Eugene Hernandez: Frederick Wiseman = The Greatest by Eugene Hernandez (November 23, 2009)
Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman yesterday in Amsterdam at IDFA. Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 23, 2009—This 15th weekly column begins with why I love Frederick Wiseman and concludes with why I love documentary cinema. Since seeing “La Danse” a few weeks ago at New York’s Film Forum, I’ve been wanting to make the following statement: Frederick Wiseman is the greatest documentary filmmaker working today. Sitting here in Amsterdam, home of the world’s leading documentary festival - IDFA - I realize that’s a bold pronouncement to make with the great Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker, Agnes Varda and others, still actively making movies. But, watching more Wiseman work lately - here in Amsterdam and back in NYC - I’ve found myself increasingly fascinated by his observational, anti-ideological cinema. In fact, at times in awe. Frederick Wiseman’s films offer an enticing window into micro worlds and he has developed a filmmaking process that almost sounds like science. Long takes observing, rather than interrupting a moment. He pursues, as he said yesterday here in Amsterdam, “the dramatic aspects of ordinary experience.” By spending hours focusing his subjective gaze on people and their environments, he constructs rich essays that reveal dramatic human experiences. By letting his camera run, he captures incredible moments and then shapes them to make a point about the people and places that he’s witnessed. “The overall goal is to make as many movies about contemporary life as I can,” Wiseman said at IDFA over the weekend. “My interest is in making a movie that has a dramatic structure, that is dramatic, funny, sad and all those cliches that a movie is supposed to be. And I also resist explanation and didacticism. But, that’s my choice and other people make wonderful work using opposite techniques.” Peter Rainier once wrote in New York Magazine that “no other director has given us as many overpoweringly expressive close-ups of faces in moments of undisguised agony and endurance. Wherever Wiseman points his camera, people’s lives bubble up, as if the intensity of their experience was there all the time, waiting to be grasped.” Wiseman’s films - he seems to avoid calling them documentaries - are always set within a generally familiar entity: a hospital, high school, modeling agency, prison, department store, military base, ballet company, welfare office, or even a small town. The boundaries of the institution provide just enough structure to catalyze a project. Asked what sort of research he does for a movie, Wiseman responded, “The shooting of the film is the research.” His self-described “insatiable curiosity” drives him to explore new places each year and Wiseman typically spends just one day orienting himself to the geography of a site before shooting for a few weeks, always on film. He and his two-person crew observe situation after situation, typically yielding more than 125 hours of footage that he edits himself on a Steenbeck (although he used an AVID for the first time with “La Danse”).
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Does anyone know what happened to “The Garden” - the film he made about Madison Square Garden? Will it ever see the light of day?
Did IDFA make Frederick Wiseman wear a headset mic? How unseemly!
Great piece, Eugene.
I like him and his work too, but wonder why you see him and it as “anti-ideological”? Do you mean he counters the ideologies he documents in each film? Or do you mean you not detect his own ideology as a citizen or a craftsman?