For more than forty years, Frederick Wiseman has been one of the hardest-working and most respected documentary filmmakers in the world. Starting with the 1967 Titicut Follies, a look inside the Bridgewater, Mass., State Prison for the Criminally Insane that so rattled the prison administrators that they instigated legal proceedings that kept the film out of distribution for twenty-five years, he's made thirty films that examine one institution, activity, or way of life after another, mostly stamped with generic-sounding titles such as High School, Hospital, Basic Training, Welfare, Juvenile Court, Meat. Domestic Violence, and State Legislature. For most of his career, he's been dependent on public television not just for funding but for his widest national audience, and his films have remained dismayingly unavailable on home video. Now, finally, Wiseman's longtime theatrical distributor, Zipporah Films, is planning to make his full body of work available on DVD. They've got twenty-three movies available on disc, with the rest scheduled for eventual release. What's been the hold-up? "Nobody wanted to put out all the films," Wiseman explained to Nicolas Rapold, and he wanted all his babies out there and making new friends.
As the documentary film scene has exploded in recent years, Wiseman, even with his best-known work largely sheltered from public view, has grown legendary for his steady pace, his wide range of subjects, and for his precise yet nonjudgmental filmmaking style. Unlike some of the filmmakers who make big waves now, he doesn't charge in looking for what he's already decided he's going to find. He doesn't knock himself out with pre-production, either. "I try to get a sense of the geography and what the centers of power are. The shooting of the film is the research." Wiseman shoots with an eye towards finding the shape and rhythm of the finished picture in the editing process, and he's never gone in for narration and other explanatory devices. When he's not at the top of his game, the results can be baffling, but when he's cooking with gas, he succeeds in his goal of "trying to put you, the viewer, in the middle of these events and ask you to evaluate them based on your own experience." He's both an investigative journalist and a social realist novelist with a camera, and making his work available is one small step in seeing to it that the world make better sense.
