lengths in some

FIGURE 9.7A  Domestic Violence: Rack focus of the camera during group discussions . . .

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FIGURE 9.7B  Domestic Violence: . . . expresses the women’s common experience of abuse.

shots of the women in group sessions are “jarring” and “unconnected to narrative,” thus calling attention to the camera and “breaking the voyeuristic fascination.”14 But, of course, the last thing Wiseman wants is to generate “voyeuristic fascination” here. Rather, the camera movement indicates a commonality, even a developing solidarity, among the women. As one woman so eloquently puts it, “We bear the weight of the world on our shoulders, but they’re stronger.” In these discussions, they share their wounds, invisible and visible—one has deep bruises on her arm, another a cast on her arm, a third a wound across the bridge of her nose, a fourth a swollen eye—the visual connections established by the camera indicating their common experiences. One shot is even framed to include four of the women, one of them nodding in agreement as another speaks. Frequently we hear in Domestic Violence that abuse is not about sex but about power and control. Patriarchy’s entrenchment is shown when an amply endowed woman in a tight dress appears in Judge Palomino’s courtroom in Domestic Violence 2 and, as she leaves, the bailiff smirks

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and makes a fanning gesture with his papers, either to indicate that she is wearing too much perfume or that she is “hot,” or perhaps both. No comparable gestures or editorial assessments are made about any of the men. The theme of the power imbalance in the context of gender is introduced early, in the first sequence after the opening montage, as the police mediate a domestic dispute between a couple that apparently began when the man became angry that his wife allowed the grandchildren to play on the edge of the backyard pool. According to the woman, the children are mixed-race, which he cannot abide. As the police arrest the man and place him in the patrol car, he complains, “Why do you always take the woman’s word?” Wiseman’s typical transitional montages of exterior views include not only mundane shots of gas stations and other businesses but also churches, liquor stores, a strip club, motels, and a Hooters restaurant. These shots imply a connection between daily life, patriarchal culture, and the pervasiveness of domestic violence, especially with Hooters, a restaurant franchise that is known for its sexualized objectification of women because of its waitresses’ revealing uniforms. (An early shot in the film shows a topless liquor store and a church.) The opening montage of Domestic Violence 2 includes a Hooters billboard, and the film’s closing montage begins with exterior shots of the courthouse and then moves to shots of fast food restaurants, another liquor store, a cemetery, a school bus, a series of shots of modest and upscale homes, and then, reversing the opening, tall office buildings and the city skyline. The attractive homes contrast with the poorer houses we see in the opening of Domestic Violence, and we recall the woman who has suffered the abuse of her husband, a university professor, for fifty years (discussing her case, one staff member says to another, “Interesting, though, because they live in a very nice place”). The school bus reminds us of the disturbing cycle of abuse that flourishes in the family context, while the juxtaposition of the liquor store (liquor stores also feature prominently in the medleys in Public Housing) and cemetery offer a clear editorial comment about the entire situation. Significantly, no street signs are visible (quite the opposite is true of High School II and Public Housing), suggesting the ubiquity of domestic abuse—this could be anywhere. In the context of this film, Wiseman’s trademark traffic shots, as in Hospital, take on greater meaning, a reminder that domestic abuse flourishes while society flows undisturbed, indeed is an inextricable part of it.

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The idea of abuse as a continuous cycle within the family is reiterated several times in Domestic Violence. One case manager comments to a client that abusers were themselves abused as children. In a staff meeting, we hear about an abused boy who has become an abuser and a young girl who tried to hang herself. A precocious five-year-old girl tells the staff interviewer that she isn’t going to cry when her daddy dies because of his violence. One of the staff says that the Spring is a “safe place for children to be children,” although when another member of the staff discusses their drawings with some of the children, it is clear that the trauma of the violence they have witnessed remains. Many of the transitional montages include shots of the playground, but never with children playing there. Roughly half of the film, once the camera moves inside the facility, shows classes and interviews with children, with transitional shots of children and parents in hallways, from children blissfully asleep in the infants’ room and preschool activities for toddlers to grammar and history lessons for teenagers. Many of the women express fear for their children and have been moved to extricate themselves from their abusive situations in order to protect them. “I don’t want my daughter to go through what I went through,” says one woman who smashed her husband’s head with a frying pan. Two-thirds of the bed space at the Spring, says the woman conducting the tour, is devoted to children, and half of them have been abused. The power and control wheel, a widely used tool in helping abuse victims, is designed as a circle, a graphic representation of the cycle. In his review of Domestic Violence, David Denby makes the point that “after the prologue, Wiseman joins the cops, picking up where he left off thirty-three years ago in Law and Order,” adding that where the Kansas City police force in the 1960s did not have adequate training for dealing with situations of domestic violence, “decades of psychology and social work have since intervened: the Tampa police we see in Domestic Violence are very good at calming people down.”15 Yet, although the police may be better trained than they were decades ago, there is a sense in the two films that the law is fighting a losing battle to stem the flow of domestic violence cases. One of the Spring counselors tells a tearful woman whose abusive ex-partner has discovered her whereabouts and is now stalking her that the police can’t stop these obsessive stalkers and that she should consider relocating. She feels like she is back to where she was at the beginning, and

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her situation seems reflected on the screen of the counselor’s computer, with its 3D pipe display twisting into Gordian knots. In some situations, the police are, in fact, hamstrung rather than helped by state domestic violence law. In the final sequence of the film, an intoxicated man calls the police because he wants his girlfriend out of his house before he gets violent. The sequence begins forebodingly, with a police car edging into the frame of a shot of a residential street. Answering the call, the police find the man who tries to pass responsibility onto the officers, but the police are not empowered to remove someone from their residence. The best they can do is suggest that the woman, who claims to be ill and so cannot leave that night, should sleep on the couch in a different room and leave the next day. The man’s remark, “I love her to death  .  .  . but I cannot cope with her” (the phrase is repeated in Domestic Violence 2 by a repeat offender), in this situation waiting to happen can only be ominous after what we have witnessed for three hours. Denby says, “As a feeling of horror hits us like a wave, they leave these two to spend the night together.”16 In the opening sequence of Domestic Violence 2, similarly, one of the responding police officers (the same one who patiently deals with the intoxicated, shirtless man at the end of Domestic Violence) says to a man whose partner is being arrested that “our hands are tied” by state law. Although the couple doesn’t want an arrest, as the officer explains, when a domestic dispute is deemed physical violence by definition—touching or grabbing—then someone must be arrested. Persons arrested on domestic violence charges are seen the following day by a judge, the only person with authority to release them and to determine the conditions of their release. One of the officers wants to let this couple go without an arrest, but a ranking officer insists they have to follow “the letter of the law” “all the way down the line.” Domestic Violence 2 shows that next step, as those arrested on domestic violence charges appear in court. The film focuses on three judges of the Thirteenth Judicial District, Hillsborough County, who deal with the many cases involving sexual abuse in their courtrooms. After the introductory montage, we never leave the courthouse until the end. There are none of the typical transitional medleys, just case after case. The first courtroom, referred to by Judge Palomino later as “video court,” indicates the volume of such cases and the relatively impersonal process in which

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they are necessarily handled. At the Spring, clients are reassuringly told that “nobody’s going to judge you,” but judging is what Domestic Violence 2 is all about. From the bench, Judge W. R. Heinrich speaks collectively to five tiered rows of the accused in orange jumpsuits, after which he hears the charges involving each one individually. His job is to sort through them, determining bail and amount or if they should be released at all and under what conditions. He tells them, “Right or wrong, the state attorney’s office has taken the position that every act of violence is going to be prosecuted.” The men are in a different space from the judge and appear before him on a television monitor, which is how they interact. (In one instance, Judge Heinrich asks for a closeup of the accused man.) The judge’s tone of voice is loud, impersonal, and authoritative, as befits the situation, and his script seems memorized, an indication that he has presided over this court many times before. In some of the cases, paperwork with crucial information is missing, but the judge pushes on with his decisions anyway. In another case involving a woman pursuing an abusive man in her car, he comments dryly, “Sounds like she probably should have run him over.” In the judges’ decisions, many of the accused are remanded to appear elsewhere in the legal system, in divorce court or family law court, suggesting the elaborate legal labyrinth that these people must now navigate, like the multiple procedures facing the clients of Welfare. This is only “the preliminary stage of determining guilt or innocence,” Judge Heinrich reminds them, and he warns one man, “This matter is far from over. It’s just beginning.” They may have to go to family law court to adjudicate custody, a restitution hearing to determine child support (although Judge Raoul Palomino, in one instance, does this on his pocket calculator), or criminal court for the domestic violence charge. One accused man wants to counter-sue and is told to go across the street and file his own injunction. There is, perhaps, an irony in the fact that the door at the back of Judge Palomino’s courtroom, through which plaintiffs and accused alike must squeeze as they enter and exit, has a sign on it that reads “open door slowly.” The frequent image of the door reminds one of the door that closes ominously on Robert Singleton when he leaves the courtroom after his fate has been decided in Juvenile Court, and, in fact, twice the film ends a hearing similarly, with the door closing behind the people as they leave and the image lasting just a moment longer than necessary.

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Judge Jaelle Ann Ober, whose courtroom the film shows next, is noticeably different in demeanor, seeming less perfunctory and punitive. Where Judge Heinrich warns defendants of what he “will” do to them, Judge Ober explains what she “can” do. To one couple, she confesses in exasperation, “I don’t understand how you can live like this.” In another knotty case, she mutters, “Oh, God,” when she finally finds out that one female defendant is married to someone other than her current partner. Another time, the judge’s eyes widen in dismay at what she is hearing. “I’m not surprised at all,” she says wearily to one couple, the Perkins, when she hears that they both have domestic violence charges pending against them. By the time Wiseman presents the cases in the courtroom of Judge Palomino, the stories offered by spouses and partners involving the same situations and incidents are completely divergent, and viewers cannot help but wonder where the truth lies. “Everybody has a story,” a skeptical policeman says to a suspect in Public Housing, and in Domestic Violence 2, we are left with many of them, contradictory or puzzling as they may be. “I was surprised by the degree to which people lie. Everybody lies. Plaintiffs, defendants, everybody,” Wiseman has said of his experience shooting the film.17 In the film, plaintiffs and accused stand apart in the courtroom, at lecterns on either side of the frame, and the viewer, along with the judge, is, so to speak, caught in the middle (see figure 9.8). “Truth changes from person to person,” observes one of the counselors during a staff meeting in Domestic Violence, and we see these relative truths articulated for the record in Domestic Violence 2. Here, the idea of Wiseman’s films as Rorschach tests, as discussed in chapter 1, is pushed to the limit. Like a judge, we inevitably seek to judge the relative truthfulness of the various stories. Viewers, then, are caught between alternatives, not unlike the double bind of many of the victims of domestic violence shown in both films. According to Isadora Kosofsky, “The divided self is the most common motif concerning the abused female,” as it refers to “the psychological divide the women feel towards their perpetrators.”18 This pattern of what one of the counselors in Domestic Violence calls a “co-dependency issue” returns throughout the two films, like the victims themselves. In the first dispute shown in Domestic Violence, the female victim tells police that she loves her husband, but he needs to let her go. The woman whose face has been cut has been visited by police no fewer than eight times, but she has

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FIGURE 9.8  Domestic Violence 2: The divergent testimony of plaintiffs and defendants is shown graphically in the framing of the courtroom proceedings.

never brought charges against her husband. Several women being interviewed for admission to the Spring all express a similar response that they love the abuser and don’t want to hurt him. Jared Rapfogel perceptively observes that Domestic Violence “almost reverses the dynamic” of the early films because where they show institutions as repressive of individuality, “the purpose of The Spring is very nearly the opposite—not to impose social norms but to offer shelter from them.” He observes that “even the cinderblock architecture, which elsewhere [in Wiseman’s cinema] suggests imprisonment and conformity, here seems like a reassuring bulwark against the violence and persecution of the outside world.”19 The two Domestic Violence films make clear that there is no permanent solution to the pervasive problem of domestic violence in American society. These films are, like that group of early films, exposés, because they do expose the pervasive prevalence and horrors of domestic violence, but these films are more compassionate than those

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earlier ones. As one woman exults in Domestic Violence, “I wasn’t allowed to cry, I wasn’t allowed to get angry, I wasn’t allowed to do, I wasn’t allowed to talk. This is the most fun I’ve had in my whole life.” For David Denby, “If suffering can be ‘redeemed,’ [Wiseman] has done so by openly acknowledging it and trying to understand it.”20 As in High School II and Public Housing, the Domestic Violence films give voice to the clients of the institution in question, and all four eschew the easy ironies of those early films to which they occasionally refer. It may be, as Klawans notes of High School II, that “inevitably, it engages you in a less visceral way than did High School,”21 but that does not make it or the other films discussed in this chapter any less revelatory.

10 PLAYTIME Ballet (1995) • La Comédie-Française, ou L’amour joué (1996) • The Last Letter (2002) • La danse—Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris (2009) • Boxing Gym (2010) • Crazy Horse (2011) • National Gallery (2014) • Un Couple (2022)

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iterary discussions come up on multiple occasions in Wiseman’s documentaries, involving, among others, Shakespeare, Melville, Flaubert, John Donne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Simon (“And if you felt that he’s a poet now, wait ’til you hear some of his poetry”). Singing, making music, dancing, performing, and painting are activities that frequently appear in Wiseman’s films, like the images of photographers taking photographs that turn up at least once in virtually every film. These activities appear often in the films not only because they are an important part of Americans’ lives but also because the arts are important to the filmmaker. Frederick Wiseman has had an abiding interest in art forms other than cinema and in their comparative relationships, as can be discerned from the various projects with which he has been involved over the years. Although in this book, I consider multiple instances where Wiseman’s films play off fiction films, especially genre movies, he has repeatedly insisted in interviews that he has been influenced more by prose fiction than by cinema. “I compare the way a novelist chooses to characterize people, his use of time and abstraction, with the choices available to me in a movie.” (He points out that he was “very influenced” by Vertov, but he didn’t see Man with a Movie Camera until he had made ten films.)1

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Formally conscious, when editing his films, Wiseman thinks about rhythm and structure and “the abstract implications” of shots and their relationships.2 More concerned with aesthetic than ideological considerations, he deleted a scene in At Berkeley involving a young undocumented student because it “may have been important politically, but it makes for bad film.”3 In his uncharacteristically personal contribution to the book published by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany its Wiseman retrospective in 2010, he writes that “the effort during shooting is to . . . make the shots as aesthetically pleasing as possible. The formal aspects of the shot are of maximum importance to me,” and that once he is in the final editing stage, his emphasis is on honing the film’s rhythm.4 Wiseman is particularly drawn to theater and dance. He saw many plays in Boston in his youth, and while attending Yale Law School, he confesses to having “disappeared to New York for a week here and there to go [to] the theater.” Later, during his time as a law student at the Sorbonne, he attended the theater, including the Comédie-Française, “at least three times a week.”5 In 1986 (the year the Deaf and Blind films were released), he worked with the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard University at the invitation of Robert Brustein on its production of Luigi Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise. According to Wiseman, he suggested adding a documentary filmmaker, a character he played. “I started in the lobby, shooting people coming in. And everything I shot was projected on a 12 by 15 screen on the stage. And when the play started, I was on stage the whole play, shooting. It was all projected, so the audience had the option of watching a play, or watching the rushes of a movie based on a play.”6 The idea may have been inspired by Jack Gelber’s 1959 play The Connection, which also embeds a documentary filmmaker in the action. The Connection, for which Wiseman was one of the investors, was made into a film in 1961 by Shirley Clarke, whose next film would be The Cool World, which Wiseman produced as his first venture into film. Wiseman has directed several other plays as well, including Hate by Joshua Goldstein at ART in 1991. He directed a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (Oh Les Beaux Jours) in Paris in 2006, and when it was brought back in 2007, the original actor, Yves Gasc, was unavailable, so Wiseman happily accepted the invitation to play the role of Willie. (“No one has yet asked me to play Lear.”7) There was, too, an opera based on

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Welfare (“Les Miserables”?), with libretto by Wiseman and noted author David Slavitt (who decades earlier had written an appreciative piece on Basic Training) and music by saxophonist Lenny Pickett (perhaps most well known as the bandleader on television’s Saturday Night Live). Wiseman directed performances at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia in 1992 and at the St. Anne’s Center for Restoration and the Arts in New York in 1997. Wiseman also worked as dramaturge (“a formal term for kibbitzing”) with the James Sewell Ballet of Minneapolis for a ballet based on several scenes in Titicut Follies, including the taunting of the inmate Jim and the incoherent monologue of another inmate in the exercise yard, with music by Pickett. He was a visiting fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, where dance critic Jennifer Homans connected him with Sewell. At a workshop performance of several episodes at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, Sewell explained that he saw choreography inherent in the repetitive actions of many of the social actors in the film and that Titicut Follies is so steeped in music and performance that he regarded it as a musical. Wiseman said that being involved in the dance adaptation was “a natural extension of my interests. As a filmmaker, you can’t help but be interested in movement” and that he was “sick and tired of seeing ballets about relationships, or mythological forests ten centuries ago.”8 The ballet had its world premiere in Minneapolis in March 2017, with another performance at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University the following month. Wiseman first directed Vasily Grossman’s La dernière lettre at ART in 1988. After making La Comédie-Française in 1996, he was invited to direct a play of his choice for the Comédie, and he returned to the Grossman play, directed it there in 2000 and then for several performances in North America, including the Theatre for a New Audience in New York City with American actress Kathleen Chalfant in 2003.9 The Last Letter is an adaptation to film of La dernière lettre. Wiseman says that he “really just used some insignificant modifications” from the theatrical production, although he specifies that the lighting was different. The play and film are based on a chapter of Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate (1980), “and the script—the dialogue to the movie is the same as in the play, which is almost exactly the same as in the novel.”10 The letter, its own chapter in Life and Fate (part one, chapter 18), marks a caesura in the novel’s sprawling

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narrative of Stalinist Russia, understood by critics as a gesture of love from the author to his own mother, who was killed by the Nazis. The film, like Wiseman’s original French production, features the solo performance of Catherine Samie, doyenne of La Comédie-Française, who appears several times in that film. Samie plays the part of the fictional Anna Seminovna, who is living in a Ukrainian ghetto occupied by the Germans in 1941. Wiseman describes the experience of working with Samie as “a complete collaboration.”11 Anna recites her final letter to her son, a physicist safe in Moscow, before her impending death at the hands of the Nazis. The text of the letter recounts some of her experiences regarding antisemitism, her life in the ghetto, and the rediscovery of her Jewish identity, along with her profession of love for her son. Filmed by Greek cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis, who had been working in France for years for such directors as Catherine Breillat (Romance [1999], Á ma soeur! [Fat Girl, 2001], Anatomie de l’enfer [Anatomy of Hell, 2004]), The Last Letter relies heavily on lighting and shadow, the basic visual components of cinema, on a bare set. Wiseman uses multiple camera setups to periodically change position or focus (closeups of Samie’s hands, fingers working, recall some of the closeups in Essene) that complement the shifting lighting and shadows and, in turn, are enhanced by them. In the theatrical production, Samie could make eye contact with the audience, but in the film, that happens only at the beginning of her monologue, an initial engagement with the viewer, after which her eyes roam. When she does look straight ahead, she seems to be looking past the camera, simultaneously into the distance and herself. Sometimes there are multiple shadows, sometimes only one, depending upon the lighting (see figure 10.1). Wiseman’s interest in the play of light and shadow is also on display in the reception scene toward the end of La danse in the shots of shadows undulating on a white wall before we see that we are at a dinner reception. In The Last Letter, the shadows serve several metaphorical functions: they suggest that, as a Jew, Anna Seminovna is now a nonperson, only the shadow of the person she once was (shadows are used similarly in Near Death); they suggest her own imminent fate (“I will no longer be of this world”); and they represent the ghosts or souls of the six million, her witnesses, making Anna’s fate representative of them all. Her occasional leaving of the frame, whether the side, bottom, or top, further prefigures her fate of disappearing, as she says, “just like the Aztecs.”

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FIGURE 10.1  The Last Letter: Catherine Samie’s haunting monologue is accompanied by

a multiplicity of her shadows.

In Un couple, Sophia Tolstoy similarly feels as if her identity is threatened, in this case subsumed by a self-absorbed writer who puts his work before his family and personal relationships. The film features French actress Nathalie Boutefeu as the Russian writer’s wife, reading from their journals and letters, chronicling their tempestuous relationship from her perspective. Boutefeu, who has worked with such filmmakers as Marco Bellochio, Olivier Assayas, and Patrice Chéreau, introduced Wiseman to Sophia’s writing after the two worked together in 2012 on The Belle of Amherst, William Luce’s play about Emily Dickinson. Sophia, sixteen years younger than Tolstoy, married him when she was eighteen and he was thirty-four; she became his secretary and bore him thirteen children but, she complains, he has taken her completely for granted. Despite her intense love for him, she fears that “I’ll betray myself if I go on like this.” The film consists entirely of Boutefeu in character talking to the camera, like Apollonia in Seraphita’s Diary and Samie in The Last Letter, although the effect is quite different. In different shots, Boutefeu sits, stands, or moves through a marvelously lush garden as she speaks (its owner is acknowledged in the final credits). The garden is located in Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany in France, and one shot on the adjacent beach centers on her shadow as she walks, recalling The Last Letter. As in that film, the

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imperiled female protagonist of Un couple often walks in and out of the frame before the film moves on to the next shot, only occasionally panning with her. While Wiseman uses the same techniques, the images are quite different. Rather than black-and-white shots of a stage empty except for lighting effects, as in The Last Letter, in Un couple the character exists amid verdant, vibrant nature, an indication of Sophia’s indominable spirit. Shots of the landscape reflected in a pond make it seem as if the trees are gently tremulous, a reflection of Sophie’s sometimes shaky emotional state. If Tolstoy was unable to see his wife as a person, Wiseman’s camera captures her strong presence and the soundtrack her words. The film opens with shots of the morning sky and closes with shots of the sky at dusk, images that could be from the documentary films. John Davey’s garden shots have the beauty of composed still lifes and so suggest a connection to the painterly concerns of National Gallery. These shots are beautiful in themselves, like the many shots of the garden that punctuate Sophia’s monologue at various points. One might speculate on the extent to which Un couple is a personal film for Wiseman—it is worth noting that where Samie looks past the camera, Boutefeu at times looks directly into it while speaking, as if addressing the person responsible for these very images—but the character of Sophia Tolstoy has definite connections to Anna of The Last Letter, Seraphita in Seraphita’s Diary (“Am I a person? An object?” Sophia says), and the performers of Crazy Horse, also women whose identities are threatened with erasure by phallic privilege. Steve Vineberg, sensitive to the different nuances of both the theatrical and filmed versions of The Last Letter, writes that “There’s no useful way to talk about The Last Letter in terms of Wiseman’s other work—it’s radically different in genre, style, and subject matter.”12 Jewish identity is also threatened in In Jackson Heights, where the local Jewish community center seems to be struggling. Also, Wiseman told one interviewer that he had “been reading and thinking about the Holocaust for a long time,” although he also says that he was also interested in the work because of his “continuing amazement at people’s capacity to kill,”13 which does suggest a link to the military films, especially Basic Training. Wiseman himself makes the same connection; he also cites Law and Order, the two Domestic Violence films, and several others.14 Vineberg goes on to observe that The Last Letter is visually “exquisite” and “at times it’s reminiscent of painting, at other times of modern dance,”15 an insight that also allows the

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film to be appreciated in the context of the other films discussed in this chapter, all of which focus on the arts. Four of these films focus on dance and theater—five, if Boxing Gym is included.16 For one reviewer, La danse (and, presumably Ballet and La ComédieFrançaise as well) is the ultimate expression of Wiseman’s focus on the coercive function of institutions, with the dancers serving as “marionettes for choreographers and ballet masters.”17 But this view seems one more attempt to impose the attitude of Wiseman’s early films on his later ones rather than to accept the filmmaker’s vision as multifaceted and evolving. La Comédie-Française is farce, not follies. An acknowledged balletomane, Wiseman says of the ballet dancers he has filmed, “I have enormous respect for the people who devote their lives to producing something that’s moving and so beautiful—and that disappears instantly.”18 La danse he describes as “a love letter to the Paris Opera Ballet Company.”19 The performers in La danse, Ballet, and La Comédie-Française may be worked incredibly hard, and not all of the choreographers and directors are collaborative, but, as discussed below, these institutions are presented as venerable traditions rather than as sites of ideological coercion. Further, while looking at other art forms, these films consider the differences between these other arts and cinema and, at the same time, provide self-reflexive commentary on Wiseman’s own film practice. Wiseman’s “respect” for dance is apparent not only in La danse and Ballet but also in Boxing Gym (and, in a different way, in Crazy Horse, as discussed below). By his own account, he was obsessed with sports and played several in high school.20 Certainly, he brings this interest to Boxing Gym, although the film treats boxing as a dance as much as a sport. The film was shot at Richard Lord’s Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas, just “behind the Goodwill store,” as charismatic proprietor and former boxer Richard Lord says. (A local legend and former professional boxer, Lord once trained David Bowie.) In the film, a woman buying a membership for her husband’s fortieth birthday explicitly refers to boxing as an art. One boxer demonstrates cumbia dancing to another while multiple boxers train behind him, and another man’s training literally turns into a silent solo dance. There is also a fascinating long take of a man and woman shadow boxing in the ring, and although they are working out separately, they could be dancing a pas de deux (see figure 10.2). Several times, Davey’s camera pans down from someone training to focus on their footwork, which receives as much attention in the film as does punching. Some

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FIGURE 10.2  Boxing Gym: The film emphasizes the similarities between pugilism and dance.

shots show footwork only or begin on it before panning up to show the boxer’s full body. As Christopher Ricks writes, “So light on their feet are the boxers, weaving in so seemly and firm a manner . . . that Boxing Gym at times seem to breathe the air of its immediate predecessor, intimating that we are attending upon La danse Revisité.”21 Boxing Gym contains a few scenes with Lord in his office talking with gym members or prospective members, but mostly the film shows people training. We see them practicing with speed bags, working out with medicine balls, shadow boxing, and sparring in the ring. Except for the quick opening and closing shots of the city skyline and a few brief shots of trainees working out in the driveway walloping truck tires with sledgehammers, the film remains inside the gym. But, untypically, it spends relatively little time at meetings in the office, instead building a rhythm of its own through the editing to complement the rhythms of the people training, which is mostly what it shows. A new member is advised that “it’s just all about getting the rhythm,” just as a ballerina in La danse is reminded that “It’s about rhythm.” The first words in the film are by Lord, training

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in the ring with a boy and establishing a rhythm for him: “one, two, one, two.” The periodic beeping of the gym’s interval timer on the soundtrack adds a percussive accent to the film’s rhythm, as do the repetitive smacks of boxing gloves on punch mitts. Formally, Boxing Gym is perhaps closest to Meat in its relatively sparse dialogue and reliance on rhythm, and while it might be regarded as a dance film, Boxing Gym is also akin to National Gallery in its formal emphasis. At the same time, although its ostensible subject is classical painting, National Gallery shares with the dance films a focus on the art of performance as it gives ample space to the guides’ engaging narrations about the paintings to museum audiences. Boxing Gym emphasizes the skill, training, and endurance required of pugilism and the gym as a place where people of all ages and backgrounds can train at their own pace. “Everybody here is super nice and friendly,” a new member remarks. Yet, we are reminded nonetheless of the sport’s potential violence and, as Wiseman said, the human inclination for it. One of the first people shown training in the film is a young girl who is regarded as a “natural.” One boxer disturbingly says he likes to get “buzzed” from being hit, and another wears a T-shirt that says “Black Death.” The mass shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia, one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, occurred in April 2007, while Wiseman was filming, and it comes up in discussion between Lord and a man working out who knows of someone who was there at the time of the shooting. In another scene, two other men also discuss the event, one confessing, “That shit bothers me. That’s some menacing shit, man.” And the film ends on a menacing note: after a typical montage of the Austin city skyline at night with a full moon, where one might expect the film to end, comes a shot of a blood-red sky as the film’s final shot. The first of the dance films, Ballet, follows the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York City preparing for and during their annual European tour, which, in 1994, the year Wiseman was shooting the film, included performances of five ballets in Athens and Copenhagen: Romeo and Juliet and Sleeping Beauty, choreographed by Kenneth Macmillan; The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Glen Tetley; Symphonic Variations, choreographed by Frederick Ashton; and Bruch’s Violin Concerto #1, choreographed by Clark Tippet. There are a few sequences involving the workaday functions of the ABT, which was founded in 1939, but most

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of the screen time in Ballet, as in La Comédie-Française and La danse, involves rehearsals and performances. La Comédie-Française shows the company preparing four plays for their season—La double inconstance (The Double Inconstancy), by Pierre de Marivaux, directed by JeanPierre Miquel; Georges Feydeau’s Occupe-toi d’Amelie, directed by Roger Plancher; Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Jacques Lassalle; and Racine’s tragedy La Théobaïde (The Theban Brothers), directed by Jannis Kokkos. La danse consists primarily of the rehearsals of seven works for the 2008 season, ranging from classical stalwarts such as Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker to the athletic modernism of Wayne McGregor’s Genus. Adrienne L. McLean, who has provided the most detailed discussion of the cinematic representation of ballet, observes that in fiction films, ballet has conventionally been depicted with the tropes of melodrama,22 perhaps most famously in The Red Shoes (1948).Wiseman’s dance films avoid this approach, of course, although Ballet and La danse, as well as La Comédie-Française, are, broadly speaking, structured in a manner that recalls the classic Warner Bros. backstage musicals of the 1930s, the movies that dominated the genre’s first cycle. As in such Warner musicals as 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933), the first halves of the films, roughly, feature scenes rehearsing and preparing for performances, with snippets of the music and choreography offered in the process, while the second half is dominated by scenes from the actual performances. Sometimes, in these films, though, it is nearly impossible to distinguish rehearsal from performance, as the audience’s presence is largely absent. In Wiseman’s films, there are no climactic Busby Berkeley cinematic spectacles, impossible to actually produce on a theatrical stage, but only the dancers we had seen earlier rehearsing now onstage performing, recorded by John Davey’s camera from a few select positions—“front row center,” courtesy of a telephoto lens, and in the wings—and edited seamlessly by Wiseman. 42nd Street suggests the intense work that goes into mounting a musical show, with director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) pushing his cast and himself to the limit. In Wiseman’s dance films, by contrast, the emphasis is on the elaborate and expensive logistics as well as the group effort involved in putting on a show. In his review of La danse, William Johnson noted that the film “takes more time focusing on the inner workings of the ballet company than on the completed ballets they perform.”23 The first dialogue

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sequence of Ballet involves the company’s director, Jane Hermann, on the telephone explaining to the owner of a prospective venue the actual costs and considerable logistics involved in producing live ballet. In addition to the dancers, we are reminded, there is the orchestra, transportation, advertising, stagehands, per diems, and so on. “You could maybe break even if you have good box office,” she advises. In the second sequence with Hermann on the telephone, she takes the unseen Susie to task at the Metropolitan Opera for the overlap in repertoire with the Kirov Ballet that was programmed without her knowledge, a duplication that will be financially detrimental to both venues. Her monologue, as memorable as that of the psychiatrist in Hospital talking to Ms. Hightower and Mrs. Finner seeking help for a pregnant teen in Public Housing, reminds viewers immediately that competition for market share informs even this most classic of the arts. La Comédie-Française includes a meeting of the Comédie workers’ council to discuss the progress of contract negotiations with the various technical groups of workers, such as electricians, stagehands, and even upholsterers, each with their own union. Ballet begins with a sunrise before taking us inside the studio—for these dancers, work begins with the first light of dawn. Many cutaways and transitional shots show dancers stretching, warming up, watching other dancers rehearse, and sometimes just resting. Twice we see the staff physiotherapist working on dancers’ aching muscles, and several more are waiting to see her. One dancer complains to her, “In the morning I have to push myself over,” and the sobering prognosis is that the injury might take a year to heal. These bodies may stretch in what seem like fantastic positions, as we see in the film’s opening montage, but they have physical limits—one ballerina even speaking with the artistic director about personal concerns involving aging and the demands of her multiple roles. In the three films, individually and together, the rehearsal and performance sequences present a range of dance contexts (with and without musical accompaniment), styles, formats (solo dances, pas de deux, corps de ballet), and the directors and choreographers are varied in their approaches from autocratic to collaborative. Nevertheless, these scenes are stylistically similar in that they tend to be lengthy and feature long takes. Consequently, it is tempting to think that the films present simply respectful accounts of the works filmed, and many reviewers have embraced this view that Wiseman celebrates dance, “the most ephemeral of all the arts” and “the most difficult to capture,”24 by preserving it in

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largely unmanipulated form. One reviewer remarked that the final performances of La danse are “shot with basic competence; Wiseman adds little to their self-contained aesthetic.”25 Somewhat more helpful is Nicolas Rapold’s observation that in La danse, Wiseman “shoots from an engaged distance that allows for full appreciation of the bodies in motion, neither framing the movement like filmed theatre nor attempting to funkily integrate camerawork and choreography.”26 Apart from the problem of what defines “an engaged distance,” Rapold appreciates that the camera seems neither entirely passive nor resorting to specifically cinematic techniques to “enhance” the dances somehow, as it might be argued that, for example, Norman McLaren does with overlapping exposures in Pas de deux (1968) and with slow motion in Ballet Adagio (1972). In fact, though, while many of the rehearsal and performance sequences in La danse, Ballet, and La Comédie-Française are comprised of individual long takes, there is some editing and camera movement in many of these sequences. And however minimal they might be, the editing and camera movements inevitably emphasize the differences between film and live performance, cinema and theater, frame and stage. As Wiseman himself points out, “In the theater, unless you’re in the first three rows, you can’t see the actors’ faces, but . . . in the cinema, the filmmaker chooses what he wants to show the viewer.”27 In some of the shots of performances, stagehands and others can be seen in the wings, a view that usually is to be avoided in the staging of a theatrical performance. In the first Marivaux rehearsal in La ComédieFrançaise, although it is one long take, there are zooms to closeups twice, once with Flaminia and once with Harlequin. The second Marivaux rehearsal initially shows the theater proscenium, then zooms into a twoshot of the performers. The camera pans to Trevelin when he enters and then zooms out to frame all three performers. In a rehearsal of Racine’s La Théobaïde, the camera comes in for a closeup of Antigone with tears in her eyes. In the first performance shown in Ballet, while the pas de deux is presented mostly in one shot, it is punctuated by a montage of dancers’ faces as they wait in the wings. In a rehearsal in Ballet accompanied by a male vocalist, the camera leaves the dancers at one point and pans right to the vocalist, holding the shot for a few seconds, the scene then ending. In such instances, viewers of the film are prevented from following the dancers as they would in the theater, for the camera (and the filmmaker as editor) has determined where we look, what is available to see, and for how long (see figures 10.3a and 10.3b). Perhaps most notably, in the Romeo and

FIGURE 10.3A  Ballet:

Dance is sometimes well composed within the frame . . .

FIGURE 10.3B  Ballet: . . .

and at other times the frame’s limitations are evident.

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Juliet ballet performance, the camera zooms out from Juliet on the balcony to take in a larger view of the set, and because of their separation on the stage, sometimes we see only Romeo or Juliet rather than Romeo and Juliet. And when Romeo runs toward the wings in a moment of dramatic blocking, it is as if he were running toward the camera, toward us; in this case, such directional movement would be less effective live on stage. Despite the numerous performance scenes in these films, none shows a complete one, so the temporal duration of the filmed performances is shorter than it was in real-time. The film only presents the portion(s) of each work that, for whatever reason, Wiseman has selected. Sometimes Wiseman even cuts on a gesture rather than after it is completed, underscoring the work of editing. In addition, the microphone must have been placed close to the stage, another stylistic choice, as the patter of dancing feet can be heard periodically, a sound that most of a live audience would not hear. And, significantly, as already mentioned, the audience at the performances, an important and necessary component of live theater, with the exception of some offscreen bursts of laughter or applause in La Comédie-Française and a few brief shots in the lobby in La danse, is omitted almost entirely from these films. Clearly, Wiseman is not after duplicating the experience of live theater. At the same time, these sequences necessarily foreground the importance of performance in Wiseman’s cinema, a prominent theme from the opening sequence of his first film, Titicut Follies, a musical revue presented by the inmates of Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane, as discussed in chapter 2. Performances by professional entertainers, politicians, and social actors in daily life are everywhere in Wiseman’s films. Among the most memorable are the gynecologist’s lecture about sex in High School, the Masons’ ceremony in Monrovia, Indiana, and the condom demonstrations in High School II and Public Housing. Christopher Ricks invokes sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of “the presentation of the self in everyday life” in discussing Wiseman’s films, the idea that we act out roles in social contexts in order to achieve goals, and he asserts that “every single one of Wiseman’s films has some strong moment or feature that asks to be seen under the aspect of performance.”28 The films inevitably raise questions about the extent to which the camera may consciously or not influence how profilmic subjects behave. The social actors in the group of films discussed here are performing but not necessarily for the camera—or

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not only for the camera. How does one define “authenticity” in such a context? These performers are professionals on actual stages, and so they serve as a metaphor for this essential question about the behavior of social actors in Wiseman’s films and in observational cinema more broadly. Crazy Horse, filmed at the famous La Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, offers a rather different case in that it takes an ironic rather than approving stance toward a type of performance—nude dancing—that it critiques from the beginning. Although Crazy Horse is filled with musical numbers, it is, in a way, the opposite of these other films, an antimusical, perhaps signified by its partially opposite structure. Unlike the other films, in Crazy Horse, we see what looks like complete performances first and then rehearsals—although, again, it is hard sometimes to distinguish between the two. It shares much with Model—and not just because of the parade of beautiful women in both films. Like that earlier film, Crazy Horse is interested in deconstruction rather than construction. The seemingly unrelated shadow play that opens and closes the film—along with that surprise shot of a shadowy space following the closing credits, unlike anything in any of Wiseman’s other films—is a self-reflexive gesture about the medium that also recalls the artifice of The Last Letter and comments on the insubstantiality of this profilmic spectacle. The gaudy colors that characterize the designs of the production numbers likewise recall the visual palette of The Store and enhance the presentation of the nude dancers as softcore eye candy. Lighting design is frequently discussed, and, several times, the film returns to shots of lights, gels, and the lighting board and computer program. In one rehearsal, the show’s directors have a run-through of various color filters to see which ones they prefer. Cunningly Brechtian, Crazy Horse is concerned with some of the same themes as Model regarding the commodification of desire and the sexual objectification of women in its focus on a nightclub that boasts “the world’s best nude dancing.” Just as the models of Model are treated as sexual objects, so, obviously, are the dancers of Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse refers to ballet several times—choreographer Philippe Découflé remarks that their show’s lighting design is “the basic lighting in ballet,” the dancers watch some sort of ballet performance on television, and there is a shot of the dancers’ feet en pointe—but only to emphasize its difference from show dancing. Jane Feuer notes that ballet has often been represented in film musicals as a thematic opposition to popular

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dance and popular music,29 a tension often expressed in the musical as one between highbrow and lowbrow art. But here, the artistes of the Crazy Horse are determined to infuse the former into the latter, like the pompous Jeffrey Cordova with Oedipus Rex in The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953). Crazy Horse doesn’t deny the skill or commitment of the dancers, nor does it necessarily believe, as Cordova proclaims, that “there is no difference between the magic rhythms of Bill Shakespeare’s immortal verse, and the magic rhythms of Bill Robinson’s immortal feet”; but the film definitely distances itself from the absurdly hyperbolic statements about art uttered by Découflé (“We’re always in creation”), recently hired to lend some artistic credibility to the club’s shows and who wants to attract the intellectuals, and especially artistic director Ali Madhavi. In English, Madhavi says that the “first time I saw the Crazy Horse, it was for me one of the most beautiful, the most moving thing I ever saw in my life” and that now it is like a dream to be involved because he is working “at this highest level of beauty and femininity that could ever be reached” in “this place of ultimate refinement, beauty, and desire.” Suggesting that the French government should make the Crazy Horse revue required viewing for all citizens, he explains that in his work, he empowers women by helping them to free themselves and, in the process, discover and enact their own apparently repressed sensuality and fantasy lives (see figure 10.4).

FIGURE 10.4  Crazy

Horse: Ali Mahdavi expounds on the show’s aesthetic aspirations.

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But from the beginning, the film undercuts this deluded view, beginning with one of the dancers recording her voice as she moans by the numbers with simulated sexual pleasure (the recording is played back later in the film as part of a dance number) and indicating throughout that these performances are the visions of men, of what men think women want and imposed on women. When, in one production number, the dancers perform close-order drill as “Soldiers of the Erotic Army,” they are literally enacting a form of aggressive masculinity overlaid on their female bodies. One of the first musical numbers shown in the film is “Baby Buns,” with its inspirational lyrics sung in English as the dancers shake their exposed buttocks: “Baby buns” is what they call me when I pass, All those fellows whistling, looking at my ass, I’ve had enough! Why can’t a gal be left alone just ’cause she’s got the stuff, There’s always some dodo right there who blocks my way with his tough stare, I know my baby buns are cute, But it’s not fair!

The lyrics perfectly reflect the foundational concept of feminist film theory, as famously expressed by Laura Mulvey, that in patriarchal culture, the controlling gaze of the camera embodies a masculinist perspective, and as a result, “mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.”30 The dancers sing in mock protest but put themselves on display for a largely male audience nonetheless (see figure 10.5). It is no coincidence that in the musical number that follows Madhavi’s comments, the dancers are wearing blindfolds—it is their gaze that is erased as the vision of the male artists is unbound. Toward the end of the film, Découflé and Madhavi can be heard in conspiratorial whispers discussing the auditioning hopefuls dutifully lined up semi-naked on the stage for inspection, their comments calling to mind the teacher’s criticism of the girls in the fashion class in High School: “the one with the nice buttocks,” “a gap between the thighs,” “you’re too small, “ I don’t like her,” “we don’t hire transsexuals.” In preparation, the women are told that they are going to be judged not on their dancing abilities but according to their

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FIGURE 10.5  Crazy

Horse: The performers protest that their “baby buns” are the object of a voyeuristic gaze.

physical proportions. The theme is explicit in the late production number, “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4, Preludio,” featuring a solo dancer doing rope work. The number begins by invoking the iconography of bondage, with the dancer wrapped in the ropes, which are tight about her exposed breasts and nipples and also her wrists. (Madhavi claims Fassbinder and Helmut Newton among his influences.) The dancer writhes and eventually works herself loose, but throughout the entire number, she remains entwined in the ropes—that is to say, still contained by a man’s vision of a woman’s erotic desire, still ensnared in scopic bondage by an audience looking at her baby buns (see figure 10.6). Mulvey goes on to argue that, as a result of the camera’s patriarchal orientation, mainstream narrative cinema fetishizes women’s bodies by objectifying them for male scopophilic pleasure (“to-be-looked-at-ness”) and emphasizing body parts at the expense of the whole.31 If legs are fetishized in Model, Crazy Horse focuses on buttocks and breasts. Indeed, there are so many conventionally beautiful breasts and buttocks on display, both in the musical numbers and backstage, that they lose all erotic power and become merely curvaceous abstractions, as literally happens in the shot of rippling rumps during one production number. The film captures the idea of fetishization in the shots of dancers’ bodies framed so as

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FIGURE 10.6  Crazy Horse: The bondage theme of the rope dance suggests the position of women in the club’s show.

to show only torsos or buttocks but no faces. In the “Upside Down” number, the dancers’ arms and legs slip into view in different configurations, reflected in shiny surfaces and seeming eerily detached from torsos, reminiscent of Gunvor Nelson’s short film Take Off (1972), a feminist protest against such visual objectification in which a stripper peels off first her clothing and then her body parts. The emphasis on body parts is shown again in Crazy Horse in the shots of costumers combing the dancers’ red wigs with red lips attached to the hair, and the placing of the wigs in a milk crate, commodified objects like the mementos for sale in the gift shop. In the Crazy Horse, desire itself is literally commodified in the large letters that spell the word onstage to announce the name of the current show (“Can I have an almost naked girl in a letter?”), which becomes one more of the industrial processes shown in Wiseman’s films. Crazy Horse hardly offers the “paroxysme d’érotisme” the dancers promise as it begins. It is difficult not to think of Paul Verhoeven’s earlier Showgirls (1995), a fiction film about Las Vegas dancers also filled with female nudity, in relation to Crazy Horse. But Wiseman’s film is less ambiguous about its subject than Verhoeven’s, which is regarded at once as one of the worst movies ever made and a serious film of social criticism that examines “gender and sexual issues with the class contradictions so often glossed

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over in Hollywood films.”32 Showgirls gives showgirls a melodramatic narrative with a preposterous protagonist, but Crazy Horse shows us almost nothing about the lives of the dancers apart from rehearsing and performing. In the film, they exist only to be seen onstage. By contrast, Ballet, La Comédie-Française, and La danse emphasize a sense of tradition and community at their respective institutions. Ballet invokes the Western tradition generally with its shots from below of the Parthenon atop the Acropolis Hill when the company travels to Athens. Dance itself is an art that is understood as “fundamental” because of “its immemorial antiquity.”33 There are numerous shots in La danse of the nearby Seine and of traffic on the streets, both endlessly flowing, a part of the Palais Garnier landscape but apart from it. Wiseman certainly appreciates the “long tradition” of ballet, which has thrived for three hundred years.34 “I wanted to place the company in the context of its tradition,” he has said.35 The opening montage includes several shots of the catacombs underneath the building (made famous as the setting for Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera [1910])—a building so old (it was completed in 1875) that, as we see, it has developed its own ecosystem with pools of water containing fish and plant life. La danse includes one of Wiseman’s loveliest found metaphors in the beehives on the roof of the Palais Garnier, which houses its theater. The hives are tended by a retired stagehand and provide a lovely image for the dance company as a community in which everyone works toward a common goal,36 a goal echoed by artistic director Brigitte Lefèvre, who stresses the importance of generational continuity in ballet. Even Boxing Gym begins with a montage of posters of famous boxers such as Roberto Duran and Marvelous Marvin Hagler that decorate the gym walls, along with a picture from an antique vase of ancient Greek pugilists. La Comédie-Française reminds us toward the end of the venerable heritage of the world’s oldest theater company, founded in 1680, and in which actors are appointed for life. There is a reception in the lobby for an actor who is retiring. Then the film turns to the Artists Mutual Benefit Society’s reception at the Pont-aux-Dames Retirement Home for actors, which is discussed earlier in the film at a meeting with actors in the context of benefits such as eyeglasses and dental care. The scene begins with four of the Comédie’s actors, including Catherine Samie, walking arm in arm up the street toward the home, comrades in art (see figure 10.7). A newspaper headline fills in the reason for the visit to the retirement home—“Former

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FIGURE 10.7  La

Comédie-Française: Members of the troupe walk arm in arm to the

retirement home.

Actress Turns 100,” referring to Suzette Nivette-Saillard, who had a career of two decades at the Comédie. Samie is very gracious in introducing Mme. Saillard, who says that the theater was like a religion to her. The scene concludes with a short montage of several stone plaques honoring famous French actors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Individual actors are mortal, but the theater lives on. In National Gallery, Wiseman pays homage to another tradition, that of classical European painting, while at the same time using these works of art to reflect on his own artistic practice. The film translates T. S. Eliot’s idea that modern artists must be aware of the traditions within which they work as Wiseman “procures the consciousness of the past.”37 Shot in London’s National Gallery, the film begins near the end of the museum’s extraordinarily successful “Leonardo de Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” exhibition and moves to the start of the “Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude” and the multimedia “Metamorphosis: Titian” shows.

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Wiseman had wanted to make a film in an art museum for twenty-five years since his plan to film in New York’s Museum of Modern Art was scuttled when the museum, in the end, withdrew access.38 As already discussed in chapter 1, he has spoken of his admiration for painters such as Brueghel, whose social tapestries he saw as anticipating his own work, and Jan Steen (whose work appears in National Gallery), while his imagery has affinities with more modern American painters from Thomas Eakins to Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. Alyda Faber notes that National Gallery “is a film that, perhaps more than any of his other films, is indirectly about Wiseman’s film style and its effects.”39 Indeed, along with Model, National Gallery is his most self-reflexive work. An art historian in the film explains that the greatness of the National Gallery’s paintings, such as da Vinci’s “The Virgin on the Rocks” (ca. 1491–1508), derives from the combination of observation and imagination, a description that perfectly accords with Wiseman’s documentary approach of shaping observational footage to his own expressive purposes. The curator of the gallery’s Leonardo exhibit comments that, while da Vinci’s works are, of course, strong individually, they also reveal the overarching narrative of an artist who refines and revisits certain themes. One cannot help but think of such comments as referring to the filmmaker’s own work, for has Wiseman not created his own “national gallery”? One of the guides explicitly compares paintings to films, and many of their comments may be understood as self-referential. Larry Keith, director of restoration, explains the process of restoring Rembrandt’s “Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback” (ca. 1663), emphasizing the importance of light and expressing a deep appreciation for the pictorial values of the work as an image, echoing Wiseman’s own aesthetic sense. Referring to Vermeer’s “A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal” (ca. 1670–1672), another expert comments that the artist “has an absolutely unique style that somehow finds a balance between realism and abstraction. . . . But there’s always an element of ambiguity, a question there that I firmly believe is absolutely intentional on the part of the best artists, because it’s designed . . . to keep your attention on this painting.” (In La ComédieFrançaise, theater administrator Jean-Pierre Miquel notes that Marivaux’s play also contains ambiguity and is open to a wide range of interpretations, and in La danse, Cocteau’s comment that “It’s up to the audience to figure it out” is cited.)

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One might argue that the sense of realism in painters like Vermeer, whose work is also shown in National Gallery, also comes through in Wiseman’s cinema in shots of, for instance, produce, baked goods, and other foods in such later films as Monrovia, Indiana and City Hall that are beautifully composed natures mortes. In National Gallery, some shots of gallery patrons capture them motionless, inviting us to consider them pictorially, as the students regard the live models in the two art classes. Further, Vermeer’s painting generally and “A Young Woman” specifically feature multiple frames within their own frame, begging comparison with National Gallery, which makes use not only of the frames of the paintings within the film frame but also door frames and floor moldings in this way. Through editing and composition, Wiseman seems to enter into dialogue with the gallery’s famous canvases. The editing often makes it appear as if patrons and portraits are exchanging looks, Wiseman juxtaposing them in profile facing in opposite directions. There is no predetermined way to read these juxtapositions, as in the famous Kuleshov experiment;40 rather, we are free to read them as we will, whether in terms of, say, the subject’s posture, clothing, facial characteristics or expression, but there is no denying that the images of actual faces that Wiseman shows are as expressive as those in the paintings. The editing also “implicates the viewer of the film in an almost vertiginous layering of looking— looking at people looking at figures in paintings (who are also looking).”41 Is the man looking at Jan Steen’s “Two Men and a Young Woman Making Music on a Terrace” (ca. 1670–1675) leering like the man with the wine glass in the painting? As might be expected, Jan van Eyck’s famous “The Arnolfini Portrait” (1434), with its mirror behind the couple, finds its way into the film. The film is filled with portraits, painted and filmed. The faces in the paintings often take up the entire frame of the film image, without the frame of the painting visible in the shots. The frames of paintings are not ignored by the film, as we do see many, and there are even two scenes of frame restoration included as well as a discussion about the qualities of an ebony frame. But Wiseman chose to frame many of the paintings this way because he thought “the painting became more present and less an object hanging on the wall.”42 As visual compositions, painted faces and filmed faces are thus treated equally (see figures 10.8a and 10.8b). One guide says that in the case of Hans Holbein’s “Christina of Denmark,

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FIGURE 10.8A  National

Gallery: Shots of the museum’s paintings . . .

FIGURE 10.8B  National

Gallery: . . . are sometimes edited to pair with shots of patrons.

Duchess of Milan” (1538), made for Henry VIII as he was looking for his fourth wife, there is a very strong attachment between representation and the thing itself. And so, the film asks us to look at all the faces similarly, from the same aesthetic perspective, as all of them are images in the

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film. Michael Atkinson pointed out that in National Gallery, “Wiseman’s prowling camera is so unemphatically observational that you can be easily and profitably distracted by a background painting or a patch of gorgeous silk wallpaper or a particularly lovely museumgoer’s face.”43 However, this effect seems deliberate, and rather than a distraction, it is an exploration of film’s similarities with and differences from painting. One of the museum guides explains to a group of schoolchildren that “a film unfolds over two hours. You’ve got time to introduce characters. You’ve got time to show the plot going in and out. A book, a huge book, can take you six months to read or longer. . . . That’s got time, too. But a painting doesn’t have time. The painting has the speed of light to tell you the story. It has the time it takes to see the painting.” This claim is debatable phenomenologically, but there are several sequences in the film featuring tour guides who provide fascinating and entertaining backstories for some of the paintings, bringing them vividly to life. Their comments, as well as those of the museum staff, often emphasize the importance of context for a historical understanding and deeper appreciation of the artworks. “Time and again, the subject of context returns in discussions over placement of works, or their removal from their original settings.”44 But just as frequently, National Gallery is attentive to the details of a painting in a manner that recalls the close reading approach of New Criticism that was in fashion when Wiseman was in college and that characterized the literature course that he says influenced him greatly.45 In one scene, for example, art historians discuss their consultation with musicologists regarding Jean-Antoine Watteau’s “The Scale of Love” (1717–1718) and whether the depicted figures are tuning up or actually playing the guitar and whether the depicted notes are real or just dashes of black pigment on the canvas. Elsewhere, an informative talk about Rubens’s “Samson and Delilah” (ca. 1609–1610) puts the painting in its historical and physical context, but it is also the subject of a fascinating narrative by one of the guides. In one instance, Wiseman even constructs a Kuleshov-like montage to suggest what a patron is thinking, cutting back and forth three times from the man’s face to details of the painting. Sometimes Wiseman breaks up a painting with closeups that direct the viewer’s attention to individual areas that illustrate points made by the guides in their talks, so that “the painting is also told serially, the way a story would be told in a film or other art forms.”46 He does this with the

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Rubens painting, for example, and with Nicolas Poussin’s “The Triumph of Pan” (1636) and Giovanni Bellini’s “The Assassination of St. Peter Martyr” (ca. 1505–1507). There are no pans in these shots as there would be in, say, a Ken Burns documentary; the narrative effects are achieved solely through the editing combined with the voice-over commentary. Wiseman has said that one of the film’s subjects “is the relationship between painting and film. Not only painting and film, but between painting and poetry, dance, literature. The different ways you can tell a story . . .”47 National Gallery shows a film artist exploring his relationship with the medium’s tools and its similarities and differences from painting, especially with how both forms use narrative and temporality. In this sense, the film has similar interests as the dance films. And unsurprisingly, this film about “comparative forms” concludes with two performance pieces that translate Titian into other forms48—a pas de deux in front of his “Diana and Actaeon” (choreographed by Wayne McGregor, whose work, as mentioned above, is also featured in La danse; see figure 10.9) and poet Jo Shapcott’s verse inspired by the painter’s “Diana and Callisto” (1556–1559). Shapcott’s prefatory comments underscore the intertwining of various media that the film explores. She informs her audience that

FIGURE 10.9  National

Gallery: The Titian dance summarizes the film’s emphasis on the relationships among the arts.

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FIGURE 10.10  La

Comédie-Française: The final curtain descends at the end of the film.

Titian thought of his paintings as poems and explains that in order to write her poem in Callisto’s voice, “I had to imagine how a constellation might sound. So on the page visually, I’ve translated her noise, her song as a star into every word being divided by an asterisk. So it looks like a constellation. In my head, I feel, if I can read it as I hear her, there would be kind of a white noise star crunching, crackling noises between every word. But I can’t really do that. So probably the most you’ll hear is a little syncopation.” It is a perfect example of how art, as an artist tells a class of students, “encompasses everything. It’s not just about either drawing or painting. It’s about life. It’s about music. It’s about film. It’s about philosophy. It’s about mathematics. It’s about science. It’s about literature.” Andrew Delbanco writes that, over time, Wiseman “has become more interested in aesthetic expression, both as a subject . . . and as an aspiration for what he hopes to achieve through his own art. He has become a filmmaker less interested in exposé than in revelation.”49 Apart from the ironic Crazy Horse, one sees this impulse at play in these films about art, and in

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this context, the ending of La Comédie-Française is especially poignant. The film concludes (as it begins) with the company onstage, each actor reciting a line from Molière by a bust of the playwright on a pedestal. The last to speak, Catherine Samie says, “To live without love isn’t really living at all.” The line is from Molière’s La Princesse d’Élide (1664), although in the context of a Wiseman film, we might be reminded of Essene and Near Death, and then we hear applause from the unseen audience as if to reinforce the sentiment. Wiseman told Gerald Peary that La ComédieFrançaise explores “a lot of ideas about what constitutes love, and that informs all the sequences, both the rehearsals and the performance.”50 The curtain comes down but rises briefly as the actors bow for a curtain call, and then the curtain comes down again, this time bringing with it a final fade to black (see figure 10.10). We may all be minor actors in each other’s lives, as Dr. Weiss says in Near Death, but we are all looking for love as we strut and fret our brief time on the stage.

11 OUR TOWN Central Park (1989) • Belfast, Maine (1999) • State Legislature (2006) • At Berkeley (2013) • In Jackson Heights (2015) • EX-LIBRIS: The New York Public Library (2017) • Monrovia, Indiana (2018) • City Hall (2020)

T

he Garden (unreleased as of this writing due to legal issues1), about New York City’s legendary Madison Square Garden, begins with the Ringling Bros. Circus arriving in the city and being greeted by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, who shakes hands with the ringmaster and smiles obligingly for the cameras as an elephant’s proboscis joins in. In retrospect, given Giuliani’s subsequent clownish disgrace after his support of Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud following the 2020 election, this scene of him welcoming the circus to town takes on political connotations that are unavoidable but of which Wiseman could hardly have been aware at the time of filming. (The film was shot in 1997, before 9/11 and the consequent anointment of Giuliani as “America’s Mayor,” and edited in 2005, before the political rise of Trump.) Nevertheless, as a teacher says in High School II about teaching Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “You ultimately have to come to history.” Wiseman, it would seem, agrees, even as the military films, as discussed in chapter 3, already indicate. The documentaries examined in this concluding chapter, comprising a late cycle of films about American communities, explore democracy at a time when it is imperiled and emphasize the importance of historical awareness for its healthy functioning.

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I suggested in chapter 1 that Wiseman’s films had some affinities with the poetry of Walt Whitman, and since I made this claim in the first edition of this book in 1992, several other writers have done so as well.2 Here, I want to pursue this connection further in the context of this group of Wiseman’s later films, all of which offer portraits of American communities that meditate on American democracy. According to the high school English teacher in Belfast, Maine, Moby Dick expresses Melville’s “great democratic vision” by making a commercial fisherman from Nantucket a tragic figure, but Wiseman’s goes further, eliminating conventional protagonists and instead emphasizing “the people” en masse. The montages of janitors, maintenance workers, cleaners, and clerks that appear in Wiseman’s typical transitional montages might be likened to Whitman’s expansive celebratory cataloging in “Song of Myself ” of the wagon drivers, trappers, butcher boys, blacksmiths, and deckhands that comprise America.3 Significantly, one of the first things we are shown in the town of Belfast is a social worker on a home visit washing the feet of a frail elderly man—an image that, like the patient on the operating table at the beginning of Hospital, not only has unavoidable religious or spiritual overtones but also, of course, carries political implications as well in its focus on the economically depressed. A citizen in City Hall asks, “How do we tell the story about what’s happening here?” Wiseman’s answer in these films is to construct them in ways that express a Whitmanesque egalitarianism in form as well as content. In Democratic Vistas (1871), Whitman called for a truly American literature that would encompass the expanse of a vibrant and diverse American culture, and there have been many similar clarion calls since. Half a century later, for example, American folklorist Constance Rourke suggested that the mural might be a conducive form for depicting the magnificent diversity of American types, while in the same decade, from a Marxist perspective, novelist James T. Farrell echoed Whitman, declaring that the art of “a genuinely democratic culture . . . would recreate and communicate how the mass of people live, how they feel about working, loving, enjoying, suffering, and dying.”4 All of these aspects of American life are expressed in Wiseman’s cinema, including this group of films. According to media historian Ardis Cameron, in Belfast, Maine, “What you see, the filmmaker insists, is Belfast, Maine, the town, not Belfast, Maine, the movie.”5 Such an astonishingly naïve comment may be the

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result of the more subtle yet no less deliberate style that Wiseman employs in these films. Paul Arthur, a critic generally sympathetic to Wiseman, describes the style of State Legislature as “filmed from comfortably neutral angles interspersed with a smattering of zoomed facial close-ups.”6 In his review of the same film, David Reilly noted, “In a film whose content is so overtly about politics, Wiseman seems remarkably apolitical in his framing and editing methods.”7 Both writers miss the political implications of the film’s style, though. One senses a disappointment in these remarks, as if to say that Wiseman is, as one critic puts it, too “reticent.”8 But this is precisely the point. Well before these films, Wiseman had moved away from the “Kino-Fist” style of editing employed in Titicut Follies and High School, but these films, among his most subtle in style, are, in fact, quite carefully crafted nevertheless. Wiseman indicates as much in Belfast, Maine. After the opening (stereotypical) view of lobster fishing, the film cuts to a photo shop where in the studio above, a painter is working on a landscape canvas. The penultimate scene shows another painter working on a larger landscape. In closeup, the camera shows his brush strokes filling in blobs of color; but it is only when the film cuts to a long shot from across the room that we can understand how these areas fit into the overall design—not unlike Wiseman’s films, individually and together. In Jackson Heights, shot in the Queens, New York neighborhood, as well as Aspen, Belfast, Maine, and Monrovia, Indiana, all being about specific geographically identifiable communities, might be viewed as contemporary examples of the city symphony film. In the 1920 and 1930s, the city symphony form celebrated the city as “perhaps the ultimate emblem of modernity,”9 using the rhythms of editing and composition to emulate the energy flowing from the great metropolises of the time, such as New York (Manahatta, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921) and Berlin (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Walter Ruttman, 1927). Wiseman says that he is quite conscious of rhythm and other formal elements of cinema when he is editing,10 and the “day in the life of ” structure of many city symphony films is echoed by Wiseman’s transitional shots, often featuring images of early morning and night. But there is a crucial difference in sensibility: in the city symphony films, people tend to be integrated into an overall kinetic visual design that foregrounds form,11 while Wiseman’s films, despite relying on found material that he shapes for his own purposes, are more focused on the people, even when, as in State Legislature,

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the emphasis is as much on the system as on the individuals comprising it. Thus, A. O. Scott calls In Jackson Heights “Wiseman’s most Whitmanesque film” because “it grounds a vision of America in the particulars of daily life.”12 The irreducible importance of the human factor is underscored in the comical sequence in At Berkeley, where a researcher tries unsuccessfully to have a robot perform the relatively simple action of folding a dishtowel only to end up with it hopelessly tangled. Stuart Klawans rightly observes that Belfast, Maine provides a “grand synthesis” of Wiseman’s previous films, and Wiseman has admitted to including in the film scenes that reference his earlier films, although he dismissed it merely as a joke.13 There are scenes at the local hospital (seemingly as busy as New York City’s Metropolitan Hospital in Hospital), meetings with social workers (Welfare), and at the district courthouse (Law and Order). A health care worker talks to a group of men detained at the local jail about AIDS, recalling the sex education scenes in High School, the sequence ending with him asking if there are any questions, just as High School cuts away more than once on the same query. Wiseman’s fascination with process and assembly lines is seen in two lengthy sequences, one following potatoes that enter a factory at one end and leave as packages of stuffed potato skins at the other end (the sequence inevitably recalls Meat) and a second showing sardines being packed at a fish plant (see figure 11.1). All of these sequences, and others, connect with earlier Wiseman documentaries, even as the film anticipates the others in this group to follow. Belfast, Maine, then, simultaneously looks back and forward, connecting the films that have come before to those that are to come and showing that any American town is built on a network of interrelated institutions, many of which he has examined before. An appreciation of such resonances itself depends on the viewer’s sense of history, in this case of film. At the same time as Belfast might be any American town, it is also specifically a New England community, and surely Wiseman must have had in mind another New England hamlet, the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the setting of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, one of the most famous of American plays. (A part of a student production of the play is presented in At Berkeley.) Just as in the play, the town is every American town—any town—so Belfast is representative as well. The connections between the film and the play are numerous. In the play, the main character, the Stage Manager, speaks directly to the

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FIGURE 11.1  Belfast, Maine: The process of sardine packing is one of many sequences that evoke earlier Wiseman films.

audience and introduces the locale and characters. Wiseman, an unseen stage manager, also speaks to his audience, albeit indirectly; he is, as Bill Nichols reminds us, an “authorial presence, or voice, that is felt and experienced by the viewer as different from the mere replication or reproduction of the world.”14 As the play begins, the Stage Manager tells us that dawn is breaking, just as the film opens with shots of the sun rising in the early morning. The Stage Manager informs the audience, “Up here is Main Street. Way back there is the railway station. . . . Over there is the Congregational Church; across the street’s the Presbyterian. . . . Here’s the Town Hall and Post Office combined. . . . Along here’s a row of stores.”15 This list sounds uncannily like a typical Wiseman montage of exterior shots, and, in fact, the opening of Belfast, Maine includes shots of some of these same places. Toward the end of the play, the Stage Manager talks about the Civil War, remarking that the people of New Hampshire were tough, independent people and that the young men fought in the war because they “had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together.”16 Similarly, near the

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end of Belfast, Maine, a local historian speaks to a group of seniors about the state’s participation in the Civil War, making the same point: “They were a very determined, very proud people. And they fought. And that flag was dear to them.” The historian seems to speak for the filmmaker in emphasizing the importance of the union when he says that in the broad sweep of history, he is interested in “personal individuals” and that they are “the real heroes.” A woman in City Hall says, “Obviously there’s a political side to all of this,” and there is, even though Wiseman’s films have been attacked as politically soft, as vaguely liberal, since they take no immediately obvious political stand.17 Many years ago, Nichols observed that Wiseman’s films offer “little overt acknowledgement that the institutions under study directly relate to a larger social context,”18 and this has been more or less the general consensus about Wiseman. Although Wiseman concedes that it is possible to view his films “indirectly” as political,19 he certainly has not endeared himself to leftist critics with remarks that his politics are Marxist, but more Groucho than Karl.20 He claims, “I have never been interested in ideological filmmaking. I have never found an ideology that explains things to my satisfaction.”21 In Thomas Waugh’s groundbreaking anthology on the “committed” documentary, Show Us Life, Wiseman is essentially cast out of the pantheon, which is curious given that his work fulfills all of the requirements the book’s contributors put forth as necessary for progressive political documentary filmmaking, including the absence of an authoritative narrator and dominant individual “stars,” a sense of structure reflecting the complexity of events, and value as a catalyst for discussion.22 Cultural critic Andrew Delbanco attests that the films were, in fact, valued as tools for consciousness-raising; Titicut Follies, High School, Hospital, and Basic Training were regarded as “advancing ‘the movement,’ whatever, exactly, that was.”23 Titicut Follies and High School can be read as comments on the Vietnam War, and we might note that Basic Training was shot in the summer of 1970, only six months after the establishment of the Vietnam draft lottery in December 1969.24 Certainly, High School and Primate move toward acknowledging the political implications inherent in their subjects, as discussed earlier, and Central Park works similarly. Richard A Schwartz rightly notes that the film shows that the park is “maintained by physical labor, administrative coordination, bureaucratic policies, and political

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decisions.”25 Politics in the park and of the park becomes unavoidable in the early sequence involving the annual Mississippi Picnic, where a Confederate flag is displayed, and we see a Black man eating watermelon. (Issues of stereotyping of minorities come up for discussion more than once in these films.) Then, the Young Communist League event is interrupted by park staff, who inform the organizers that they cannot sell T-shirts and other items because vending is not allowed in the park. One member of the disappointed crowd compares the staff ’s actions to the Nazis in the Nuremberg Trials, “where the Nazis stood up and said, hey, I was just doing my job” (One thinks of Bob Walters in High School, “only a body doing a job”), and a woman cries, “I never thought this would happen where I lived in this country. This is Russia. This isn’t America.” But here Wiseman seems to take no clear position on the situation. Unlike so many other commentators, David Saunders sees Wiseman’s political views as “the essence of his vocation” and the early films as critiques of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and accounts of “the other America.” In his discussion of direct cinema and American politics in the 1960s, Saunders explores in considerable detail the political contexts of Wiseman’s first five films (Titicut Follies to Basic Training), citing many contemporary sources. Saunders traces the films’ connections with, and differences from, the New Left, placing particular emphasis on Law and Order, including the connotative associations of the film’s title with the Far Right. He describes the appearance of Nixon in the film campaigning on the theme of law and order as “foreboding”26 (“It’s time for a complete housecleaning and new leadership from top to bottom,” Nixon says), and, indeed, Nixon is invoked again in Basic Training when the newly-trained recruits march to the chant, “Mr. Nixon drop the bomb/’Cause I don’t want to go to ’Nam.” But if Nixon is an ominous yet marginal omen in these early films, the group of later films discussed in this chapter may be seen as a definite response to Trumpism, even though the forty-fifth president never actually appears in any of them. Several of the films show institutions struggling with cuts in government funding as they deal with the policies and priorities of the Trump administration. In one scene in Public Housing (shot in the spring of 1995 and released in 1996, toward the end of the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency), a job counselor, meeting with some local women residents of Wells, seeks to motivate them by reminding them that, “We talked about

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the new cuts” because new legislation that is about to take effect will eliminate a number of social programs that affect them. The cuts were in the future then, but in this later group of films discussed here, cuts and budget constraints are very much in the fore. Lawmakers in State Legislature, filmed in the Idaho State Capitol building in Boise, concede, “It’s a tough budget year,” when receiving input from teachers, who have had no salary increase in several years (and do not seem to be getting one here). The situation is especially dire for the University of California at the time of At Berkeley, which Wiseman filmed during the fall semester of 2010. Although the state was supposed to provide 30 percent of the university’s budget, then Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cut the amount almost by half, to 16 percent—“a level of disinvestment that was literally unprecedented in the history of the University of California.”27 Many of the meetings in the film involve the question of how to make cuts without compromising quality. The film’s second sequence is a meeting of senior administrative staff discussing declining funding and strategizing a plan for “organizational simplification” that faculty and staff will buy into. We learn at one of the meetings that the campus grounds crew has been reduced to just one person who cuts all the lawns—a surprise even to Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau. The New York Public Library in EX-LIBRIS, shot in the fall of 2015, is perhaps the one exception in these films because, in the current budget year when Wiseman was filming, the library had succeeded in having much of its funding from the city restored. But as library president Tony Marx explains at a staff meeting, the pressure is now on them to match the city’s contribution with private funds and to repeat their successful application to the city again in the next round of funding. Donald Trump, says Wiseman, is “an unseen presence” in City Hall,28 the only one of these films in which Trump is mentioned by name. The film was shot in the fall of 2018 and the winter and fall of 2019 and released in 2020, toward the end of the Trump presidency and shortly before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although, for this film, Wiseman returned to his home territory of Boston for the first time since Near Death, he has explained that he had written to the mayors of six cities, but only Boston replied positively.29 Be that as it may, the film, focusing on Boston’s municipal government, often returns to charismatic mayor Marty Walsh, who cannot but seem to offer a sharp contrast to the values of Trump.

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A two-term democrat, elected in 2013 and again in 2017, Walsh subsequently served as secretary of labor in the Biden administration. In the course of the film, Walsh appears multiple times, including at a lunch with senior citizens, a rally in support of nurses, a Veterans Day event, and a Chinese New Year parade. When Walsh meets with a Latinx business group early on, mention is made of the Muslim ban, a controversial executive order signed by Trump in his first year in office that curtailed immigration from several countries. Shortly after, in another meeting, reference is made to the rollback of the Fair Housing Act under the Trump administration, a position said to be a “reversal of the last fifty years.” As Manohla Dargis writes, Mayor Walsh “serves as a sharp counterpoint to President Trump, an unseen presence whose administration, policies, and political agenda wind through the movie like a cord.”30 Wiseman has said that EX-LIBRIS has inadvertently become a very political film because “the activities of the library are in such stark contrast to what Trump represents.” Indeed, “You could make the argument that Trump’s election is a triumph of the failure of American education.”31 The film begins with a lecture by biologist Richard Dawkins in which he says, among other provocative things, that “science is the poetry of reality.” This statement at the outset is a direct riposte to the antiscience and antiintellectualism of Trumpism, as is the emphasis in several of these films on the multicultural, ethnic, religious, and sexual diversity of their respective communities—a tone completely at odds with the exclusionary and divisive rhetoric that characterized the Trump administration. In the center of the nearly three-hour-long Aspen, Wiseman includes a scene of an immigrant workers’ meeting in which the participants discuss the racism they have encountered when trying to find housing in the resort town. The central placement of the scene suggests that these people are at the heart, not the margins, of this community known primarily as a playground for wealthy white people—“the backbone of our economy,” as Sen. Martinez puts it in State Legislature. His comment is certainly endorsed by this group of films. At the meeting about the IDNYC program in In Jackson Heights, the discussion leader insists that immigrants like them don’t take from the country but rather give to it, that they not only contribute to the economy as workers but also to the rich diversity of American culture. At the beginning of In Jackson Heights, district city councilman Danny Dromm boasts that “Jackson Heights is the most diverse community in the whole world.

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FIGURE 11.2  In

Jackson Heights: City councilman Danny Dromm leads the Queens Pride Parade, celebrating the neighborhood’s, and the film’s, embrace of diversity.

Literally. We have 167 different languages spoken here. We are very, very proud of that diversity.”32 Early on in City Hall, we see a civil wedding ceremony being performed for two women; In Jackson Heights includes several gay community meetings, one with city councilman Dromm, who leads the borough’s Gay Pride Parade (see figure 11.2),33 and a transgender support group meeting. An LGBTQ support group meeting is also included in Belfast, Maine. At Berkeley begins with a student orientation in which the professor remarks on the university’s “very diverse population,” and City Hall concludes with Mayor Walsh proudly declaring in a speech that he has built “the most diverse administration in Boston’s history.” All of these moments stand in opposition to Trump’s embrace of misogynist and white supremacist values. In Jackson Heights emphasizes the diversity of the neighborhood as one of its major themes. The film begins with a Muslim prayer for redemption and then moves to a Jewish community center, which hosts a variety of groups, including an LGBTQ meeting. In the typical transitional exterior shots between lengthy sequences, we see the storefronts of a variety of retail shops and community services before taking us inside some of them, among them an Ecuadorian restaurant, a taco stand, Kung Fu

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FIGURE 11.3  In Jackson Heights: Soccer jerseys for sale in a local shop during the World Cup reflect the neighborhood’s ethnic diversity.

Tea shop, Kabob King, Caja Musicale gay sports bar, and a halal butcher (see figure 11.3). As a participant at a gay rights march declares, “We’re not one, we’re millions.” In the earlier Welfare and Canal Zone, Spanish is not translated in subtitles, but in In Jackson Heights, subtitles are provided in Spanish and Arabic as well—another gesture of inclusivity on the filmmaker’s part. Diversity is also expressed by some of the transitional shots in City Hall and in State Legislature that feature office buildings with multiple glass panels on the front (see figure 11.4). Only together do these individual facades form patterns that provide a sense of architectural harmony—like Wiseman’s films themselves, with their mosaic structure. The man explaining the IDNYC program in In Jackson Heights says their goal is to develop unity in diversity, and at that very point, the film offers a lengthy montage of faces of individual attendees to accompany his speech. The image that perhaps best sums up the sense of multiculturalism in these films is the scene in City Hall of a cooking class in which an Asian woman in traditional garb plays “Red River Valley” on an Asian string instrument like a mandolin (see figure 11.5). The woman hosting the event explains that the series was conceived to acknowledge the importance of diversity in the city’s population and “to break down some of the barriers

FIGURE 11.4  State Legislature: The segmented reflection of the capitol building expresses the democratic mosaic.

FIGURE 11.5  City Hall: A musician plays “Red River Valley” at the Chinese cooking class.

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that have historically existed here in Boston and really sort of, by being next to one another, by being together sort of create the sense of community that really exists.” In Jackson Heights concludes with fireworks over the New York City skyline—an editorial gesture of celebration for the peaceful diversity shown throughout the film. Diversity is also emphasized in the wide range of music found in these films. In Jackson Heights contains a percussion concert in a laundromat, Latin music being recorded in a music studio, a Mariachi band, a student big band playing Gershwin, an Indian belly dancing class, and a Bollywood musical number on a television. EX-LIBRIS contains a performance by a woodwind quartet, ragtime in the library garden (Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”), and Elvis Costello’s father, much to his son’s apparent chagrin, in a folk-rock rendition of “If I Had a Hammer.” Central Park, as Schwartz notes, begins and ends with music and contains several scenes featuring culturally diverse music that ranges across genres, including rock, opera, salsa, rap, folk, blues, and show tunes. “Like Walt Whitman,” Schwartz concludes, “Central Park embraces multitudes; it is a place where a person can go to hear America singing.”34 Diversity remains to be attained in the American heartland, however. The town portrayed in Monrovia, Indiana, located approximately in the heart of the state, is almost entirely white. The town, southwest of Indianapolis, with a population of approximately 1,400, voted 65 percent for Trump in 2016.35 Shot from the spring to fall of 2017, shortly after Trump had taken office, the film features many beautiful landscape images that evoke the rural Americana of Norman Rockwell, if not the dreamy howtown of e. e. cummings’s poem, read in its entirety in At Berkeley. Trump is never mentioned by name in the film, but American flags are everywhere, on front lawns, in the barbershop, at the Lions Club, on the vintage cars on display during the town festival, on baseball caps, motorcycle helmets, in the barrels of rifles in the town gun shop, and on T-shirts worn by local residents (a montage of shirts sold at the town festival feature progun and misogynist sentiments; see figure 11.6). “I’ve made movies in seventeen states but had not filmed in the rural Middle West,” explains Wiseman, and he only chose this particular town by chance, through an acquaintance. He claims that he didn’t make the film for political reasons, although he concedes that “It’s implicitly political.”36 The town has many things in common with the communities shown in the other films—pubs and

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FIGURE 11.6  Monrovia,

Indiana: American flags seem to be on display everywhere in

the town.

restaurants, supermarkets, hair salons and barber shops, veterinarians— but diversity isn’t one of them. The same is true of State Legislature. Within the resplendent rotunda of the capitol building, the chorus of schoolchildren singing a soulless version of the Black spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (“I will lay down my burden and be free”) is mostly white, with only a few brown faces visible in the group (see figure 11.7). At another point in the film, a group of Mexican American students performs a traditional dance in the legislature lobby, an entertainment interlude in which they are positioned as the exotic other to curious onlookers, who Wiseman shows in several shots looking on bemusedly. The scene comes shortly before the hallway meeting between a senator and an undocumented activist who is pushing for driver’s licenses for undocumented workers. No matter the argument the activist tries to make regarding community safety, the senator’s bottom line is that the workers are there illegally, which for him, ends the conversation. Paul Arthur wryly notes of the film, “Xenophobia never has a chance to rear its ugly head, due to a scarcity of xenos.”37 State Legislature begins with house speaker and cattleman Bruce Newcombe welcoming a group of high school students in the rotunda. He uses

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FIGURE 11.7  State Legislature: The school choir performs “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the capitol building.

the metaphor of the “gate cut,” which, as he explains, means the first cows of any designated number to come through the gate “are what you get,” to compare with the average citizens who come forward to serve part-time in the state senate. His analogy immediately evokes ominous connections to Meat, as do the pigs marked with a red stripe and shipped off early in Monrovia, Indiana—we know where they’re going (see figure 11.8). If the gate cut in the legislature represents a cross-section of Idahoans, as Newcombe avers, it is overwhelmingly white and male (although we do see a few women lawmakers). Their masculinist perspective seeps through at several points, as in the discussion about a bill to criminalize video voyeurism, where one male speaker draws a distinction between serious offenders and “football players and fraternity boys” who are just having harmless fun. A common thread that runs through many of the discussions in State Legislature, despite the range of legislative issues they address, involves

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FIGURE 11.8  Monrovia, Indiana: The metaphoric connotations of this scene are strengthened by its unavoidable associations with the earlier Meat.

people having democratic input and representation (“O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!”—Whitman, “Song of Myself ”). For example, one debate involves a bill about local charter schools and what level of local or state government is and should be authorized to approve them. There is also a long discussion about extending the ability of citizens to speak to proposals regarding animal feeding and water transfer sites if their permanent residence is more than one mile away. Senator Goedde hypothesizes that having no restrictions would allow activists from anywhere to come in, to which Senator Noh responds, “Freedom of speech can be inconvenient.” “With freedom come responsibilities, always,” says Senator Hill to close debate on legislation involving smoking in public places, and the importance of such responsible democratic participation is crucial to EX-LIBRIS. “People pay attention to people who participate,” explains Tony Marx at a library staff meeting. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, then director of the library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, gives a talk to library donors in which he quotes Toni Morrison’s description of libraries as “the pillars of our democracy,” and president Marx talks to library staff about digitizing information as a democratizing tool,

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referring to it as the “holy grail” that will take everyone out of the “digital dark” because “education, the access to information, is the fundamental solution over time to inequality.” As if to endorse this view, Wiseman follows this discussion with a montage of people doing research on computers. Shortly after that, children of color are shown reading and working on computers in a Bronx library branch, and soon after that, it is Asian immigrants learning computer skills. Later we see one of the library’s initiatives, distributing hotspot devices for remote internet connection to patrons eagerly lined up for them. In shooting EX-LIBRIS, Wiseman shuttled between the main branch (the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building) on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street and a dozen smaller branch libraries in Manhattan and the Bronx. Thus, the film involved shooting in more locations than for any of his other films,38 with the institution’s geographical spread indicating a grassroots view of libraries as the pillars of democracy, dispersed as if to support the weight of the people.39 Reinforcing the point, one of the organizers attempting to help local shopkeepers from being evicted by larger corporate interests in In Jackson Heights insists that “the first thing we need to do is awaken and educate people,” while a participant at a Boston NAACP meeting in City Hall observes, “History is the key thing . . . if people know history they get the good, they get the bad, they got a context for where we are, and then they can act.” At Berkeley, though, demonstrates the extent to which education is shaped by and intertwined with politics. At the beginning of the film, a professor points out to her students that “we need to think about structures of power and systems of decision-making” that shape one’s choices. “And partly what’s at stake here,” she continues, “as we talk about public education, is to think about how the restructuring of public education shapes not only socio-economic mobility for Americans, but in fact begins to shape a whole set of choices.” Student debt is cited as an example that might affect one’s choice of major and subsequent career path, and more than once, we hear that there are no funding assistance programs for middle-class students, with one such student even brought to tears by the situation. Guest lecturer and cancer researcher Dr. Mina Bissell tells her audience that earlier in her career, it was difficult for her to obtain research funding because her minority view about cancer genes was regarded as “complete heresy,” and in a scene of student recruitment,

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a faculty member explains to two prospective engineering students that one’s research interests in this field may not necessarily “align very well” with the mission of public funding. The point is reiterated by one of the student leaders speaking to the protesting students near the end of the film, who observes “how capitalism is reshaping education.” The university is a marketplace, subject to the dynamics of supply and demand, like the nearby street market on Telegraph Avenue that Wiseman also shows several times in the transitional montages. Capitalist competition also informs In Jackson Heights, where the Queens Business Improvement District (BID) threatens many local businesses in a neighborhood that, until then, had resisted gentrification, and toward the end of City Hall, similarly, there is a meeting among some entrepreneurs who want to open a cannabis shop and the local residents who are concerned about the impact it would have on the neighborhood. In Jackson Heights returns to this issue a number of times, with local business owners discussing the implications of the BID proposal and the need to organize against it in several sequences. Some shop windows display going-out-of-business signs, making clear that the threat is imminent, and transitional montages include shots of local outlets of corporate franchises, such as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, and a large Gap store, seen as a villainous corporate interloper by local proprietors, in a shot that Wiseman holds for several seconds. The threat of gentrification and of being pushed out by landlords, investors, and outside developers looms over local business owners and the film, like the elevated subway that seems to be everywhere in the neighborhood in the transitional montages. Belfast, Maine, writes Stuart Klawans, “quietly but devastatingly reveals the wounds inflicted by this economy” on one particular post-industrial community,40 with several scenes involving people visiting the Salvation Army store, social service workers picking lice from impoverished clients, workers doing dull and repetitive manual labor, and so on. (“They sewed their isn’t, they reaped their same, sun, moon, stars, rain,” writes cummings.) Not very long into the film, Halloween images begin to appear, first in the form of a jack-o-lantern on a woman’s shirt, and then one of the transitional montages contains shots of Halloween decorations on front lawns, including a death mask on which Wiseman holds momentarily. As one of the guides states in National Gallery when discussing Holbein’s “The Ambassadors,” “To put a skull, which is a symbol of death,

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into a portrait is a strange and unusual thing, perhaps. Certain symbols, certain objects, are multi-valent. They carry manifold symbols, but not the skull. The skull is always, is it not, a symbol of death.” And indeed, much of the town’s life seems stultifying, as summed up in the lengthy sequence involving the processing and packaging of stuffed potatoes. As the potatoes move along the various conveyor belts, the shells are halved in trays before being stuffed, the empty shells reminiscent of the scene in Meat of cattle butchering to the tune of “What Kind of Fool Am I?” (“an empty shell”) and the discussion of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation” (“couched in our indifference, like shells upon the shore”) in High School. The town seems deadened by the standardization of the marketplace, with its emphasis on weighing and quantifying. Sardines are measured as they move through the fish packing process in the local Stinson Cannery, the fingers of the workers bloodied and bandaged from their cutting. At the local pet shop in the strip mall, there are tanks of tropical fish for sale, along with lizards, mice, and birds. The fish are bagged and sold, objects of exchange, like the foxes that are skinned for their pelts. In the Stinson fish plant, salmon are sliced into fillets and packed in neat rows, the packages recognized as identical to those shown earlier filling the shelves in the local Shop n’ Save. A social worker has a frail man named Frances struggle to stand on a scale to be weighed, not unlike the dead deer that two hunters hoist onto a scale with some effort. Baked goods are weighed and priced at Perry’s Nut House, accompanied by a closeup of a shopper snapping her purse closed. In a found metaphor as resonant as Mr. Hirsch’s monologue about Waiting for Godot in Welfare, there is a stuffed animal museum above the nut shop. “Why are they dead?” a little girl asks of her mother as Wiseman provides a montage of the stuffed animals (see figure 11.9). After the girl’s perceptive question and a few transitional shots, we next see the agent workers at the local MBNA America center in their cubicles, a sterile and restrictive space compared to the beauties of the natural New England autumnal landscape to which the film frequently returns. The transitional shots in all the films feature images of ambulances, fire engines, and police cars, and the soundtracks are punctuated with their sirens, alarums ringing amidst Whitman’s beloved “blab of the pave.” Nevertheless, Wiseman remains a believer in the democratic system—unlike Herman Melville, who, according to the high school English teacher

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FIGURE 11.9  Belfast,

Maine: The stuffed animals at Perry’s Nut House provide another

resonant metaphor.

in Belfast, Maine, grew totally disillusioned and came to believe in The Confidence-Man (at one time, recall, Wiseman had named it among his favorite books) that “everything in America is a confidence game.” Showing City Hall at the Venice Film Festival in September 2020, the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, Wiseman said of democracy, “Does it function perfectly? Obviously not, but I do not know any form of government that does.”41 “I made City Hall to illustrate why government is necessary for people to successfully live together. . . . The Boston city government is designed and strives to offer these services in a manner consistent with the Constitution and democratic norms,” he has said elsewhere.42 The system is celebrated in State Legislature on multiple occasions even as it is shown to be cumbersome. One legislator explains that “An RS is a proposed bill. And then after the committee, and is proprietary, and then after the committee votes to, as the chairman mentioned today, if the committee votes to print an RS, then it becomes public, and the public bill is available to everybody in the world, on the internet, they can pick it up in the basement, they can, they can get copies of the bill,

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and then it’s a bill. And then the chairman has the discretion of putting it back on his agenda, when it’s referred back to him from the floor of the Senate, on having hearings.” A lobbyist jokes with Speaker Newcombe about the unwieldy bureaucracy of government in the form of a newly discovered mineral, “governmentonium,” which “causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it ordinarily would take less than a second,” and the mass of which “will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.” Everyone laughs in recognition of the joke’s truth. Interestingly, we never see any bill actually passed into law in State Legislature. Providing something of a dramatic climax to the film is a tense discussion about a proposed amendment regarding gay marriage that would go against state law, which does not recognize such unions. Senator Goedde does not state a position on whether he supports sending the measure to the floor for debate but explains that he wants the committee to take what is considered an extraordinary step and overrule the chair on the matter so that it can receive the public hearing it deserves. When the vote is taken, the motion fails. Nevertheless, “Democracy is hard work. And it should be,” declares a student leader in At Berkeley. “This is what democracy looks like.” The third and final act of Our Town has to do with death and mortality, with a scene in the town cemetery, and this is where Belfast, Maine ends, with several shots of the town cemetery and its grave markers. This sobering conclusion invokes intimations of mortality, like the final curtain in La Comédie-Française, as discussed at the end of chapter 10. The Stage Manager tells the audience at the beginning of act 3, “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”43 Although numerous priests and preachers propound a belief in the soul and in the afterlife in Wiseman’s cinema, the films do not endorse such a view, nor do they indicate that the filmmaker himself holds any orthodox beliefs. For Errol Morris, in fact, in Wiseman’s films, “We characteristically feel the absence of God rather than his presence.”44 Some of the earlier films criticize organized religion, as discussed in chapter 3 on the military films, but in these later films, in keeping with his more open, more democratic approach, that is not the case. Wiseman presents the Masons’ award ceremony in Monrovia, Indiana, for example, as no more or less solemn—or absurd, depending upon one’s point of

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FIGURE 11.10  Monrovia, Indiana: The film shows a variety of religious and secular rituals.

view—than the film’s several church services (see figure 11.10). He gives them equal time to have their say. If anything in these films is sacred, it is the democratic arena itself, just as park administrator Betsy Barlow Rogers in Central Park describes the egalitarian park as a “holy space.”45 According to philosopher Alexander Leicht in his work on democracy and art, “Certain kinds of loose, open, non-hierarchical collage structures can be seen to share features with how democratic theory describes a pluralist democratic society.” Leicht finds democracy to be based on core philosophic assumptions of respect for the autonomous self, pluralism, consensus, and openness to process. Examining the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Walker Evans, and William Carlos Williams as his case studies, he correctly cautions that democratic art is not necessarily the same as popular art, that democratic art has often but incorrectly been viewed as synonymous with accessibility and art for “the so-called popular man.” Rather, democratic art has to do with how it expresses democratic values in form as well as content. Leicht identifies several common and essential aspects to works that express a democratic aesthetic: “An egalitarian respect for the individual elements of an artwork, combined with a non-hierarchical attention to the mundane; an acceptance of multiplicity and contingency, together with a search for coherence; and an

28 8 O U R TOW N

experimental and procedural approach discernible in the artwork.”46 Wiseman’s films include all of these qualities: shooting without a script, he relies on aleatory techniques; attention is just as often focused on the typical, the unremarkable, as on the dramatic; in the editing, he works out a structure for the film; and he embraces ambiguity and viewer participation in making meaning. Toward the end of Central Park, there is public debate at a board meeting involving a decision as to whether to demolish the park’s existing tennis house and build a new one that is fraught with competing interests and different points of view. Demonstrating Leicht’s point, Wiseman patiently records and includes these various positions. This treatment is characteristic of Wiseman’s approach in these films. In his conclusion, Leicht speculates about applying his analysis to works of art in other media, like dance or music, but, astonishingly, never even mentions film—even though at the outset he specifically excludes State Legislature from his discussion, along with Henry Adams’s novel Democracy (1882) and Warren Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), on the grounds that they are about democracy without demonstrating the formal qualities of democratic art. Yet, omitting a consideration of a film like State Legislature (not to mention film more broadly as a medium) makes little sense because it, like the other films discussed in this chapter, clearly are aesthetic constructions that abide by the formal qualities Leicht himself identifies. Of course, Wiseman’s chosen medium, cinema, was the great democratizing art of the modern era. As film historian Robert Sklar has written, “For the first half of the twentieth century—from 1896 to 1946, to be exact—movies were the most popular and influential medium of culture in the United States.”47 Apart from localized restrictions, as cinema grew in popularity, people of different classes, ethnicities, and races mixed in the audience.48 Journalists writing about the popularity of film in the early years of the century referred to movie houses as “democracy’s theatre.”49 While Wiseman concedes that “thousands of people aren’t that easily moved in a democratic society,”50 public screenings and television broadcasts do provide ways of reaching a large audience. In the context of the documentary, Carl Plantinga argues that Wiseman’s films “exemplify the open voice.” Somewhat differently from the schema of Bill Nichols, Plantinga hypothesizes three “voices,” or tones, in nonfiction film: the formal, the open, and the poetic. The open voice

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“abdicates some of its epistemic authority to explain the world.” And the choice to withhold contextual explanations, he notes, “also may facilitate a democracy of interpretation, allowing the spectator to come to her own conclusions.”51 While Plantinga acknowledges that individual films may feature more than one of these voices, in Wiseman’s films, the open voice is predominant. Speaking during the “Books at Noon” series in EX-LIBRIS, poet Yusef Komunyakaa responds, when asked about whether he regards himself as a political poet, by insisting that “language is political” and that a poem’s politics are “woven into the emotional architecture of the poem.” The same is true of films, of course. In this group of films, consistent with the democratic values they express, Wiseman refuses to condescend to the viewer by assuming an authorial superiority. “I have a horror of obvious, cliché-ridden political statements in films,” Wiseman has said. Instead, he believes that documentaries are suspect if they do not reveal ambiguity.52 (“You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself ”—Whitman, “Song of Myself.”) Wiseman maintains, “The true film lies halfway between the screen and the mind of the viewer.”53 His films seek, as he puts it, to eliminate the cinematic equivalent of the proscenium arch in theatre,54 to leave it to the reader to figure out what he is saying. For Walt Whitman, such aesthetic interaction is integral to the functioning of democracy because it activates the intelligence of readers and requires their willing participation, thus creating a kind of responsible aesthetic citizenship. This ideal is based, as Whitman said, on “the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework.”55 Theologian Alyda Faber argues that Wiseman’s films employ what she refers to as “democratic noise.” Citing political scientist David Panagia, she claims that democracy demands attention “not only to what is said but also to the ‘aurality of an utterance,’ its vocal qualities, its duration, its pauses, its interruptions, its babble and ‘democratic non-sense.’ ”56 At the beginning of this book, I noted how Wiseman’s films capture “the barbaric yawps” of vernacular speech, the common speech of a people that literary scholar Richard Bridgman refers to as “the nation’s common fund

29 0 O U R TOW N

of language.”57 Faber claims that Wiseman’s films are like parables in their characteristic lack of contextual explanation for what we see and that, as a result, they open up a space for viewers to regard others normally marginalized or ignored with a “reciprocity” that is deeply spiritual and religious. Certainly, this quality of Wiseman’s vision is most manifest in Essene and the Deaf and Blind films, as discussed in chapter 7, but Faber finds it as early as High School and Juvenile Court. She claims that Wiseman’s films envision “radically egalitarian possibilities within the given social world of persistent hierarchies and domination,” an important point before she moves into a religious frenzy with references to “the soul, the neighbor as stranger, God.”58 As the previous chapters have shown, throughout his career, Wiseman has approached his subjects in different ways, the films’ styles consistently appropriate to their content. The group of films discussed in this chapter takes a different approach still. In State Legislature, a few speakers are shown responding to the proposal for an “American Heritage Monument” in the Capital Building that would include the Christian Ten Commandments. A rabbi explains that there are a number of variations of the Commandments, which raises the question of privileging one over the others. A local man (Gary Bennett from Emmett) suggests that other documents, including the U.S. Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, should also be included, while reiterating the Founding Fathers’ warnings about the separation of church and state (the legislative session opens with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance). And a former teacher who explains that “I’m representing myself—and hopefully our country” expresses support for the proposal because it will help stave off, at least temporarily, the barbarians at the gates and the inevitable collapse of American civilization with the rise of a “new world order.” Each is presented in turn, allowed to speak their piece. And Wiseman is careful to include in almost every meeting in these films both a series of closeups of individual faces and long shots that contextualize them within the larger group. While this technique also appears in other Wiseman films, in these films, it takes on special significance in that the editing invokes and seeks to resolve the tension between individualism and society at the core of democratic theory and vividly articulated by Whitman in Democratic Vistas as necessary in order to keep the union together.

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Film scholar and maker Michael Chanan observes that one of the “crucial differences” between documentary and fiction “is that fiction addresses the viewer primarily as a private individual, it speaks to the interior life of feelings, sentiments and secret desires; whereas documentary addresses the viewer primarily as a citizen, member of civil society, putative participant in the public sphere.”59 Quite conscious of this audience from early on in his career, Wiseman insists that he does not prescribe solutions because he’s not a pharmacist, and “what the films do is give people some information. Hopefully on the basis of this and other information people will be able to make more informed decisions about what, if any, change they would like to have take place.”60 Such active involvement is reinforced by history professor Robert L. Allen, who, in his guest lecture in At Berkeley, begins by asking, “What is the role of ordinary people in social change?” and concludes by telling his listeners to look into history for themselves. At the end of In Jackson Heights, a man explains that he was fired from his job because of discrimination and that he has no power to do anything about it. “One is sometimes left wondering what the reality of this country is,” he concludes, leaving spectators with the kind of probing rhetorical question that comes at the end of High School and Hospital.61 At Berkeley ends with a literal question addressed to viewers as citizens. After the protesters disperse and the banner comes down from the library façade, and the traffic flows by, behind the credits, we see a pageant of silhouetted actors walking in different ways across a stage accompanied by Willie Nelson singing “City of New Orleans” with its refrain, “Good morning, America, how are you?” The question, now addressed to the viewer, is accompanied visually by a parade of anonymous people from all “walks of life”—another parade, as in In Jackson Heights, celebrating diversity. No matter who we are, that is to say, democracy requires our participation. But because maintaining democracy is such “hard work,” as the student leader says in At Berkeley, the image of blind students in EX-LIBRIS reading “The Declaration of Independence” in braille assumes much metaphoric resonance as we grope our collective way toward a more perfect union. As mentioned earlier in this book, documentary scholar Bill Nichols writes that Wiseman’s late films reveal a profound “respect” and “love”62 for his profilmic subjects. It might be said that these films also reveal the

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same attitude toward their viewers, for Wiseman allows them space to listen and interpret for themselves, to be active participants in the construction of the films’ meaning. Paraphrasing Whitman, D. W. Griffith said, “To have great motion pictures, we must have good audiences, too.”63 Ultimately, it is these “good audiences” that Wiseman seeks to discover on his voyages, audiences that are engaged and attentive to what is before them. And even as the search seems particularly urgent in these late films, they are, in both style and content, truly democratic in spirit.

FILMOGRAPHY

The Cool World (1963; b&w, 104 min.) Screenplay by Shirley Clarke and Carl Lee Adapted from the novel by Warren Miller and the play by Warren Miller and Robert Rossen Photographed by Baird Bryant Sound recorded by David Jones Music by Mal Waldron Produced by Frederick Wiseman Directed and edited by Shirley Clarke Cast: Hampton Clanton (Duke Custis), Yolanda Rodriquez (Luanne), Carl Lee (Priest), Clarence Williams (Blood), Gloria Foster (Mrs. Custis) Titicut Follies (1967; b&w, 89 min.) Photographed by John Marshall Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Best Film, Mannheim International Film Week, 1967 Best Film Dealing With the Human Condition, Festival dei Popoli, 1967 High School (1968; b&w, 75 min.) Photographed by Richard Leiterman Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Law and Order (1969; b&w, 81 min.) Photographed by William Brayne

29 4FILM O GRAP H Y

Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Emmy, Best News Documentary, 1969 Award for Exceptional Merit, Philadelphia International Festival, 1971 Hospital (1970; b&w, 84 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Emmy Award, Best Documentary, 1970 Emmy Award, Best Director, 1970 Catholic Filmmakers Award, Mannheim International Film Week, 1970 Dupont Award, Best Documentary, Columbia University School of Journalism, for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, 1970 Red Ribbon, American Film Festival, 1972 Basic Training (1971; b&w, 89 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Award for Exceptional Merit, Philadelphia International Festival, 1971 Essene (1972; b&w, 86 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Gabriel Award, Catholic Broadcasters Association, 1972 Juvenile Court (1973; b&w, 144 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Silver Phoenix, Atlanta International Film Festival, 1974

FILMOGRAPHY295

CINE Golden Eagle, Council of International Nontheatrical Events, Washington, DC, 1974 Columbia Dupont Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, 1974 Emmy Award nomination, Best News Documentary, 1974 Dupont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, 1975 Primate (1974; b&w, 105 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Welfare (1975; b&w, 167 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Gold Medal, Special Jury Award, Virgin Islands International Film Festival, 1975 CINE Golden Eagle Certificate, 1975 Best Documentary, Athens International Film Festival, 1976 Ohio State Award for Excellence in Broadcasting, 1977 Meat (1976; b&w, 113 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Canal Zone (1977; b&w, 174 min.) Photographed by William Brayne Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Golden Athena Award for Best Feature, Athens International Film Festival, 1978 Sinai Field Mission (1978; b&w, 127 min.) Photographed by William Brayne

29 6 FILM O GRAP H Y

Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Manoeuvre (1979; b&w, 115 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: CINE Golden Eagle Certificate, 1980 Best Documentary, Festival Internacional de Cinema, Portugal, 1980 Model (1980; b&w, 129 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: CINE Golden Eagle Certificate, 1981 Seraphita’s Diary (1982; color, 90 min.) Screenplay by Frederick Wiseman Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by David John Adapted, produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Cast: Apollonia van Ravenstein Awards: Honorary Mention, Festival dei Popoli, 1983 Gold Special Jury Award, Houston Film Festival, 1983 The Store (1983; color, 118 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Racetrack (1985; b&w, 114 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman

FILM O GRAP H Y297

Blind (1986; color, 132 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Honorary Mention, American Film and Video Festival, 1987 Deaf (1986; color, 164 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Adjustment and Work (1986; color, 120 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Multi-Handicapped (1986; color, 126 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Missile (1987; color, 115 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Near Death (1989; b&w, 358 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: International Critics’ Prize, Berlin Film Festival, 1990 Media Award, Retirement Research Foundation, 1990 Broadcast Media Award, American Association of Critical Care Nurses, 1990

29 8 FILM O GRAP H Y

DuPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, Columbia University School of Journalism, 1990 L’Age d’Or Prize, Royal Film Archive of Belgium, 1990 Central Park (1989; color, 176 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: CINE Golden Eagle Certificate, 1990 Aspen (1991; color, 146 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Zoo (1993; color, 130 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Mayor’s Prize, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 1993 High School II (1994; color, 220 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Ballet (1995; color, 170 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Golden Gate Award Certificate of Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1996 La Comédie-Française, ou L’amour joué (1996; color, 223 min.) Photographed by John Davey

FILM O GRAP H Y29 9

Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Competition Jury’s Special Prize, Yamagata International Film Festival, 1997 Public Housing (1997; color, 200 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Jury Award, L’Age d’Or Prize, Royal Film Archive of Belgium, 1998 Prix du Cinéma de Recherche, Grand Prix, Vue sur les Docs, International Documentary Film Festival, Marseilles, 1998 Belfast, Maine (1999; color, 248 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Mayor’s Prize, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 1999 Documentary Award of Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich Documentary Festival, 2000 Domestic Violence (2001; color, 196 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Silver Hugo Award, Chicago Film Festival, 2001 Domestic Violence 2 (2002; color, 160 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman La dernière lettre/ The Last Letter (2002; b&w, 61 min.) Photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis

3 0 0 FILM O GRAP H Y

Sound recorded by François Waledisch Produced by Frederick Wiseman and Pierre-Olivier Bardet Edited and directed by Frederick Wiseman Cast: Catherine Samie The Garden (2005 [unreleased]; color, 196 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman State Legislature (2006; color, 217 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: Templeton Award, Visions du Réel, Switzerland, 2007 La danse—Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris (2009; color, 158 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Edited by Valérie Pico Produced and directed by Frederick Wiseman I Miss Sonia Henie (2009; color, 20 min.) Directed by Karpo Acimovic-Godina, Tinto Brass, Mladomir “Purisa” Djordjevic, Milos Forman, Buck Henry, Dusan Makavejev, Paul Morrisey, Frederick Wiseman Boxing Gym (2010; color, 91 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Crazy Horse (2011; 134 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced by Pierre-Olivier Bardet and Frederick Wiseman Edited and directed by Frederick Wiseman

FILMOGRAPHY301

At Berkeley (2013; color, 244 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman National Gallery (2014; color, 180 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced by Pierre-Olivier Bardet and Frederick Wiseman Edited and directed by Frederick Wiseman In Jackson Heights (2015; color, 190 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced, edited, and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film (Documentary), 2015 EX-LIBRIS: The New York Public Library (2017; color, 197 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced by Frederick Wiseman and Karen Konicek Edited and directed by Frederick Wiseman Awards: FIPRESCI Critics Jury Award, Venice International Film Festival, 2017 Monrovia, Indiana (2018; color, 143 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Edited by Valérie Pico and Frederick Wiseman Produced and directed by Frederick Wiseman City Hall (2020; color, 272 min.) Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Frederick Wiseman Produced by Frederick Wiseman and Karen Konicek Edited and directed by Frederick Wiseman

302FILM O GRAP H Y

Un couple (2022; color, 63 min.) Screenplay by Nathalie Boutefeu and Frederick Wiseman Photographed by John Davey Sound recorded by Jean-Paul Mugel Produced by Frederick Wiseman and Karen Konicek Edited and directed by Frederick Wiseman Cast: Nathalie Boutefeu

T H E AT E R

Tonight We Improvise by Luigi Pirandello. American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA. Director of video sequences and actor in role of documentary filmmaker, November 1986–February 1987 The Last Letter, an adaptation from the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Director, May 1988 Hate by Joshua Goldstein. American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Director, January 1991 Welfare: The Opera, story by Frederick Wiseman and David Slavitt, libretto by David Slavitt, music by Lenny Pickett. American Music Theater Festival, Philadelphia. Director, June 1992 Welfare: The Opera, story by Frederick Wiseman and David Slavitt, libretto by David Slavitt, music by Lenny Pickett. St. Anne’s Center for Restoration and the Arts, New York. Director, May 1997 The Last Letter, an adaptation from the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. La Comédie-Française, Paris. Director, March-April 2000, SeptemberNovember 2000 The Last Letter, an adaptation from the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. North American Tour with La Comédie-Française production (Ottawa/ Toronto, Canada; Cambridge/Springfield, MA; New York; Chicago). Director, May–June 2001 The Last Letter, an adaptation from the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Theatre for a New Audience, New York. Director, December 2003 Happy Days (Oh Les Beaux Jours) by Samuel Beckett. La Comédie-Française, Paris. Director, November 2005–January 2006. Director and Actor, January–March 2007 La Belle d’Amherst (The Belle of Amherst) by William Luce. Le Théâtre Noir, Paris. Director, May–July 2012

PERSONAL AWARDS

Gold Hugo Award, Chicago International Film Festival, 1972 Personal Achievement Gabriel Award, Catholic Broadcasters Association, 1975 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, 1980–1981 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 1982–1987 Great Director Tribute and Award for Continuing Directorial Achievement in the Documentary Field, USA Film Festival, 1984 Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1987 Louis Hazam Award, Washington Film and Video Council, 1987 Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking, Virginia Festival of American Film, 1988 Career Achievement Award, International Documentary Association, 1990 Humanitarian Award, Massachusetts Psychological Association, 1990 Peabody Award for Significant and Meritorious Achievement, 1990 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991 The Rosenberger Medal, University of Chicago, 1999 Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 2000 Irene Diamond Life-Time Achievement Award/Human Rights Watch, 2000 Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, 2002 Yale Law Association Award of Merit, 2002 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Career Award, 2002

3 0 4P ERS O NAL AWARDS

Dan David Prize Laureate, 2003 George Polk Career Award, 2006 Distinguished Achievement Award, American Society of Cinematographers, 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award, Chicago International Documentary Festival, 2007 IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) Living Legend Award, 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award, News and Documentary Emmy Awards, 2010 Dartmouth Film Award, Dartmouth College, 2010 Special Award, New York Film Critics Circle Awards, 2013 Career Achievement Award, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, 2013 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Venice International Film Festival, 2014 Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2016 France Culture Prix Consécration, Cannes Film Festival, 2016 Cameraimage Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking, 2017 Disability Law Center Impact Award, 2017 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 2018 Critics’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award, 2019 Library Lions Honoree, New York Public Library, 2019 Carrosse d’Or, Cannes Film Festival, 2021

H O N O R A RY D E G R E E S

Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Cincinnati, 1973 Doctor of Humane Letters, Williams College, 1976 Doctor of Fine Arts, Lake Forest College, 1991 Doctor of Humane Letters, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 1994 Doctor of Fine Arts, Princeton University, 1994 Doctor of Fine Arts, Bowdoin College, 2005 Doctor of Fine Arts, City University of New York at Purchase, 2009 Doctor Honoris Causa, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, 2016

RETROSPECTIVE SCREENINGS

1972 1972 1975 1975 1975 1976 1976 1978 1979 1979 1979 1980 1980 1982 1982 1983 1984 1984 1993 1993 1994

Chicago International Film Festival National Film Theatre, London Swedish Film Cinematheque, Stockholm Danish Cinematheque, Copenhagen Paris Film Cinematheque Norsk Filminstitutt, Oslo Filmex, Los Angeles International Film Festival Spanish Film Cinematheque, Madrid and Barcelona Cleveland International Film Festival Denver International Film Festival Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin Royal Film Archive, Brussels American Film Institute, Los Angeles Festival Internacional de Cinema, Lisbon Danske Filmskole, Copenhagen Svenska Filminstitutet/Cinemateket, Stockholm Durban Film Festival USA Film Festival, Dallas Boston Film Festival Museum of Television and Radio, New York Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA Bombay Film Festival

306RETROSPECTIVE SCREENINGS

1997 1997 1997 1998 1998 1998 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000 2001 2001 2001 2001–2002 2001 2002 2002 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2005 2005 2003 2005 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2007

First International Conference on Documentary Films, Beijing Film Forum, New York La Cinématèque de Toulouse Filmoteca de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona Filmoteca Española, Madrid Libero Bizzarri, Italy Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montreal Sheffield Film Festival National Film Theatre, London Chalon-sur-Saône, France Palermo, Italy Milan, Italy Göteborg, Sweden Prague, Czech Republic São Paulo, Brazil Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival, Toronto Internationale Filmfestspiele, Berlin Salt Lake City Film Festival Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, Berlin Österreichischen Filmmuseum, Vienna Ilju Art House, Seoul Irish Film Institute, Dublin DocPoint Film Festival, Helsinki Swedish Film Institute and Cinematheque, Stockholm Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus American Film Festival, Moscow Centre Georges Pompidou/Bibliothèque publique d’information, Paris Cinémathèque Française, Paris Chicago International Documentary Film Festival

RETROSPECTIVE SCREENINGS307

2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2009 2009 2010 2013 2013 2016 2017 2017–2018 2017 2017 2017 2018 2019 2019

Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporareo, Mexico City Lisbon International Documentary Film Festival, Portugal Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic Cineteca Nazionale, Rome Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin Documenta Madrid, Spain International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam Museum of Modern Art, New York Slovenska Kinoteka, Ljubljana Juruberba Produções, Rio de Janeiro CineFamily, Los Angeles Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Film Forum, New York Cinémathèque Suisse, Lausanne Les Cinémas Du Grütli, Geneva Cameraimage, Warsaw Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA Shanghai Film Festival Filmoteca Española, Madrid

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

Annette Kuhn, “The Camera I: Observations on Documentary,” Screen 19, no. 2 (1978– 1979): 75. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, “Case Study: The Beginnings of American Cinema Verité,” in Film History: Theory and Practice, ed. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery (New York: Knopf, 1985), 229. Kuhn, “The Camera I,” 72, 76. Alan Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 8. Raymond Carney, American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 16. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27 (Winter 1962/63): 1–8. Reprinted in Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 35–45. André Bazin, “La Politique des Auteurs,” Cahiers du cinéma 70 (1957). Reprinted in The New Wave, ed. and trans. Peter Graham (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 137–155; and in Grant, Auteurs and Authorship, 19–28. The pros and cons of auteur theory are discussed in my introduction to Auteurs and Authorship and in several of the essays that follow. See, for example, Celestino Deleyto, “Film Genres at the Crossroads: What Genres and Films Do to Each Other,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 218–236. Chabrol’s “Little Themes,” from Cahiers du cinéma 100 (1959) is included in Graham, The New Wave, 73–77. Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 284, 289. John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 35.

3 10 INTRO D U CTIO N

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968), 42. Anon., “Viewpoints: Shooting the Institution,” Time, December 9, 1974, 95; and Sherie Posesorski, “Social Trials Tracked Through Institutions,” Broadcast Week, June 18, 1988), 10. See also Ira Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” Filmmakers Newsletter 7, no. 4 (February 1974): 24; and Christina Robb, “Focus on Life,” Boston Globe Magazine, January 23, 1983, 33. Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 2; Richard Leacock, qtd. in Louis Marcorelles, Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Filmmaking, trans. Isabel Quigly (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 53. G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-Makers (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1971), 321. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, revised ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 102. Errol Morris, “The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed Joshua Siegel and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 65. Richard Shickel, “A Vérité View of High School,” Life, September 12, 1969 (pagination varies by region); David Bromwich, “Documentary Now,” Dissent, October 1971, 508; David R. Slavitt, “Basic Training,” Contempora 2, no. 1 (September/February 1972), 11; Ken Gay, “Primate,” Films and Filming 21, no. 6 (March 1975), 38; and Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” New Yorker, October 18, 1969, 204. Frederick Wiseman, “A Sketch of a Life,” in Siegel and de Navacelle, Frederick Wiseman, 20. Robb, “Focus on Life,” 17. A. William Bluem, Documentary in American Television (New York: Hastings House, 1972), 16. Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 351–352. Wiseman, “A Sketch,” 28–29. Glenn Rifkin, “Wiseman Looks at Affluent Texans,” New York Times, December 11, 1983; Wiseman, “What Public TV Needs: Less Bureaucracy,” New York Times, November 27, 1988. See also Dai Vaughan, Television Documentary Usage (London: British Film Institute, 1976), chap. 3, for a discussion of how television discourages the development of distinctive and original documentary work.

1. MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA 1. 2.

A. William Bluem, Documentary in American Television (New York: Hastings House, 1972), 128–131. In Television Documentary Usage (London: British Film Institute, 1976), 22–23, Dai Vaughan uses the term in a way indistinguishable from Rouch’s approach to visual

1. M AN W ITH A M OVIE CAM ER A 31 1

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

ethnography. Young is unnecessarily prescriptive in his description of observational cinema as a type of documentary that does not manipulate chronology through editing, where “the subject directs the filmmaker, rather than the other way around,” where the director begins with a sympathetic attitude toward his or her subject and the presence of the camera is acknowledged, as in Rouch’s notion of shared anthropology. See also Colin Young, “Observational Cinema,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 65–79. For an early discussion of these filmmakers, see Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” Film Culture 24 (Spring 1962): 6–16. Critics have taken the same view. Cf. George Bluestone’s comment about a sequence involving Humphrey in Primary that it “gives us more insight into the bone-crushing fatigue of a primary campaign than a thousand narrative assertions.” “The Intimate Television Documentary,” Television Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 52. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 236. See Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 5. Barnouw, Documentary, 254–255. Quoted in Ian Cameron and Mark Shivas, “Cinéma Verité: A Survey Including Interviews,” Movie 8 (April 1963): 13, 12. See Mick Eaton, ed., Anthropology—Reality—Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 61; G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-Makers (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1971), 137. Boris Kaufman, “Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice,” in The Documentary Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Norton, 1979), 78. Levin, Documentary Explorations, 137; Rouch interviewed by Cameron and Shivas, “Cinéma Verité: A Survey,” 22. Ira Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” Filmmakers Newsletter 7, no. 4 (February 1974): 20. See also Frederick Wiseman, “How Much Truth,” TV Mailbag, New York Times, March 1, 1970, 22; Donald E. McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 25; and Levin, Documentary Explorations, 318–319. See also Frederick Wiseman, “A Sketch of a Life,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Joshua Siegel and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 41–43. Christina Robb, “Focus on Life,” Boston Globe Magazine, January 23, 1983, 26. Frederick Wiseman, quoted in Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil, eds., Photography Within the Humanities (Danbury, NH: Addison House, 1977), 69–70; Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” 19; Levin, Documentary Explorations, 318. Gerald Peary, “Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Boston Phoenix, March 1998, http:// www.geraldpeary.com/interviews/wxyz/wiseman.html. Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 6. Lewis Jacobs, “Documentary Becomes Engaged and Vérité,” in The Documentary Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. Jacobs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 378.

3 121. M AN W ITH A M OVIE CA MER A

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

See Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950), 121–126. John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979), 39. Quoted in Alan Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 32. Similarly, in their film Letter to Jane (1972), Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin specify on the soundtrack that they are not speaking about the person Jane Fonda, but “the function of Jane” as a star image. E. Ann Kaplan, “Theory and Practice of the Realist Documentary Form in Harlan County, U.S.A.,” in “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, ed. Thomas Waugh (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 214. See also Michael Renov, “Re-Thinking Documentary: Toward a Taxonomy of Mediation,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (1986): 71–77. James Wolcott, “Welfare Must Be Seen,” Village Voice, September 29, 1975, 126. John Barth, The Floating Opera (New York: Avon, 1967), 116–117. André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma 1 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1959), 57, trans. by J. Dudley Andrew in The Major Film Theories (New York: Oxford, 1976), 144. Cf. Eric Rohmer’s claim in “De la metaphore” that concrete reality on the screen is the stuff of poetry. Cahiers du cinéma 9, no. 51 (1955): 2–9. Reprinted as “About Metaphor,” in Realism and the Cinema: A Reader, ed. Christopher Williams, trans. Diana Matias (London: Routledge, 1980), 62–68. Dan Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Cinema of the Absurd: Welfare, or ‘Waiting for the Dole,’ ” Film Criticism 12, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 2–19. Wiseman used this phrase during the Editing Reality symposium at the State University of New York at Buffalo, September 24, 1988. In an early essay published while a teaching fellow at Boston University’s Law-Medicine Research Institute, Wiseman already revealed a sensitivity to the importance of body language and gesture, as well as verbal intonation. “Lawyer-Client Interviews: Some Lessons from Psychiatry,” Boston University Law Review 39, no. 2 (Spring 1959): 181–187. Levin, Documentary Explorations, 323. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, ed. Warner Berthoff (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), 33. Walt Whitman, “Faces,” in Leaves of Grass: A Facsimile of the First Edition (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), 83. Michael J. Arlen, “The Air: Fred Wiseman’s ‘Kino Pravda,’ ” New Yorker, August 21, 1980, 94; Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 41; Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), chap. 8. Louis Marcorelles, Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Film-Making (New York: Praeger, 1973). McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” 17; Stephen Mamber, “The New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” Cinema 6, no. 1 (n.d.), 38; Mamber, Cinema Verite in America, 217; “Viewpoints: Shooting the Institution,” Time, December 9, 1974, 95; and Janet Handelman, “An Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Film Library Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1970): 6.

1. M AN W ITH A M OVIE CAM ER A 31 3

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

Andrew Sarris, The John Ford Movie Mystery (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 85. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 18. Quoted in Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 50. See Mamber, Cinema Verite in America, 115–140. James Blue, “One Man’s Truth: Interview with Richard Leacock,” Film Comment 3, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 17; and James Blue, “Thoughts on Cinéma Vérité and a Discussion with the Maysles Brothers,” Film Comment 2 (Fall 1965): 27. Bill Nichols, “Fred Wiseman’s Documentaries: Theory and Structure,” Film Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 15–28; and Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), chap. 7. John Graham and George Garett, “How Far Can You Go: A Conversation with Fred Wiseman,” Contempora 1, no. 4 (October/November 1970): 32; Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action, 72; and “Viewpoints,” 95. Graham and Garett, “How Far Can You Go,” 32. See also Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” 22; Frederick Wiseman, “A Filmmaker’s Choices,” Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 1984, 30; “Viewpoints,” 95; Janis and MacNeil, Photography Within the Humanities, 72; and Sylvia Feldman, “The Wiseman Documentary,” Human Behavior 5 (February 1976): 65–66. Philip Nicholson and Elizabeth Nicholson, “Meet Lawyer-Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman,” American Bar Association Journal 61, no. 3 (1975): 332; Hillary DeVries, “Fred Wiseman’s Unblinking Camera Watches How Society Works,” Christian Science Monitor, May 1, 1984, 27. Lindsay Anderson described Wiseman’s cinema more accurately than his own when he said it is “a form in which the elements that you use are the actual elements. It is the manipulation of the actual world into, as far as I am concerned, a poetic form— and that is documentary.” Levin, Documentary Explorations, 66. Benson and Anderson, Reality Fictions, 13. Janis and MacNeil, Photography Within the Humanities, 71. Alan Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide’: Conversation with Film Maker Frederick Wiseman,” Civil Liberties Review 1, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1974): 57. Paul D. Zimmerman, “Shooting It Like It Is,” Newsweek, March 17, 1969, 134; Mamber, “The New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” 39; Gary Arnold, “Law and Order,” Washington Post, March 7, 1970; and Frederick Wiseman, “Reminiscences of a Film Maker: Frederick Wiseman on Law and Order,” Police Chief 36, no. 9 (September 1969): 32–35. Graham and Garett, “How Far Can You Go,” 31; Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” 22; McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” 20, 22–23; Mamber, “The New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” 38–39; Allan T. Sutherland, “Wiseman on Polemic,” Sight and Sound 47, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 82; Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action, 72; Levin, Documentary Explorations, 316–318; Janis and MacNeil, eds., Photography Within the Humanities, 72; Nicholson and Nicholson, “Meet Lawyer-Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman,” 329. In his taxonomy of documentary genres, Bruce E. Gronbeck specifically cites

3141. M AN W ITH A M OVIE CA MER A

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

High School as an example of “the report.” “Celluloid Rhetoric: On Genres of Documentary,” in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Falls Church, VA.: Speech Communication Association, n.d.), 139–161. Graham and Garett, “How Far Can You Go,” 33. See also Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” 20; and Janis and MacNeil, eds., Photography Within the Humanities, 75. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 245–246. Robb, “Focus on Life,” 28; Beatrice Berg, “ ‘I Was Fed Up with Hollywood Fantasies,’ ” New York Times, February 1, 1970, 26. See also Levin, Documentary Explorations, 318. Nichols, Ideology and the Image, 210–211. Charles Barr, “Cinemascope: Before and After,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 140–168; and Robert Rossellini, “A Discussion of Neo-Realism—Rossellini Interviewed by Mario Verdone,” Screen 14, no. 4 (Winter 1973/74): 71. Berg, “ ‘I Was Fed Up with Hollywood Fantasies,’ ” 26; Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action, 69; Mamber, “New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” 39; and Janis and MacNeil, eds., Photography Within the Humanities, 67. David Eames, “Watching Wiseman Watch,” New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1977, 97. In his important article on this type of documentary film, “Prospects of the Ethnographic Film,” Film Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Winter 1969/70): 16–30, David MacDougall includes Titicut Follies in his list of ethnographic films about industrialized societies. John Marshall and Emile de Brigard, “Idea and Event in Urban Film,” in Hockings, Principles of Visual Anthropology, 138. Janis and MacNeil, eds., Photography Within the Humanities, 67. See also Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action, 69. Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1955), 2: 49; John Grierson, “The Nature of Propaganda,” in Nonfiction Film: Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Meran Barsam (New York: Dutton, 1976), 39. Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide,’ ” 64; Levin, Documentary Explorations, 319. See also Frederick Wiseman, “A Filmmaker’s Choices,” 30; Sutherland, “Wiseman on Polemic,” 82. Quoted in Mamber, “The New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” 40. The ethical implications of this view are explored by Calvin Pryluck in his essay, “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming,” Journal of the University Film Association 28, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 21–29. Berg, “ ‘I Was Fed Up with Hollywood Fantasies,’ ” 25. Emerson, Nature, 20. Quoted in Sutherland, “Wiseman on Polemic,” 82. See also McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” 19; Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide,’ ” 61–62; “Viewpoints,” 96; and Janis and MacNeil, Photography Within the Humanities, 77. McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” 19; Westin, “ ‘You Start Off With a Bromide,’ ” 62.

2. AM ERICAN M AD NE SS 31 5

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

Wiseman, “A Filmmaker’s Choices,” 30. Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action, 74. See also Levin, Documentary Explorations, 326. Eames, “Watching Wiseman Watch,” 98. Graham and Garett, “How Far Can You Go,” 31. See also Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” 22. Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide,’ ” 60. See also Rosenthal, New Documentary in Action, 72 Alan Rosenthal, ed., introduction to The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 9. Harry M. Geduld, “Garbage Cans and Institutions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman,” Humanist 31, no. 5 (September/October 1971), 36. Tom Wolfe, “The New Journalism,” in The New Journalism, ed. Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 14. Wolfe, “The New Journalism,” in Wolfe and Johnson, The New Journalism, 28. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 39. Janis and MacNeil, Photography Within the Humanities, 69; Mamber, “New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” 39. Robb, “Focus on Life,” 28. Bruce Jay Friedman, foreword to Black Humor, ed. Friedman (New York: Bantam, 1965), viii, x. Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 20, 21 Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide,’ ” 54–55; Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (New York: Dutton, 1973), 272. See also Cristine Russell, “Science on Film: The Primate Controversy,” Bioscience 25, no. 3 (March 1976): 151. Benson and Anderson are the only critics who invoke the metaphor to disagree with it: “Are the films merely inkblots? We think not.” Reality Fictions, 6. Rosenthal, New Documentary in Action, 75. See also Mamber, “New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” 39; Levin, Documentary Explorations, 323; and Graham and Garett, “How Far Can You Go,” 33. Benson and Anderson, Reality Fictions, 6. Janet Staiger, “Writing the History of American Film Reception,” in Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 54. Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky, introduction to Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2013), 5. Geiger and Rutsky, introduction to Film Analysis, 6.

2. AMERICAN MADNESS 1. 2.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 2: 478ff. Alan Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide’: Conversation with Film Maker Frederick Wiseman,” Civil Liberties Review 1, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1974), 52.

316 2. AM E RICAN M AD N ESS

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

Wilfred Sheed, “Films,” Esquire, March 1968, 55. Dan Armstrong also discusses this aspect of the film in his essay, “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression: Titicut Follies, the Symbolic Father, and the Spectacle of Confinement,” Cinema Journal 29, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 20–35. Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (New York: Dutton, 1973), 274. Quoted in Christina Robb, “Focus on Life,” Boston Globe Magazine, January 23, 1983. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 265. See, for example, Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” Movie 24 (Spring 1977): 2–13. Reprinted in Rick Altman, ed., Genre: The Musical (London: British Film Institute/ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 175–189. This idea is also explored by Armstrong in his “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression.” See the discussion of the James Sewell Ballet’s dance interpretation of Titicut Follies in chapter 10. Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression,” 26–29. Robert Hatch, “Films,” The Nation, October 30, 1967, 446. See Barsam, Nonfiction Film, 274; Beatrice Berg, “ ‘I Was Fed Up with Hollywood Fantasies,’ ” New York Times, February 1, 1970; Brendan Gill, “The Current Cinema,” New Yorker, October 28, 1967, 167–168. The connection between the two works has also been made by Dan Armstrong in “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression,” 29–30. Donald E. McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 17. Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 331. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Text and Criticism, ed. John C. Pratt (New York: Penguin, 1977), 311. Arthur Knight, “Cinéma Verité and Film Truth,” Saturday Review, September 9, 1967, 44; Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), 187. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 250. Stephen Mamber, “The New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” Cinema 6, no. 1 (n.d.), 34; and Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 219. The presiding judge in the case, Harry Kalus, called the film “a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities.” Litigation focused on the question of whether proper consent had been obtained from the Bridgewater patients shown in the film and whether they had been competent to give such consent, although Wiseman sees this as a false issue raised to deflect attention away from the conditions at Bridgewater itself. The result was that the film was banned from public screening in Massachusetts. According to the ruling, only “legislators, judges, lawyers, sociologists, social workers doctors, psychiatrists, students in these or related fields, and organizations dealing with the social problems of custodial care and mental infirmity” were able to screen it, and a signed statement, filed with Wiseman’s Zipporah Films, was required by law from anyone wishing to view it. According to Wiseman, the decision marked the first time in U.S. legal history that a work of art had been restricted for a reason other than obscenity or national security. Lengthy accounts

2. AM E RICAN M AD NE SS 31 7

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

of the film’s legal battle can be found in Carolyn Anderson and Thomas W. Benson, Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); and Toby Miller, Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 216–231. Brian Winston considers the issue of informed consent in Titicut Follies in Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 85–86; and in the introduction to his edited volume The Documentary Film Book (London: British Film Institute/ Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–29. Robert Coles, “Stripped Bare at the Follies,” New Republic, January 20, 1968, 18, 28–30; Richard Schickel, “The Sorriest Spectacle,” Life, December 1, 1967, 12: Wilfred Sheed, “Films,” 52, 55; Knight, “Cinéma Verité and Film Truth,” 44; Gill, “The Current Cinema,” 166–167; and Vincent Canby, “The Screen: Titicut Follies Observes Life in a Modern Bedlam,” New York Times, October 4, 1967. Charles Taylor, “Titicut Follies,” Sight and Sound 57, no. 2 (Spring 1988), 99. “Deaths at a Prison Hospital Lead to Inquiries,” New York Times, July 19, 1987, 32. Alan Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 70. G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-Makers (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1971), 322. Donald E. McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 24–25; Rosenthal, New Documentary in Action, 72; and Berg, “ ‘I Was Fed Up with Hollywood Fantasies,’ ” 25–26. Thomas Benson, “The Rhetorical Structure of Frederick Wiseman’s High School,” Communication Monographs 47 (November 1980): 238. See also Benson and Anderson, Reality Fictions, chap. 3. Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide,’ ” 56. See also Rosenthal, New Documentary in Action, 73. Levin, Documentary Explorations, 317–318. Benson, “Rhetorical Structure of Frederick Wiseman’s High School,” 236. Stephen Mamber, “Cinéma Vérité and Social Concerns,” Film Comment 9, no. 6 (November/ December 1973): 12–13; Mamber, Cinema Verite in America, 234–240; Harry M. Geduld, “Garbage Cans and Institutions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman,” Humanist 31, no. 5 (September/ October 1971): 36–37; Edgar Z. Friedenberg, “Ship of Fools: The Films of Frederick Wiseman,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971, 19–22; Richard Fuller, “ ‘Survive, Survive, Survive’: Frederick Wiseman’s New Documentary: Basic Training,” Film Journal 1, nos. 3–4 (Fall/ Winter 1972), 75; and Thomas R. Atkins, “Wiseman’s America: Titicut Follies to Primate,” in Frederick Wiseman (New York: Monarch Press, 1976), 12. See also chapter 3. Rosenthal, New Documentary in Action, 73. V. F. Perkins, “Omission and Oversight in Close Reading: The Final Moments of Frederick Wiseman’s High School,” in V. F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism, ed. Douglas Pye (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020), 485–489. Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 209, 235.

3182. AM E RICAN M AD N ESS

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

Brian Winston, “Documentary: I Think We Are in Trouble,” Sight and Sound 48, no. 1 (Winter 1978/1979): 4. Victor W. Sidel, “Hospital on View,” New England Journal of Medicine 282, no. 5 (January 29, 1970): 279. Geduld, “Garbage Cans and Institutions,” 37. Levin, Documentary Explorations, 316. Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression,” 27. Mamber, “New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” 35–36, and Mamber, Cinema Verite in America, 224. McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” 23. Janet Handelman, “An Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Film Library Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1970): 7. John J. O’Connor, “TV Review: Wiseman’s Welfare is on Channel 13 Tonight,” New York Times, September 24, 1975. Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” New Yorker, October 18, 1969, 202. James Wolcott, “Welfare Must Be Seen,” Village Voice, September 29, 1975. Dan Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Cinema of the Absurd: Welfare, or ‘Waiting for the Dole,’ ” Film Criticism 12, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 2–19. J. Louis Campbell III and Richard Buttny, “Rhetorical Coherence: An Exploration into Thomas Farrell’s Theory of the Synchrony of Rhetoric and Conversation,” Communication Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 269. Carolyn Anderson, “The Conundrum of Competing Rights in Titicut Follies,” Journal of the University Film Association 33, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 18. William Carlos Williams, “XVII: To Eloise,” Spring and All, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGoulan, vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 217.

3. THE BIG PARADE 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Richard Fuller, “ ‘Survive, Survive, Survive’: Frederick Wiseman’s New Documentary: Basic Training,” Film Journal 1, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 1972): 75. Stephen Mamber, “Cinéma Vérité and Social Concerns,” Film Comment 9, no. 6 (November/ December 1973): 12–13. See also Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 234–240; Harry M. Geduld, “Garbage Cans and Institutions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman,” Humanist 31, no. 5 (September/October 1971): 36; and Fuller, “ ‘Survive, Survive, Survive,’ ” 75. David R. Slavitt, “Basic Training,” Contempora 2, no. 1 (September/February 1972): 11. Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 61–62, 73–76. Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940– 1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 75–76. Slavitt, “Basic Training,” 11.

4. BLO O D O F TH E BE ASTS31 9

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

See also Thomas Benson and Carolyn Anderson’s comments about Hoffman’s racist remark to Booker that he is not “back on the block. You do not go around just beating people up” in Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Cabondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 172. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 208. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 89. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, “Ship of Fools: The Films of Frederick Wiseman,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971, 92; and Chandra Hecht, “Total Institutions on Celluloid,” Society 9 (April, 1972): 46. Slavitt, “Basic Training,” 10. David Denby, “Television: Taps,” New York, October 4, 1971, 69. According to Lawrence H. Suid, Guts & Glory: Great American War Movies (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 9, this is the view of Joseph Heller, David Halberstam, and Pete Hammill. Suid quotes Halberstam’s observation that many soldiers, “while they are heterosexual . . . really don’t like women; they replace sex with war.” D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Heinemann, 1964), 59. Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, 1982). Lifton and Falk, Indefensible Weapons, 106–107. Lifton and Falk, Indefensible Weapons, 106–107; Allen Ginsberg, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” in Planet News (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968), 119. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, ed. and trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 143. Slavitt, “Basic Training,” 11. Lifton and Falk, Indefensible Weapons, 9. Lifton and Falk, Indefensible Weapons, 22.

4. BLOOD OF THE BEASTS 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

James Wolcott, “Welfare Must Be Seen,” Village Voice, September 29, 1975, 126. Interview with Wiseman in Photography Within the Humanities, ed. Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil (Danbury, NH: Addison House, 1977), 71. Liz Ellsworth, Frederick Wiseman: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 102–158. James Wolcott, “Blood on the Racks: Wiseman’s Meat,” Village Voice, November 15, 1976, 95; and John J. O’Connor, “Wiseman’s Latest Film is Another Reality Fiction,” New York Times, November 7, 1976, 27. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 1. Chuck Kraemer, “Fred Wiseman’s Primate Makes Monkeys of Scientists,” New York Times, December 1, 1974, Sec. II, 31. See also Thomas R. Atkins, “ ‘Reality Fictions’:

3 20 4. BLO O D O F TH E B EASTS

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Wiseman on Primate,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Atkins (New York: Monarch Press, 1976), 75. Patrick J. Sullivan, “Frederick Wiseman’s Primate,” New Republic, January 25, 1975, 31. Sullivan, “Frederick Wiseman’s Primate,” 32. Geoffrey H. Bourne, “Yerkes Director Calls ‘Foul,’ ” New York Times, December 15, 1974, 33. A “substantially edited” transcript of part of the discussion was published as Graham Shedd, Frederick Wiseman, Adrian Perachio, David Baltimore, Richard Lewontin, and Robert Nozick, “Primate and the Scientific Ethos: Can Some Knowledge Simply Cost Too Much?” Hastings Center Report 5, no. 1 (February 1975): 6–8. The quotation is from p. 6. Kraemer, “Fred Wiseman’s “Primate,” 31; Wolcott, “Blood on the Racks.” Cristine Russell, “Science on Film: The Primate Controversy,” Bioscience 25, no. 3 (March 1976): 153, 218. Quoted in Hillary DeVries, “Fred Wiseman’s Unblinking Camera Watches How Society Works,” Christian Science Monitor, May 1, 1984, 27. Kraemer, “Fred Wiseman’s Primate,” 1. Russell, “Science on Film,” 151–154, 218. See also Ken Gay, “Primate,” Films and Filming 21, no. 6 (March 1975): 37–38. Timothy Jon Curry, “Frederick Wiseman: Sociological Filmmaker?” Contemporary Sociology 14, no. 1 (January 1985): 37. Sylvia Feldman, “The Wiseman Documentary,” Human Behavior 5 (February 1976): 69. Gary Arnold, “Frederick Wiseman’s Primates, ” Washington Post, December 5, 1974, B15. The woman is identified in one interview (Atkins, “ ‘Reality Fictions,’ ” in Frederick Wiseman, 86) by Wiseman as the sister of the scientist conducting the zero gravity experiment. Dramatically, she functions as a surrogate for most viewers, unaware of the facts about primate research. Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). See esp. chap.1, “The Mind’s Eye.” Nick Browne, “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach,” Film Quarterly 29, no. 2 (Winter, 1975/1976): 26–38. Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Cinema (New York: Mouton, 1984), 104. Thomas Atkins, “Wiseman’s America: Titicut Follies to Primate,” in Atkins, Frederick Wiseman, 25. Wolcott, “Blood on the Racks.” Alfred Hayes, “The Slaughter-House,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 62, no. 6 (September 1943): 320. See, for example, Roland Tuch, “Frederick Wiseman’s Cinema of Alienation,” Film Library Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1978): 9–15, 49. O’Connor, “Wiseman’s Latest Film is Another ‘Reality Fiction.’ ” Wolcott, “Blood on the Racks.” Norman B. Wiltsey, “The Great Buffalo Slaughter,” in The American West, ed. Raymond Friday Locke (Los Angeles: Mankind Publishing, 1971), 109–140. The quotations are from pp. 110 and 133, respectively.

5 . W H E N WO RLDS CO LLIDE321

30. 31. 32. 33.

Edward Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 23. Huxley, “Brave New World, 8. Calvin Pryluck, “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming,” Journal of the University Film Association 28, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 24. Hence Primate works to encourage rather than to “revoke” the viewer’s look, as Stuart Cunningham argues in “The Look and Its Revocation: Wiseman’s Primate,” Australian Journal of Screen Theory, nos. 11–12 (1982): 86–95.

5. WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, ed. and trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), esp. 142–143, 151. SFM officially ceased operations in April 1982, when it was replaced by the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO). Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (New York: Pocket Books, 1980), 263. James Wolcott, “Television and Its Discontents: Wiseman’s Panamania,” Village Voice, October 10, 1977, 45. Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express, 242. Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express, 242–243. Wolcott, “Television and Its Discontents,” 45. Louise Sweet, “Canal Zone,” Sight and Sound 47, no. 1 (Winter 1977–1978): 59. Frank Rich, “A Sunny, Nightmare Vision,” Time, October 10, 1977, 103. Peter Sourian, “Television,” The Nation, October 15, 1977, 381. Glenn Rifkin, “Wiseman Looks at Affluent Texans,” New York Times, December 11, 1983. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin, 1972), 131. James Wolcott, “Adrift in Cheekbone Heaven,” Village Voice, September 16, 1981, 67. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 129–130. Robert Herrick, “Delight in Disorder,” in The Poems of Robert Herrick (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 29. Dan Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Model and the Documentary Project: Towards a Radical Film Practice,” Film Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Winter 1983–84): 5. James Bryce, South America: Observations and Impressions, new ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1912), 36. Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Model,” 5; and Wolcott, “Adrift in Cheekbone Heaven,” 67. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Pocket Books, 1958), chap. 21. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 149. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 202. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47 (emphasis in the original). Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Model,” 6. Mary-Lou Weisman, “Neiman-Marcus, The Movie,” New Republic, December 31, 1983, 26.

3225 . W H E N WO RLDS COLLI DE

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), pt. 1. Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, 70. Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Model,” 7. Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Model,” 8; and Berger, Ways of Seeing, 51. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 75–81. Jeffrey Shrank, Snap, Crackle, and Popular Taste: The Illusion of Free Choice in America (New York: Delta, 1977), 84–85. John Corry, “TV: The Store, a Wiseman Film,” New York Times, December 14, 1983; Karen Rosenberg, “Television: The Store,” The Nation, December 17, 1983, 642–643; Wolcott, “Adrift in Cheekbone Heaven,” 67. Jay Ruby, “The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film,” Journal of the University Film Association 29, no. 1 (Fall 1977): 3. Jay Ruby, “Ethnography as Trompe L’Oeil: Film and Anthropology,” in A Crack in the Mirror: Perspectives in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 129.

6. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Stephen Mamber, “The New Documentaries of Frederick Wiseman,” Cinema (L.A.) 6, no. 1 (n.d.): 39. See, for example, John Graham, “How Far Can You Go: A Conversation with Fred Wiseman,” Contempora 1, no. 4 (October/ November 1970): 33; and Ira Halberstadt, “An Interview With Frederick Wiseman,” Filmmakers Newsletter 7, no. 4 (February 1974): 25. Donald McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 26. David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2008); María del Mar Azcona, The Multi-Protagonist Film (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Janet Handelman, “An Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Film Library Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1970): 9 A. H. Weiler, “Wiseman to Make ‘Yes Yes, No No,’ First Fiction Film,” New York Times, December 6, 1974, 78. Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 32, 322. Benson and Anderson, Reality Fictions, 11; and Christina Robb, “Focus on Life,” Boston Globe Magazine, January 23, 1983, 27. See, for example, Beatrice Berg, “ ‘I Was Fed Up with Hollywood Fantasies,’ ” New York Times, February 1, 1970, Sec. 2, 25–26. See Warren Miller, “Progress in Documentary,” in The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock, 2nd. ed., ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Norton, 1979), 247–250. Warren Miller, The Cool World (New York: Crest, 1965), 26.

6 . TH E BAD AND TH E BE AU TI FUL323

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Heinemann, 1962), 184. Quoted in “The Talk of the Town: New Producer,” New Yorker, September 14, 1963, 34. “The Talk of the Town: New Producer,” 34; and Gordon Hitchens, “The Cool World,” Film Comment 2, no. 2 (1964): 52. Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943–1971 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 130. Louis Marcorelles, Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Filmmaking, trans. Isabel Quigly (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973). Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 100. Andrew Sarris, “ ‘The Cool World,” Village Voice, April 23, 1964 and reprinted in Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist: Notes on the Cinema 1955/1969 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 135–136; Hitchens, “The Cool World,” 53; and Dwight Macdonald, “The Cool World,” in Dwight Macdonald on Movies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 323–327. Miller, The Cool World, 15, 119. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 33. Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” Film Culture, no. 24 (Spring 1962): 6–16. See Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 5. Addison Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), xxi. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Sarris, “The Cool World,” 136. Berg, “ ‘I Was Fed Up with Hollywood Fantasies.’ ” Harriet Polt, “The Cool World,” Film Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 34. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (New York: Bantam, 1974), 284. David Eames, “Watching Wiseman Watch,” New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1977, 99. Quoted in Benson and Anderson, Reality Fictions, 39. Quoted in “Talk of the Town: New Producer,” 35. For details on many of these movies, see Richard Staehling, “From Rock Around the Clock to The Trip: The Truth About Teen Movies,” in Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System, ed. Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn (New York: Dutton, 1975), 220–251; and Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988). See Brian Henderson, “Towards a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Winter, 1970/1971): 2–14. Reprinted in Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York: Dutton, 1980), 62–81. Compare the long take of a woman’s nude torso in British Sounds (Dziga Vertov Group, 1969). Robb, “Focus on Life,” 15.

3 247. YO U AND M E

7. YOU AND ME 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Aldous Huxley, appendix to The Devils of Loudun (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 375. Quoted in Sylvia Feldman, “The Wiseman Documentary,” Human Behavior 5 (February 1976): 69. Chuck Kraemer, “Fred Wiseman’s Primate Makes Monkeys of Scientists,” New York Times, December 1, 1974. Harry F. Waters, “Rocky Mountain High Life,” Newsweek, December 30, 1991, 55. Errol Morris also sees Aspen as a film about religion. Errol Morris, “The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Joshua Siegel and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 66. Biblical connotations are invoked somewhat ironically in the title The Garden, the unreleased film about New York’s Madison Square Garden. Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 371, 374. Feldman, “The Wiseman Documentary,” 69. Alan Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide’: Conversation with Film Maker Frederick Wiseman,” Civil Liberties Review 1, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1974): 52. Quoted in Thomas Meehan, “The Documentary Maker,” Saturday Review of the Arts 55, no. 49 (December 1972): 14. Malcolm Boyd, “To Worship and Glorify God,” New York Times, November 12, 1972, 17. Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 240. Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 374. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1971), 6. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 122. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New York: Norton, 1958), 85. Patrick Sullivan, “Essene,” Film Quarterly 27, no. 1 (Fall 1973): 56. Jeff Jarvis, “Tube,” People, March 13, 1988, 11. Robert Coles, “Senses and Sensibility,” New Republic, August 29, 1988, 60. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, ed. Warner Berthoff (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), 13. Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle,” in Washington Irving: Selected Prose, ed. Stanley T. Williams (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 106. Peter Sourian, “Television,” The Nation, October 15, 1977, 382. Sullivan, “Essene,” 55. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 69. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (New York: Da Capo, 1988), 42–43. Schrader, Transcendental Style 39–49, 63. Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 64. The Sontag quotation is from Susan Sontag, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1966), 191.

8 . LOVE AND D EATH 325

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Yvette Biro, Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema, trans. Imre Goldstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. Schrader, Transcendental Style, 63. For similar views on the sacred in film, see Michael Bird, “Film as Hierophany,” in Religion in Film, ed. John R. May and Michael Bird (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 3–22; and Amédée Ayfre, Conversion aux images? (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1964). Schrader, Transcendental Style, 49. Schrader, Transcendental Style, 45. Mamber, Cinema Verite in America, 244; Dan Armstrong, “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression: Titicut Follies, the Symbolic Father, and the Spectacle of Confinement,” Cinema Journal 29, no. 1 (Fall, 1989): 21. Coles, “Senses and Sensibility,” 59. Melville, The Confidence-Man, 136–137. Martin Buber, I and Thou, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 62. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909–1914), 4: 238. Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2006), 84.

8. LOVE AND DEATH 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Arthur Kleinman, “The American Medical Way of Death: Do Not Go Gentle,” New Republic, February 5, 1990, 28. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991), 81. Nichols, Representing Reality, 28. My choice of the word “sobering” is deliberate in that it invokes Nichols’s assertion that the documentary is a “discourse of sobriety,” along with religion, education, politics, science, and others. Nichols, Representing Reality, 3. Janet Maslin, “Frederick Wiseman’s Near Death,” New York Times, October 7, 1989, 11. Quoted in Harry F. Waters, “A Stiff Dose of Intensive Care,” Newsweek, January 22, 1990, 52. See, for example, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1973) and Avery D. Weisman, On Dying and Denying: A Psychiatric Study of Terminality (New York: Behavioral Publications, 1972). Weisman, On Dying and Denying, 220. Kleinman, “The American Medical Way of Death,” 29. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 10. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 33. Weisman, On Dying and Denying, 18. Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), 169.

326 8 . LOVE AND D EATH

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

Quoted in David Livingstone, “A Heart-Wrenching Reminder of Our Own Mortality,” [Toronto] Globe and Mail Broadcast Week, January 27, 1990, 9. Avery D. Weisman, The Realization of Death (New York: Jason Aronson, 1974), 7. Kleinman, “Do Not Go Gentle,” 29. Kleinman, “Do Not Go Gentle,” 29. See also the exchange between Susan M. Wolf, “Near Death—In the Moment of Decision,” New England Journal of Medicine 322, no. 3 (June 18, 1990): 208–209; and Wiseman et. al., “Letter to the Editor,” New England Journal of Medicine 322, no. 22 (May 31, 1990): 1605–1606. Weisman, On Dying and Denying, 200. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 7. Weisman, On Dying and Denying, 18. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 26. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 200–201. Weisman, On Dying and Denying, 4. See also The Realization of Death, 4, 16. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta, 1978), 15. Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby, eds., Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 21. Jay Neugeboren, “Near Death/Near Life,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Joshua Siegel and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 127.

9. THE NEVER-ENDING STORY 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

According to Wiseman, “In the first high school, there were 4,000 white students and only 12 Black students. This one was 45 percent Black, 45 percent Hispanic, only 10 percent white.” Gerald Peary, “Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Boston Phoenix, March 1998, http://www.geraldpeary.com/interviews/wxyz/wiseman.html. Stuart Klawans, “High School II,” The Nation, July 25, 1994, 136. Samuel G. Freedman, “Showing a Harrowing World but Not How It Got That Way,” New York Times, November 30, 1997, 37. Jared Rapfogel, “The Birth, Life, and Death of a Nation: A Portrait by Frederick Wiseman,” Senses of Cinema 19 (March 2002): https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature -articles/wiseman/. Peary, “Interview with Frederick Wiseman.” Freedman, “Showing a Harrowing World.” Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” in When the Moon Waxes Red (New York: Routledge, 1991), 37. Freedman, “Showing a Harrowing World.” In the interview with Gerald Peary, Wiseman explains that the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has its own police force, that its officers receive the same training as the city police, and that it responds first to calls on CHA property. Peary, “Interview with Frederick Wiseman.”

10. P LAYTIM E 327

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime, revised ed. (New York: Oak Publications, 1971), 86; and Sandra Jean Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 176. See also Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 173. The song was apparently used for a time in many ice cream trucks across the United States. Freedman, “Showing a Harrowing World.” Simon Houpt, “Wiseman’s Vérités,” [Toronto] Globe and Mail, March 18, 2003, R3. Isadora Kosofsky makes the same observation in “The Visual Psychology of Frederick Wiseman’s Domestic Violence,” Film Matters 6, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 22. Ronnie Scheib, “Domestic Violence,” Variety, February 2002, 34. David Denby, “Women and Children: Frederick Wiseman’s Domestic Violence,” New Yorker, February 11, 2002, 92. Denby, “Women and Children,” 92. Houpt, “Wiseman’s Vérités,” R3. Kosofsky, “Visual Psychology,” 23. Rapfogel, “Birth, Life, and Death of a Nation.” David Denby, “Comfort for the Tough-Minded,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Joshua Siegel and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 98. Stuart Klawans, “High School II,” 136.

10. PLAYTIME 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Vera Dika, “A Movie of a Small Town: Introduction and Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37, no. 2 (2020), 110. Elsewhere he has said, “The editing of these movies is a lot like writing. The issues are very similar. As an editor, I’m interested in the same issues that a writer is—the passage of time, the abstraction, characterization, metaphor, and silences.” Marie Garcia, “La danse and the Rhythms of Institutions: An Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Cineaste 35, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 16. Garcia, “La danse,” 16. Robert J. Birgeneau, then chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, quoting Wiseman. In Lawrence S. Bacow et al., “At Berkeley, A New Documentary by Frederick Wiseman,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 67, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 29. Frederick Wiseman, “Sketch of a Life,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Joshua Siegel and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 35, 38. Wiseman, “A Sketch of a Life,” 25. Nicolas Rapold, “Big Man on Campus,” Film Comment 49, no. 6 (November/December 2013): 27. Wiseman, “Sketch of a Life,” 46. Rob Nelson, “Frederick Wiseman’s Ways of Seeing,” [Minneapolis] Star Tribune, November 28, 2014, 8E; Michael Cooper, “Turning ‘A Nightmare of Ghoulish Obscenities’ into a Ballet,” New York Times, April 2, 2017, Sec. AR, 10.

3 2810. P LAYTIM E

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Nick Poppy, “Stalking Shadows: Frederick Wiseman on The Last Letter,” Indiewire, February 10, 20003, https://www.indiewire.com/2003/02/stalking-shadows-frederick -wiseman-on-the-last-letter-79953/. Quoted in William T. Volmann, “In Memory of Us All: Some Scenes Out of Wiseman,” in Siegel and de Navacelle, Frederick Wiseman, 71. Poppy, “Stalking Shadows.” According to Samie, Wiseman gave her photos of “the sublime men” James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper and instructed her to think of them as her son. Marie-Christian de Navacelle, “Interview with Catherine Samie,” in Siegel and de Navacelle, Frederick Wiseman, 109. Steve Vineberg, “Before We Disappeared: Frederick Wiseman’s The Last Letter,” Pakn Treger (Summer 2003): 24. Poppy, “Stalking Shadows.” Frederick Wiseman, “Director’s Statement,” Boxing Gym press kit, 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. The statement begins with an epigram from Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows (1972): “Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. It will not disappear and it will not diminish but will only be transformed.” Vineberg, “Before We Disappeared,” 24, 25. Christopher Ricks includes The Last Letter in this group of films. “Imagination Alive Imagine,” in Siegel and de Navacelle, Frederick Wiseman, 55. Garcia, “La danse,” 12. Nicolas Rapold, “The Organization Man,” Sight and Sound 19, no. 11 (November 2009): 23. Garcia, “La danse,” 15. Wiseman, “Sketch of a Life,” 20. Ricks, “Imagination Alive Imagine,” 57. Adrienne L. McLean, Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 15–17. William Johnson, “Ringside in the Wings,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2010): 8. Cobbett Steinberg, preface to The Dance Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1980), xi. Michael Sicinski, “La danse: The Paris Opera Ballet,” Cinema Scope 42 (Spring 2010): 91. Rapold, “Organization Man,” 23. de Navacelle, “Interview with Catherine Samie,” 109. Ricks, “Imagination Alive Imagine,” 55. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), esp. chapter 3. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1977), 414. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 418. Noël Burch, “Embarrassing Showgirls,” Film Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 35. Paul Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” in Steinberg, The Dance Anthology, 330. Quoted in Rapold, “Organization Man,” 23. Quoted in Christine Smallwood, “Back Talk: Frederick Wiseman,” The Nation, January 11, 2010, 30.

11. O U R TOW N3 29

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Garcia, “La danse,” 13. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 6. Nelson, “Frederick Wiseman’s Ways of Seeing.” Elsewhere, Wiseman said that the reason MOMA denied access was because the museum wanted to be paid. David Jenkins, “National Gallery,” Sight & Sound 25, no. 2 (2015): 51. Alyda Faber, “Film, Parable, Reciprocity: Frederick Wiseman’s ‘Reality Fictions’ and Social Change,” Journal of Religion, Film and Media 2, no. 2 (2016): 77. Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov juxtaposed neutral shots of the face of actor Ivan Mozhukhin with shots of a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a woman on a sofa, and the audience supposedly perceived the actor as expressing hunger, grief, and desire, respectively, thereby demonstrating the expressive power of editing. For a discussion of the “Kuleshov effect,” see V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 168; and David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1981), 135–139. Faber, “Film, Parable, Reciprocity,” 76. Sophie Hamacher, “In Conversation: Frederick Wiseman with Sophie Hamacher,” Brooklyn Rail, March 2015, https://brooklynrail.org/2015/03/film/frederick-wiseman-with-sophie -hamacher. Michael Atkinson, “National Gallery,” Sight & Sound 25, no. 2 (February 2015): 80. Nick Pinkerton, “Museum Guide,” Frieze, no. 167 (October 31, 2014): https://www.frieze .com/article/museum-guide. Wiseman, “Sketch of a Life,” 23–24. Hamacher, “In Conversation.” Peary, “Interview with Frederick Wiseman.” Peary, “Interview with Frederick Wiseman.” Andrew Delbanco, “Learning from Wiseman,” in Siegel and de Navacelle, Frederick Wiseman, 92. Peary, “Interview with Frederick Wiseman.”

11. OUR TOWN 1.

2.

Purportedly, Wiseman would have been allowed by the Dolan family, owners of Madison Square Garden, to release this film if the scenes featuring the executives were excised. When asked about the cuts, Wiseman said, “They only wanted a few lines removed, but they were the kinds of lines that would have made all the scenes meaningless.” Quoted in David Blum, “Secret Garden,” New Yorker, April 25, 2005, https://www.newyorker .com/magazine/2005/04/25/secret-garden. Because The Garden has not been officially released, it is not discussed in detail here. See, for example, Philip Lopate, “Composing an American Epic,” New York Times, January 23, 2000, 11, 26; and A. O. Scott, “The Rhythms of Small-Town America,” New York Times, October 26, 2018, C6.

3 30 11. O U R TOW N

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein perceived the cinematic qualities of Whitman’s catalogues, referring in passing to “Walt Whitman’s huge montage conception.” Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 231. For further discussion, see my essay “Whitman and Eisenstein,” Literature/Film Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 264–270. Constance Rourke, “American Art: A Possible Future,” in The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942), 292; James T. Farrell, “The Language of Hollywood: Mass Culture in a Bourgeois Society,” New International 11, no. 1 (January 1948): 24–27. Ardis Cameron, “When Strangers Bring Cameras: The Poetics and Politics of Othered Places,” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (September 2002): 422. Paul Arthur, “State Legislature,” Film Comment 43, no. 4 (July/August 2007): 72. David Reilly, “State Legislature,” Cineaste 32, no. 4 (2007): 51–53. Alyda Faber, “Film, Parable, Reciprocity: Frederick Wiseman’s ‘Reality Fictions’ and Social Change,” Journal of Religion, Film, and Media 2, no. 2 (2016): 79, 84. Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, Eva Hielscher, “Introduction: The City Symphony Phenomenon, 1920–1940,” in The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3–4. Quoted in Vera Dika, “A Movie of a Small Town: Introduction and Interview with Frederick Wiseman,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37, no. 2 (2020): 109. Later in the same interview, Wiseman offers Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as a point of comparison, but describes it as “grotesque” (113). In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), Siegfried Kracauer argues that Berlin and similar films “shun” critical comment because of their emphasis on the formal qualities of images rather than their content (181–189). See also Keith Beattie, Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), chap. 2. A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, “The Filmmaker Who Shows Us Ourselves,” New York Times, April 9, 2017, AR12. Stuart Klawans, “As Maine Goes, So Goes  .  .  .” The Nation, February 14, 200, 34; and Nicholas Rapold, “Big Man on Campus,” Film Comment 49, no. 6 (November/December 2013): 26. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 128. Thornton Wilder, Our Town, Three Plays by Thornton Wilder (New York: Bantam, 1958), 6. Wilder, Our Town, 51. In championing a notion of realism in documentary film, Brian Winston unleashes a particular animus toward Wiseman. See, for example, Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), in which he confusingly accuses Wiseman of creating “a smokescreen of double-talk” regarding the question of objectivity in his filming and accuses “our hero” of singlehandedly sabotaging direct cinema’s concern with the ethics of filming their subjects

11. O U R TOW N331

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

(163). Astonishingly, Winston also claims that the first edition of Voyages of Discovery assumes that Wiseman’s films offer “unproblematic evidence” of the real, which is a complete misreading of this book (205). Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 211. See, for example, Eric Cortellessa, “EX-LIBRIS: A Conversation with Frederick Wiseman,” American Prospect (blog), September 29, 2017, https://prospect.org/culture/ex-libris -conversation-frederick-wiseman/. Alan Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide’: Conversation with Film Maker Frederick Wiseman,” Civil Liberties Review 1, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1974): 55. In addition to Groucho, Wiseman has variously included among his influences Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Preston Sturges, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene Ionesco. Maria Garcia, “La Danse and the Rhythms of Institutions,” Cineaste 35, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 14. Thomas Waugh, ed., “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984). See especially the essays by Chuck Kleinhans, “Forms, Politics, Makers and Contexts: Basic Issues for a Theory of Radical Political Documentary,” 318–342; and Julianne Burton, “Democratizing Documentary: Modes of Address in the Latin American Cinema, 1858–72,” 344–383. Andrew Delbanco, “Learning from Wiseman,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Joshua Siegel and Marie Christine de Navacelle (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 88. Recall, though, Wiseman’s comment regarding the problems shown in Hospital that, “It’s too much of a liberal’s thing to say, ‘If only we had more doctors, if only we had more nurses, the situation would be different.’ ” Quoted in G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-Makers (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1971), 316. It is worth noting that Wiseman claims to choose subjects that interest him, that he has never picked a subject because of an historical event. For example, the fact that Canal Zone was filmed during the American bicentennial and the negotiation of a new canal treaty with Panama was, says, Wiseman, simply coincidence. Given that Wiseman has a list of potential subjects and that it takes a considerable time to secure permission to film any of them, it is difficult to claim specific contemporary events as influencing the choice of subjects to film. Richard A. Schwartz, “Frederick Wiseman’s Modernist Vision: Central Park,” Literature/ Film Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1995): 225. Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 146, 162. Robert J. Birgeneau, in Lawrence S. Bacow, Frederick Wiseman, Robert J. Birgeneau, George W. Breslauer, and Mark Schlissel, “At Berkeley, A New Documentary by Frederick Wiseman,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 67, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 29–30. Wiseman quoted in “City Hall: U.S. Democracy Despite Trump,” France 24, February 23, 2021, https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210223-city-hall-us-democracy-despite -trump. Quoted in “City Hall,” France 24.

3 3211. O U R TOW N

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

Manohla Dargis, “Frederick Wiseman, for the People,” New York Times, October 30, 2020, C3. Also, Wiseman might have a greater appreciation for Walsh’s inclusiveness given that he experienced antisemitism personally in Boston’s legal culture. See his account in “A Sketch of a Life,” in Siegel and de Navacelle, Frederick Wiseman, 21. Quoted in Cortellessa, “EX-LIBRIS.” As of March, 2011, according to the New York City Department of City Planning, the neighborhood was comprised of 56.5 percent Hispanic, 22 percent Asian, 17 percent white, 2 percent Black, 1.6 percent mixed race, and 0.7 percent other. New York City Department of City Planning, “Table PL-P3A NTA: Total Population by Mutually Exclusive Race and Hispanic Origin New York City Neighborhood Tabulation Areas,” NYC. gov, March 2011, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc -population/census2010/t_pl_p3a_nta.pdf. Cited in David Lipson, “Migration and Cultural Resistance: Canal Zone and In Jackson Heights,” La Furia Umana 42 (2021): http:// www.lafuriaumana.it/. The neighborhood is also the setting of the documentary Julio of Jackson Heights (Richard Shpuntoff, 2016). Schwartz, “Frederick Wiseman’s Modernist Vision,” 225. Robbie Collin, “Frederick Wiseman Interview: ‘The New York Library Is Everything Trump Doesn’t Understand,’ ” Telegraph, Saturday, July 14, 2018. https://www.telegraph .co.uk/films/2018/07/14/frederick-wiseman-interview-new-york-library-everything -trump/. See also Dika, “A Movie of a Small Town.” Dika, “A Movie of a Small Town,” 105, 107, 108; Collin, “Frederick Wiseman Interview.” Arthur, “State Legislature,” 72. Will Tizard, “Documentary Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman on Life in Donald Trump’s America,” Variety, November 12, 2017. Wiseman has said, “Cultural institutions are the glue of democracy.” “Frederick Wiseman: A Public Library Is Also a Pandemic Vaccine,” Teller Report, April 10, 2020, https:// www.tellerreport.com/life/2020-04-11---frederick-wiseman--%22a-public-library-is -also-a-vaccine-against-the-pandemic%22-.Hy1crcCv8.html. Klawans, “As Maine Goes, So Goes.” Agence France-Presse, “Trump Tries to ‘Create Chaos,’ Says Oscar-Winner Wiseman,” Jakarta Post, September 9, 2020, https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/09/10/trump -tries-to-create-chaos-says-oscar-winner-wiseman.html. Quoted in Erin Callanan, “Frederick Wiseman’s 45th Film, City Hall, A Fascinating, Urgent Portrait of Democracy in Action in Boston,” WGBH, December 4, 2020, https:// www.wgbh.org/foundation/press/frederick-wisemans-45th-film-city-hall-a-fascinating -urgent-portrait-of-democracy-in-action-in-boston-broadcast-premiere-on-december -22-2020-on-gbh. Wilder, Our Town, 52. Errol Morris, “The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality,” in Siegel and de Navacelle, Frederick Wiseman, 66. In his review of City Hall, David Koehler describes the film’s chronicling of democracy at work as nothing less than “holy.” “City Hall,” Cineaste 46, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 49.

11. O U R TOW N3 33

46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

Alexander Leicht, The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics: Robert Rauschenberg, Walker Evans, William Carlos Williams (Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011), 11, 12, 74. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1–16. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915, History of American Cinema, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 10. Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in The American Film Industry, rev. ed., ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 87. Sophie Hamacher, “In Conversation: Frederick Wiseman with Sophie Hamacher,” Brooklyn Rail, March 2015, https://brooklynrail.org/2015/03/film/frederick-wiseman-with-sophie -hamacher. Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 116, 108, 118. Donald E. McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 23. “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, October 24, 1988, 32. See also John Graham, “ ‘There Are No Simple Solutions’: Wiseman on Film Making and Viewing,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Thomas R. Atkins (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 44–45. Graham, “ ‘There Are No Simple Solutions,’ ” 44–45. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: Viking, 1945), 468. Another champion of democracy, philosopher John Dewey, similarly asserts that the phrase “work of art” implies an action, an interaction, with the text on the part of the reader/viewer/listener, an aesthetic experience rather than object. As Dewey says, “Art is the quality of doing and what is done. . . . The product of art—temple, painting, statue, poem—is not the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties.” John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1958), 220, 152. Alyda Faber, “Film, Parable, Reciprocity,” 46, 49, 42. Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 17. Faber, “Film, Parable, Reciprocity,” 94 Michael Chanan, The Politics of Documentary (London: British Film Institute, 2007), vi. Alan Westin, “ ‘You Start Off with a Bromide,’ ” 60. Brian Winston laments that “it is the spectator’s responsibility to be savvy . . . at least in the conditions of a bourgeois democracy, they are autonomous individuals.” Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone, and Wang Chi, The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 178. Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2006), 84. D. W. Griffith, from “Motion Pictures: The Miracle of Modern Photography,” in Focus on D. W. Griffith, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 57.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

Frame enlargements appear on pages given in boldface. Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, The, 36 Adams, Henry, 288 Adams, Randall, 23 Adjustment and Work, 163–194. See also Deaf and Blind Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 145, 266 African Queen, The, 70 Alien, 141 Allen, Robert C., xviii Allen, Robert L., 291 All the King’s Men (Warren), 288 American Ballet Theatre (ABT), 246 American Film Institute (AFI), 144 American International Pictures (AIP), 155 American Repertory Theatre (ART), 239, 240 Anderson, Carolyn, 7, 13, 27, 33, 144, 315n80 Anderson, Lindsay, 2, 313n42 Anderson, Sherwood, 330n10 Anderson, Wes, 40 Angels Wash Their Faces, 155

Angels with Dirty Faces, 155 Anka, Paul, 5, 20 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 131, 160 Apollonia, 130, 132, 157–160, 242 A Propos de Nice, xix, 5 Arlen, Michael J., 12 Armstrong, Dan, 10, 32, 59, 127, 131, 135, 138–139, 188, 316n12 Arnold, Gary, 96 Arthur, Paul, 268, 279 Arvanitis, Giorgos, 241 Ashton, Frederick, 246 Aspen, xxiv, 14, 52, 164–165, 177, 268, 274 Assayas, Olivier, 242 At Berkeley, 239, 269, 273, 275, 278, 282–283, 286, 291 Atkinson, Michael, 262 auteurism, xviii–xxi Avventura, L’, 160 Balázs, Béla, 12 Ballet, 30, 184, 244, 246–252, 250, 257

356INDEX

Ballet Adagio, 249 Baltimore, David, 94 Band Wagon, The, 253 Barnouw, Erik, 3 Baron of Arizona, The, 149 Barr, Charles, 19 Barsam, Richard Meran, 26, 31 Barth, John, 10 Barthes, Roland, xv, 81, 84, 115 Basic Training, xiv, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 12, 15, 16, 22, 25, 29, 43, 44, 56, 59, 60, 62, 64–85, 66, 97, 98, 108, 122, 149, 154, 168, 191, 196, 202, 210, 226, 240, 243, 271, 272 Basinger, Jeanine, 69, 71, 74 Bateson, Gregory, 43 Battle of Algiers, The, 4, 143, 156, 157 Bazin, André, xix, 10 Beatty, Warren, 161 Beckett, Samuel, 10, 26, 59, 239, 331n20 Belfast, Maine, xxi, 116, 164, 213, 266–292, 270, 285 Belle of Amherst, The, 242 Bellochio, Marco, 242 Benson, Thomas W., 7, 13, 27, 33, 43, 44, 144, 315n80 Berger, John, 124, 126, 133, 139 Bergman, Ingmar, xx, 8 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 268, 330n11 Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (Melville), 168 Biro, Yvette, 187 Blackboard Jungle, 155 Blade Runner, 141 Bleak House (Dickens), 58 Blind, 12, 100, 163–194, 193. See also Deaf and Blind Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne), 169 Blood of the Beasts. See Sang des bêtes, Le Blow-Up, 131 Bluem, A. William, xxiii, 1

Bluestone, George, 311n4 Bogart, Humphrey, 70 Bogle, Donald, 155 Bosch, Hieronymus, 21 Bourne, Geoffrey, 94 Boutefeu, Nathalie, 242–243 Bowery Boys, The, 155 Boxing Gym, xxii, 20, 22, 244–246, 245, 257 Boy and His Dog, A, 122 Brady, Matthew, 20 Brakhage, Stan, xix, xxi, 36 Brando, Marlon, 20 Branigan, Edward, 101 Brault, Michel, 2, 3 Brayne, William, 7, 109 Breaking It Up at the Museum, 148 Breillat, Catherine, 241 Breslin, Jimmy, 24–25 Bresson, Robert, 186–188 Bridges-Go-Round, 148 Bridgman, Richard, 289 Brook, Peter, 33 Browne, Nick, 101 Brueghel, Pieter, 22, 259 Brussels Film Loops, 148 Brustein, Robert, 239 Bryant, Baird, 147 Bryce, James, 128 Buber, Martin, 193 Buchwald, Art, 136 Buck Privates, 75 Buñuel, Luis, xix Burgess, Anthony, 146 Burns, Ken, xix, 263 Buscombe, Edward, 108 Cagney, James, 70, 150, 151 Cameron, Ardis, 267 Canal Zone, xiv, 12, 16–17, 23, 25, 27, 33, 34, 42, 64, 67, 78, 111, 115–124, 119, 126,

INDEX357

128, 133, 135, 142, 152, 153, 154, 155, 167, 174, 183, 195, 228, 276 Canby, Vincent, 37 Candid Eye, 2 Candyman (1992), 219 Capote, Truman, 24 Capra, Frank, xxii Carabiniers, Les, 85 Carney, Raymond, xviii Carter, Ron, 218–219, 221, 224 Casablanca, 70 Cassavetes, John, 2 Catch-22 (Heller), 74 Central Park, xxii, 14, 19, 20, 23, 195–196, 204, 271, 278, 287, 288 Chabrol, Claude, xix Chalfant, Kathleen, 240 Chanan, Michael, 291 Chaplin, Charles, 75, 331n20 Chéreau, Patrice, 242 Children Were Watching, The, 1 Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), 3 cinéma verité, xvii–xviii, 1–5, 148. See also direct cinema Citizen Kane, 4 City Hall, xxi, 20, 28, 65, 84, 87, 133, 190, 225, 260, 266–292, 277 city symphony films, xix, 117, 148, 268 Clarke, Shirley, 144–156, 239 classical narrative cinema. See fiction film Clinton, Bill, 273 Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess), 146 Cocteau, Jean, 259 Coleman, Ornette, 148 Coles, Robert, 37, 176, 190 Comédie-Française, La, 239, 240–241 Comédie-Française, La, ou L’amour joué, 12, 27, 30, 240, 244, 247–252, 257–258, 259, 264–265

Condamné a mort s’est échappé, Un, 187 Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, The (Melville), 167, 285, 192 Connection, The, 144–145, 148, 239 Connection, The (Gelber), 144–145, 239 Contrast, The (Tyler), 116 Cool World, The, xiii, xxiv, 54, 144–156, 150, 151, 157, 162, 183, 239 Cool World, The (Miller), 144–146 Cooper, James Fenimore, 78 Coppola, Francis Ford, xxii Corner in Wheat, A, 21 Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), xxiii–xxiv Corral, 110 Costello, Lou, 75 couple, Un, 11, 12, 144, 156, 166, 242–243 Crane, Stephen, 22 Crazy Horse, xxiii, 7, 30, 131, 136, 141, 157, 161, 243, 244, 252–257, 253, 255, 256, 264 Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, 2 cummings, e. e., 109, 278, 283 Cunningham, Stuart, 321n33 Daly, Tom, 2 danse, La—Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, 7, 30, 184, 241, 244, 245, 247–252, 257, 259, 263 Dargis, Manohla, 274 Dark City, The, 92 Davey, John, 7, 178, 229, 243, 244, 247 da Vinci, Leonardo, 259 Davis, Peter, 184 Dawkins, Richard, 11, 274 Dawn of the Dead (1978), 132 Dead End, 155 Deaf, 147, 149, 166, 163–194. See also Deaf and Blind

358INDEX

Deaf and Blind, xxi, xxiii, 12, 18, 23, 39, 52, 57, 62, 132, 159, 163–194, 196, 197, 214, 239, 290. See also Adjustment and Work; Blind; Deaf; Multi-Handicapped Découflé, Philippe, 252–254 Delbanco, Andrew, 264, 271 Delicate Delinquent, The, 155 Democracy (Adams), 288 Denby, David, 76, 232, 237 Deren, Maya, 151 Dernière lettre, La, 240–241, 243 De Sica, Vittorio, 2 Deus Ex, xxi Devil and Mss Jones, The, 125 Dewey, John, 333n55 Dickens, Charles, 58 Dickinson, Emily, 242 direct cinema, 1–4, 13, 19, 111, 147, 272. See also cinéma verité; observational cinema Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 75, 79 documentary film, xvii–xx, 1–10, 15, 24, 25, 111, 142, 169, 187, 196, 271, 288–289, 291 Domestic Violence, 53, 183, 213–214, 226–233, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235–237, 243 Domestic Violence 2, 53, 54, 213–214, 226–227, 230–231, 233–237, 236, 243 Donne, John, 174, 238 Dos Passos, John, 22 Dreiser, Theodore, 22 Drew Associates, 2–3, 29 Drew, Robert, 2 Dreyer, Carl Theodore, 186–188 Drifters, 24 Dromm, Danny, 274–275 Dubois, W. E. B., 152 Dying, xxi Dying at Grace, 196 Dylan, Bob, 20

Eakins, Thomas, 22 Eames, David, 155 Eddie, 3 Eisenstein, Sergei, 35, 65, 320n3 Eliot, T. S., 7, 47, 52, 60, 259 Ellsworth, Liz, 88 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 12–13, 22, 176, 194 Engel, Morris, 2 Essene, xxiii, 12, 20, 32, 38, 52, 57, 62, 132, 159, 163–194, 171, 182, 186, 189, 196, 205, 241, 265, 290 ethnographic film, 20, 314n55 Evans, Walker, 20, 287 Everything Flows (Grossman), 328n14 EX-LIBRIS: The New York Public Library, 11, 84, 273, 274, 281–282, 289, 291 Eyes, xxi Faber, Alyda, 259, 289–290 Falk, Richard, 80–81, 82, 84 Farrell, James T., 267 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 255 Fellini, Federico, 135 Feuer, Jane, 252 Feydeau, Georges, 247 fiction film, xxii, 7, 17, 19, 40, 85, 125, 144, 145, 146, 148, 152, 155, 156, 159, 162, 169, 196, 254–255, 257–258 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 238 Flaherty, Robert, xix–xx, 2, 8, 10 Flaubert, Gustave, 238 Floating Opera, The (Barth), 10 Fonda, Henry, 120 Fonda, Jane, 19, 312n20 Ford, John, xx, 12, 15, 65, 108, 120, 128 Forman, Milos, 33 Forster, E. M., 158 42nd Street, 247 Foster, Gloria, 147 Foucault, Michel, 31, 36

INDEX359

Franju, Georges, 104–105 Free Cinema, 2 Friedman, Bruce Jay, 26 Full Metal Jacket, 76 Fuller, Samuel, 31, 67, 149 gangster films, 150–151 Garden, The, xxi, xxiii, 266, 324n5, 329n1 Garland, Hamlin, 22 Gasc, Yves, 239 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 152 Gayle, Addison, 152 Geduld, Harry M., 48 Geiger, Jeffrey, 27 Gelber, Jack, 144–145, 239 genre, xix, xxii, 7–8, 84, 102, 108, 141, 149–152, 155, 238. See also specific genres Gilda, 161 Gill, Brendan, 37 Gimme Shelter, xviii, 15 Ginsberg, Allen, 81 Giuliani, Rudy, 266 Glackens, William J., 22 Godard, Jean-Luc, 85, 136, 158, 312n20 Goffman, Erving, 161, 251 Gold Diggers of 1933, 247 Goldman, William, 77 Goldstein, Joshua, 239 Gomery, Douglas, xviii Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 312n20 Grande Illusion, La, 67 Grierson, John, xix, 2, 7, 8–9, 20–21, 24 Griffith, D. W., 21, 292 Gronbeck, Bruce E., 313–314n47 Grossman, Vasily, 240–241, 328n14 Groulx, Gilles, 2 Halberstam, David, 319n13 Hammil, Pete, 319n13 Happy Days (Beckett), 239

Happy Mother’s Day, A, 5 Harrington, Michael, 48, 60, 153, 215 Hatch, Robert, 32 Hawks, Howard, xx–xxi, 74 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 169, 170 Hayes, Alfred, 103 Hearts and Minds, 184 Heller, Joseph, 26, 74, 319n13 Hellzapoppin’, 159 Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, 147 Hemmings, David, 131 Henderson, Brian, 158 High School, xx, 7, 11–12, 13, 14, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 37–47, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 48, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 67–69, 71, 72, 75, 88, 98, 102, 131, 135, 153, 176–177, 185, 187, 210, 213–218, 237, 251, 254, 268, 269, 271, 272, 284, 290, 291 High School II, xxi, 17, 23, 25, 39, 177, 213–218, 216, 220, 221, 231, 237, 251, 266, 314n47 Hitchcock, Alfred, 31, 93 Hitchens, Gordon, 148 Holbein, Hans, 260–261, 283 Hollywood. See fiction film Homans, Jennifer, 240 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 186 Hopper, Edward, 22, 259 horror films, 29, 102 Hospital, xxi, xxiii, 15, 19, 20, 22, 25, 29, 42, 47–52, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 59, 61, 63, 82, 88, 98, 112, 126, 129, 133, 153, 169, 174, 175, 183, 188, 197, 200, 202–203, 205, 220, 224, 231, 248, 267, 269, 271, 272, 291, 331n23 Howells, William Dean, 22 Hud, 145 Huizinga, Johan, 73 Humphrey, Hubert H., 2–3, 29 Hunters, The, 20 Hurdes, Las, xix, 196 Huxley, Aldous, 91, 110, 165–166, 167

3 6 0 IND E X

Imitation of Life (1958), 135 In Cold Blood (Capote), 24 In Jackson Heights, 164, 243, 266–292, 275, 276 In Paris Parks, 148 Industrial Britain, 24 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 63 Ionesco, Eugene, 26, 331n20 Irving, Washington, 181 I Was a Male War Bride, 74 Jacobs, Lewis, 7 Jacoby, Irving, 148 James, Henry, 116 Jarvis, Jeff, 176 Jazz on a Summer’s Day, 2 Jefferson, Thomas, 21 Jewison, Norman, 144 Johnson, Lady Bird, 136 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 272 Johnson, William, 247 Joli Mai, Le, 3 Juvenile Court, 20, 22, 37, 43, 52, 53, 54–56, 58, 63, 82, 97, 167, 183, 210, 213, 234 Kael, Pauline, 57 Kafka, Franz, 59 Kalus, Harry, 316n19 Kaplan, E. Ann, 9 Katzman, Sam, 155 Kaufman, Boris, 5 Kawin, Bruce, 99 Kazan, Elia, 146 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 2–3, 29 Kesey, Ken, 33–35, 124 Key, Wilson Bryan, 131 King, Allan, xviii, 8, 181 King, Martin Luther, 215 King, Rodney, 215, 217

Kiss of Death, 150 Klawans, Stuart, 214, 237, 269, 283 Klein, Bonnie Sherr, 133 Kleinman, Arthur, 196, 209 Knight, Arthur, 35, 37 Koehler, David, 325n45 Koenig, Wolf, 2 Kokkos, Jannis, 247 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 289 Koppel, Ted, 21 Kosofky, Isadora, 235 Kracauer, Siegfried, 1, 19, 175, 330n11 Kraemer, Chuck, 95, 163 Kroitor, Roman, 2 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 204, 205, 210 Kubrick, Stanley, 75, 76, 97 Kuhn, Annette, xvii Kuleshov, Lev, 260, 329n40 Lacan, Jacques, 140 Land Without Bread. See Hurdas, Las Lang, Fritz, 88 Lanzmann, Claude, 197 Lassalle, Jacques, 247 Last Letter, The, 12, 144, 240–244, 242, 252 Laurel and Hardy, 331n20 Law and Order, xxi, xxiii, 13, 18, 52–54, 56, 58, 62, 63, 82, 149, 153, 183, 204, 211, 213, 226, 232, 243, 269, 272 Lawder, Standish, 141 Lawrence, D. H., 78 Leacock, Richard, xx, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 15, 31, 138 Lee, Carl, 145, 147, 156 Leicht, Alexander, 287–288 Leiterman, Richard, xviii, 7 Leroux, Gaston, 257 LeRoy, Mervyn, 120 Letter to Jane, 312n20 Levin, G. Roy, 39–40 Levine, Joe, 20

IND EX 3 61

Lewis, Jerry, 155 Lewis, Sinclair, 22 Lewontin, Richard, 94 Life and Fate (Grossman), 240–241 Life without Zoe, xxii Lifton, Robert Jay, 80–81, 82, 84 Lindsay, John,50 Lippmann, Walter, 21 Little Fugitive, The, 2 Lonely Boy, 5 Lord of the Flies (Goldman), 77 Lovely May, The. See Joli Mai, Le Louisiana Story, 2 Low, Colin, 110 Luce, William, 242 Lumière Brothers, 2 M*A*S*H, 119 Macartney-Filgate, Terence, 2 Macdonald, Dwight, 148 MacDougall, David, 314n55 Macero, Teo, 148 Macmillan, Kenneth, 246 Madame de . . ., 139 Madhavi, Ali, 253-255 magic realism, 162 Mailer, Norman, 24, 25 Mamber, Stephen, 15, 36, 52, 68, 166, 188 Manahatta, 268 Man Escaped, A. See Condamné a mort s’est échappé Man with a Movie Camera, The, xx, 238 Manoeuvre, xxii, 7, 13, 64–85, 79, 105, 115, 117, 128, 168, 188 Marat/Sade, 33 Marat/Sade (Weiss), 33 Marcorelles, Louis, 12, 147 Marivaux, Pierre de, 247, 249 Marker, Chris, 3 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 159, 162

Married Couple, A, xviii, 8 Marshall, John, 7, 20 Masterpiece Theatre, 128 Maysles, Albert, xviii, 2, 15 Maysles, David, xviii Maysles Brothers, xx, 5, 15 McElwee, Ross, 25 McGregor, Wayne, 247, 263 McLaren, Norman, 249 McLean, Adrienne L., 247 McLuhan, Marshall, 71, 124, 133 Meat, xxii, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 29, 41, 57, 64, 65, 87–114, 89, 103, 104, 106, 109, 115, 121, 131, 132, 133, 155, 174, 185, 196, 200, 202, 246, 269, 280–281, 284 Mekas, Jonas, 152 Mèliés, Georges, 125 Melville, Herman, 167–168, 192, 208, 238, 267, 284–285 Meyer, Andrew Gil, 36 Meyers, Sidney, 146 Miller, Warren, 144–145, 148–149 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 219 Miquel, Jean-Pierre, 27, 247, 259 Miracle on 34th Street, 125 Miracle Worker, The, 176 Missile, 18, 25, 58, 59, 64–85, 83, 111, 136, 168–169, 175, 196, 209 Mr. Roberts, 120 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Melville), 267 Model, xxii, 12, 13, 26, 30, 65, 85, 92, 110, 115–116, 124–128, 127, 130–142, 134, 137, 138, 144, 149, 156, 157, 159, 160, 184, 190, 252, 255, 259 Molière, 247, 265 Monrovia, Indiana, 12, 92, 164, 251, 259, 266–292, 279, 281, 287 Moore, Michael, xix, 25 Morin, Edgar, 3 Morris, Errol, xix, xxi, 23, 286, 324n4

36 2IND E X

Morrison, Toni, 281 Multi-Handicapped, 163–194, 182 Multi-protagonist films, 143 Mulvey, Laura, 254–255 musical films, xxii, 32, 141, 247, 252 Nabokov, Vladimir, 26 Nanook of the North, 8 National Film Board of Canada (NFB), 2, 20 National Gallery, 12, 22, 30, 137, 161, 243, 246, 258–264, 261, 263, 283–284 Native Son (Wright), 151–152 Near Death, xxi, 12, 18, 20, 23, 28, 132, 164, 166, 195–212, 198, 201, 207, 214, 241, 265, 273 Necrology, 141 Nelson, Gunvor, 256 neorealism, 2, 146 Neugeboren, Jay, 212 New Criticism, 262 New Journalism, 24–25 New York Film Festival, 36 New York Stories, xxii Newton, Helmut, 255 Nichols, Bill, 16, 17, 19, 25, 26, 47, 194, 196, 203, 270, 288, 291, 325n4 Night and Fog. See Nuit et brouillard Nightline, 21, 37 Night Mail, 24 Night of the Living Dead (1968), 200 Nixon, Richard, 53, 272 Norris, Frank, 21 Not a Love Story, 133 Nothing But a Man, 147 Nozick, Robert, 94 Nuit et brouillard, 4 observational cinema, xviii, xx, 1–10, 13–15, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26, 29, 30, 59, 90, 101,

112–113, 138, 161, 252, 311n2. See also cinéma verité; direct cinema O’Connor, John J., 57, 90, 107 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 33, 123 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 33–35 On the Bowery, 2 On the Bridge, 196 Opening Night in Moscow, 148 Ophüls, Max, 139 Organization for Social and Technical Innovation (OSTI), 23 Ornette. . .Made in America, 148 Our Hitler, 197 Our Town (Wilder), 269–270, 286 Ozu, Yasujiro, xx, 186–188 Packard, Vance, 132 Panagia, David, 289 Pas de Deux, 249 Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, La, 186 Patton, 71 Peary, Gerald, 265 Pennebaker, D. A., xx, 2, 148 Perachio, Adrian, 94–95 Perkins, V. F., 46 Perrault, Pierre, 2 Perry, Frank, 196 Persona, 8 Phantom of the Opera, The (Leroux), 257 Pickett, Lenny, 240 Pirandello, Luigi, 239 Pittsburgh Trilogy, The, xxi Plancher, Roger, 247 Plantinga, Carl, 288–289 Plimpton, George, 25 Poitier, Sidney, 155 Polan, Dana, 70 Polt, Harriet, 154 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 4, 143, 156, 157

IND E X 3 63

Portrait of Jason, 5, 148 Pour la suite du monde, 2 Powaqqaatsi, 128 Price of Knowledge?, The, 94 Primary, 2, 29, 147 Primate, 12, 13, 16, 18, 25, 26, 29, 34, 45, 57, 87–114, 92, 98, 100, 101, 112, 139, 144, 163, 174, 184, 185, 194, 195, 202, 208, 271 Pryluck, Calvin, 111, 314n61 Psycho (1960), 31, 57, 93 Public Broadcasting System (PBS), xxiii–xxiv, 94, 128 Public Enemy, 150 Public Housing, 13, 14, 20, 28, 153, 183, 213, 215, 218–226, 222, 223, 225, 227, 231, 235, 237, 248, 251, 272–273, 326n9 Punishment Park, 143 Quiet One, The, 146 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 147, 148 Racetrack, 48, 71, 86–88, 90, 91, 95, 97, 108, 110, 111, 114, 165, 169, 195 Racine, Jean, 247, 249 Raging Bull, xxii Randall, Suze, 133 Rapfogel, Jared, 236 Rapold, Nicolas, 249 Raquetteurs, Les, 2 Rauschenberg, Robert, 287 Ravenstein, Apollonia Van. See Apollonia Rebel without a Cause, 155 Red Shoes, The, 247 Redd, Freddie, 148 Redding, Otis, 14, 46, 62, 71 Reds, 161 Reggio, Godfrey, 128 Reilly, David, 268 Reisz, Karel, 2

Renoir, Jean, xx, 4 Rich, Frank, 122 Richardson, Tony, 2 Ricks, Christopher, 245, 251 Riefenstahl, Leni, xix, xx Riis, Jacob, 20 Ritt, Martin, 145, 147 Rocky, 192 Rockwell, Norman, 278 Roemer, Michael, 147 Rogosin, Lionel, 2 Rohmer, Eric, 312n24 Roma, 135 Romero, George, 74, 132 Rosenthal, Alan, xviii, 24 Rossellini, Roberto, 2, 19 Rouch, Jean, xix, 1, 3, 5, 13, 310–311n2 Rourke, Constance, 267 Rubbo, Michael, xx, 25 Ruby, Jay, 142 Rush, Richard, 144 Rushmore, 40 Rutsky, R. L., 27 Sachs, Eddie, 3 Sack, John 25 Sadoul, Georges, 3 Salesman, 5 Salt, Barry, 19 Samie, Catherine, 241, 242–243, 257–258, 265 Sands of Iwo Jima, 70 Sang des bêtes, Le, 104–105 Sarris, Andrew, xiii–xix, 15, 148, 152 Saunders, Dave, 272 Scheib, Ronnie, 229 Schickel, Richard, 37 Schlesinger, John, 126 Schrader, Paul, 186–188 Schwartz, Richard A., 271, 278

36 4IND EX

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 273 science fiction films, 102 Scott, A. O., 269 Scott, Ridley, 141 Seraphita’s Diary, xxiv, 12, 26, 130, 131, 141, 144, 156–162, 158, 160, 242, 243 Sewell, James, 240 Shadows, 2 Shakespeare, William, 213 Shapcott, Jo, 263–264 Shedd, Graham, 94 Sheed, Wilfred, 29, 37 Sheeler, Charles, 22, 259, 268 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 129 Shinn, Everett, 22 Shklovsky, Viktor, 15, 102, 142 Shoah, 4, 197 Shock Corridor, 31 Shoulder Arms, 75 Showgirls, 256–257 Shrank, Jeffrey, 141 Silence, The, 78 Simon, Paul, 238 Sinai Field Mission, 12, 64, 65, 71, 115–116, 119–121, 123–124, 126, 128–130, 129, 133, 135 Sinclair, Upton, 21, 22 Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut), 67 Sirk, Douglas, 124, 135 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 22 Sklar, Robert, 288 Skyscraper, 148 Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade (Vonnegut), 190 Slavitt, David, 75, 81, 240 Sloan, John, 22 Smith, Adam, 25 Soldier Girls, xxi Sontag, Susan, 187, 211

Sourian, Peter, 123 Southern, Terry, 26 Spanish Earth, The, 196 Spottiswoode, Raymond, xix Stagecoach (1939), 108–109, 128 State Legislature, 12, 28, 133, 190, 266–292, 277, 280 Steen, Jan, 22, 259, 260 Stern, Bert, 2 Store, The, 7, 12, 15, 16, 19, 62, 115–116, 119, 124–127, 132, 135–142, 140, 157, 190, 252 Stunt Man, The, 144 Sturges, Preston, 331n20 Sucksdorff, Arne, xx Suid, Lawrence H., 319n13 Sullivan, Patrick J., 93, 96, 185 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 197 Take Off, 256 Tarbell, Ida M., 21 Taylor, Charles, 37 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 247 teen films, 155 television, xxii–xxiii, 2, 24, 128, 288. See also Corporation for Public Broadcasting; Public Broadcasting System Terre sans pain. See Hurdes, Las Tetley, Glen, 246 Thayer, Ernest, 40 Theroux, Paul, 117, 118–119 Thin Blue Line, The, 23 Thomas Crown Affair, The (1968), 144 Thompson, Hunter S., 24 Tippet, Clark, 246 Titian, 263–264 Titicut Follies, xx, xxii, 7, 9, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 29–37, 30, 34, 38, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 63, 82, 88, 90, 95, 97, 98,

IND EX 3 6 5

100, 115, 138, 145, 155, 163, 168, 187, 196, 202, 208, 213, 251, 268, 271, 272, 314n55, 316n19, 320n19 Titicut Follies, the Ballet, 240 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 28 Tolstoy, Leo, 242–243 Tonight We Improvise (Pirandello), 39 Tourou et Bitti, xix Tracey, Linda Lee, 133 transcendental film, 57, 186–188 Transcendentalism, 10, 12, 57 Trump, Donald J., 266, 272–275, 278, 285 Twain, Mark, 145, 266 2001: A Space Odyssey, 97 Tyler, Royall, 116 Van Dyke, Willard, 148 van Eyck, Jan, 260 van Ravenstein, Apollonia. See Apollonia Varushka, 131 Vaughan, Dai, 1, 310n23, 310n2 Vermeer, Johannes, 259–260 Venice Film Festival, 145, 285 Verhoeven, Paul, 256 Vertov, Dziga, xx, 1, 3, 12, 15, 17, 238 Vigo, Jean, xix Vineberg, Steve, 243 Vogel, Amos, 35 Vonnegut, Kurt, 26, 67, 190 WETV (Atlanta), 94 WGBH (Boston), 94 WNET (New York), 94 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 9–10, 59 Waldron, Mal, 148 Walking Tall, Part Two, 118 Walsh, Marty, 20, 65, 273–275 Walsh, Raoul, 151 war films, xxii, 69–70, 84–85, 108

War Game, The, 143 Warhol, Andy, 125, 134, 137, 156 Warren, Robert Penn, 288 Warrendale, 7, 16, 181 Warriors, The, 151 Waters, Harry F., 165 Watkins, Peter, xix, 21, 143 Watt, Harry, 24 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 262 Waugh, Thomas, 271 Wayne, John, 70, 149 Way We Were, The, 204–205 Weddings and Babies, 2 Weekend, 158 Weisman, Avery D., 203, 207, 210, 211 Weiss, Peter, 33 Welfare, 9, 13, 20, 22, 25, 28, 33–34, 53, 54, 56, 57–63, 61, 64, 71, 80, 82, 88, 91, 119, 129, 153, 154, 163, 169, 175, 181, 191, 209, 213, 224, 234, 269, 276, 284 Welfare: The Opera, 239–240 Westerns, xxii, 108–109, 149 Westin, Alan, 26 West Side Story (1961), 151 White Heat, 151 Whitman, Walt, 12, 267, 278, 281, 285, 289, 290, 292 Why We Fight, xxii Widmark, Richard, 150 Wild Boys of the Road, 155 Wilder, Thornton, 269–270, 286 Wild One, The, 155 Williams, Clarence, 147 Williams, William Carlos, 10, 63, 287 Williamson, Judith, 136, 139 Winston, Brian, 47, 317n19, 330–331n17 Wiseman, Frederick: and authorship, xx–xxii, 7, 10–21, 28–29, 156; career of, 6–7–14, 23; and dance, 239–240,

36 6 IND E X

Wiseman, Frederick (continued ) 244–258; and editing, 7, 15–19, 25; and fiction film, xxii, 17, 19, 85, 125, 143–162, 169, 176; and literature, 22, 24, 143–144, 228; and painting, 22, 258–264; and public television, xxiii–xxiv; and sound, 12–14; and theater, 239–241, 242, 257–258, 264–265; films of: class in, 48, 51, 57; 214, 218–221; gender in, 68, 76–78, 133–134, 243, 254–256; 280; humor in, 25–26, 33, 71–75, 92–93, 132, 227–231; institutions in, 14–15, 19, 20–21, 24–25, 28–29, 115–116, 125; race in, 50–51, 53, 62, 70–71, 118–119, 134, 152–154, 215, 218–221, 223–225, 279; Wolcott, James, 9, 58, 88, 90, 102, 118, 121, 126, 131

Wolfe, Tom, 24–25 Wollen, Peter, xx Woodstock, 195 Wordsworth, William, 178 Wright, Basil, 24 Wright, Richard, 151–152 Young, Colin, 1, 20, 311n2 Young, Robert, 147 Zavattini, Cesare, 2 Zipporah Films, xxiv, 124, 156, 316n19 Zoo, 15, 22, 86–88, 87, 90, 91, 96, 102, 110, 111, 114, 195, 200 Zugsmith, Albert, 155 Zwerin, Charlotte, xviii