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Frederick Wiseman is probably the best documentary filmmaker there is. He’s definitely the purest. But it’s very likely you haven’t heard of him yet, much less seen his films, even though he’s been working at a relentless pace since 1967.

Wiseman’s work, until this fall, has been unavailable on DVD or VHS. It has had zero commercial distribution. Your only chance of spotting one would be if you followed your local PBS affiliate’s schedule very carefully, and we both know you don’t do that. You might have also been able to see one at a museum or film fest, but that would have been rare, like spotting a unicorn walking through the MoMA. So why hasn’t Wiseman let his films out to video-rental shops, Netflix, and the like until now? Because he doesn’t compromise on anything, and it took him this long to work out a system in which he could get his films available on a large scale without taking it up the ass financially. Simple as that.

Now that you can see his movies, you should start doing so immediately. A Frederick Wiseman documentary is the most perfect form of immersive reporting. He goes to a place (anything from a mental hospital, to a high school, to an army basic-training camp, to an upscale New York modeling agency, to Central Park) and stays there for anywhere from 4 to 12 weeks and shoots, and shoots, and shoots. He never interviews anybody. He never appears on camera. The people and the place tell their own stories, and they do it better than anyone else could. These films are the closest you can come to having been somewhere yourself.

Any conversation with Wiseman will almost inevitably return to Titicut Follies, the 1967 documentary he made at Bridgewater, a state mental institution in Massachusetts. It is an incredibly harrowing, moving, and—most surprisingly—entertaining portrait of the inside of a place that nobody was supposed to see. Prisoners are kept naked and abused. Heartless psychiatrists decide the fate of men during blithe staff meetings. An inmate stands on his head in the courtyard and calmly sings, and another one is force-fed—through a tube that goes into his nose and down to his stomach—by a staff member who is pouring liquid mush into the funnel with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. You really sometimes cannot believe what you’re seeing as you watch Titicut Follies.

We recently talked to Frederick Wiseman on the phone from his home base in remotest Maine. He told us, mostly, about the decades-long war of attrition he went through to get his first movie seen.

Vice: Can you tell me how you got interested in documenting institutions?

Frederick Wiseman: When I was doing Titicut Follies, which is the first one, it occurred to me that while I was doing it at Bridgewater, I could have done it at a number of other institutions. Out of that came the idea of doing a so-called institutional series. At that point—and I think it’s still true to some extent—the kind of subjects I’d been choosing were not subjects that were being picked for documentary films. But the idea of making a movie about one place, from my point of view, was useful because it provided a boundary.

Having clear borders that framed what the film could and couldn’t be about was helpful.

The place serves the same function as the lines and net of a tennis court. Whatever happens within the place is suitable for the film and whatever happens outside is for another film. So I tried to pick places that existed for awhile, that were up and running, that were thought to be good examples of their kind, and that affected the lives of a lot of people.

That way they would be more rich in things to cover. Were places like hospitals, high schools, and police beats not being covered in documentaries before you did them because filmmakers weren’t thinking in broad-enough terms?

I could speculate, but it would be completely hypothetical.

INTERVIEWED BY JESSE PEARSON

TO BE CONTINUED:
THE FOLLIES OF DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

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