{"id":11763,"date":"2011-02-28T11:31:40","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T16:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11763"},"modified":"2011-02-28T12:05:04","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T17:05:04","slug":"frederick-wiseman-the-tawdry-gruesomeness-of-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/28\/frederick-wiseman-the-tawdry-gruesomeness-of-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Frederick Wiseman: The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_12186\" style=\"width: 582px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/SFM-poker.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-12186\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/SFM-poker.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"SFM - poker\" width=\"572\" height=\"437\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12186\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/SFM-poker.jpg 572w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/SFM-poker-300x229.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-12186\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Sinai Field Mission, \u00a9 1978 Zipporah Films, Inc.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Fred Wiseman has been my idol for a long time. In the 1970s it wasn\u2019t all that easy to see his films. For a while I had seen only <em>Basic Training <\/em>(1971) and <em>High School <\/em>(1968). Nothing else. <em>Titicut Follies <\/em>(1967) was almost impossible to see because it was under a court injunction. Videocassettes had been introduced, but Wiseman\u2019s films existed only on 16mm\u2014ready to be slapped onto a projector or viewed on a flatbed. Until very recently, he was reluctant to transfer his films to DVD. I believe it was because that would have made them too easy to be seen.<\/p>\n<p>When I was editing my first film, I visited Fred Wiseman in Boston. His offices in those days were on Lewis Wharf, and he very kindly allowed me to watch several of his films on a Steenbeck editing machine. At dinner in his home, one of his sons asked him whether he was going to show me \u201cthe two-hour, the three-hour, or the four-hour boring film.\u201d Fred didn\u2019t smile. But honestly, I had no problem with the length. For me, they could have been even longer.<\/p>\n<p>I saw Fred again at the London Film Festival in 1978. He was showing <em>Sinai Field Mission<\/em>. My future wife, Julia Sheehan, and I went to the first screening at the National Film Theatre. Julia, also a Wiseman fan, had just gotten off an all-night flight from Boston, and promptly fell asleep next to Fred. She was mortified. I remember being mesmerized by the film and its \u201clanguage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The cinder block buildings, the microwave dishes, and the injunction: to stop sunbathing on the modules. If Surrealist painters had to conjure an empty, featureless plain with pieces of driftwood, Wiseman was able to do away with the driftwood, the conjuring, and simply point the camera at reality. The results are disarming and even dismaying.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/20348153?byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"573\" height=\"469\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>A woman plays basketball alone in Frederick Wiseman\u2019s <em>Sinai Field Mission<\/em> (1976). The clip appears courtesy of Zipporah Films and may not be downloaded or used in any way. All Frederick Wiseman films are available from Zipporah Films at zipporah.com. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>One thing surprised me in 1978. Fred had little interest in watching other movies at the festival. He was interested in London theater and excited about the prospect of going to a play. I still believe, over thirty years later, that his movies come from the theater, perhaps the theater of the absurd, rather than from any specific film tradition.<\/p>\n<p>Many people have written or filmed unending paeans to the human race, the nobility of man, the endurance of human spirit. But they have described man as we might <em>like <\/em>him to be, with little regard for how he is. Wiseman has had the honesty and supreme decency to portray human society for what it is: a madhouse. <em>Titicut Follies <\/em>was his first but not his only madhouse movie. It was a template for the thirty-eight movies that followed.<\/p>\n<p>I sat down recently and re-watched <em>Sinai Field Mission<\/em>. It was much as I had remembered it. The man with the push broom in the middle of the desert, the Texas techies (from some bizarre organization called \u201cE-Systems\u201d), the endlessly marching Ghanaians and Finns, the lonely, enervated one-person basketball games, the bicycle rider straining himself on a hill to nowhere. Sisyphus without the grand illusions. In sum total: a feeling of immense dislocation, meaninglessness, and isolation.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/20347872?byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"573\" height=\"469\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>A man rides a bike along a desert road in Frederick Wiseman\u2019s \u201cSinai Field Mission\u201d (1976). The clip appears courtesy of Zipporah Films and may not be downloaded or used in any way. All Frederick Wiseman films are available from Zipporah Films at www.zipporah.com.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I learned about filmmaking at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, where I spent a lot of time watching movies: a few documentaries and a steady diet of Dreyer, Hawks, Renoir, and Nicholas Ray. The documentaries I saw were by Bu\u00f1uel, Herzog, and Georges Franju\u2014not the Maysles or Leacock and Pennebaker.<\/p>\n<p>Wiseman once asked me, \u201cHow could you possibly like my movies? They\u2019re all filmed in wobblyscope,\u201d his affectionate term for handheld camerawork. And he is right. His movies are stylistically <em>ur<\/em>-v\u00e9rit\u00e9. No narration. Available light. Fly-on-the wall. But Wiseman\u2019s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. He may be a direct-cinema guy in form, but the content is not valetudinarian but visionary and dystopian. Wiseman has never been a straight v\u00e9rit\u00e9 \u201cdocumentarian.\u201d He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/20348218?byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"573\" height=\"469\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>A jeep drives through an arid valley in Frederick Wiseman\u2019s \u201cSinai Field Mission\u201d (1976). The clip appears courtesy of Zipporah Films and may not be downloaded or used in any way. All Frederick Wiseman films are available from Zipporah Films at zipporah.com. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I have jotted down some obsessions, themes, and predilections that recur in his films. These are not comprehensive but hopefully give some idea of what I love about his work.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. Surface <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We constantly think about the motivations of people\u2014their dreams, ideas, hopes. This is not really present in Wiseman\u2019s films. He shows things as they are. As they are manifest. He never asks anyone to explain anything, certainly not themselves. He never interviews anybody. Instead he functions as eavesdropper, listening in on conversations unraveling around him . . . And what amazing conversations they are. People endlessly tallying up senseless columns of numbers. There is a brief inkling that the mission in the Sinai is concerned with peacekeeping, that there is perhaps some larger <em>purpose <\/em>for it all, but in this film larger purposes shrink away, leaving us with a residue of meaningless ritual.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. Real Time <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We very rarely see examples of real time in the movies. There is the minute of silence in Godard\u2019s <em>Band of Outsiders <\/em>(1964). But in Wiseman\u2019s films, we are treated to many minutes of silence and to unbroken time. Earnest conversations about seemingly nothing ramble on and on. If movies generally compress time through cutting and editing, then in Wiseman\u2019s films time feels extended. A minute of real time can feel interminable, or if you prefer, like an eternity. But I am reminded of a remark made to me by Sidney Coleman, a Harvard quantum field theorist, about the artist and designer Robert Wilson. Sidney said, \u201cSlow is not boring. Only boring is boring.\u201d The same could be said about these films. Slow, yes, but endlessly fascinating.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3. Length <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Fred has gotten into countless fights with film programmers and television producers about the length of his movies. He is the Howard Roark of documentary. Like Ayn Rand\u2019s protagonist in <em>The Fountainhead <\/em>(1943), he would rather blow up the building he designed than remove a doorknob. Change one frame, alter one image, try to reduce the length by one second, particularly if it\u2019s already over four hours, and Fred will destroy the film rather than compromise. He is the ultimate auteur. <em>Near Death <\/em>(1989) is set in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel hospital in Boston. The viewer begins to feel his own mortality and to wither under the weight of the subject matter over the course of six hours. I, however, told Fred it should have been even longer. I was serious. For a Wiseman film to work it <em>has <\/em>to be long. Unendurably long. Intolerably long. It is hard to look at Wiseman\u2019s version of reality. One has to be led there and forced to look at it on a leash with a muzzle.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. Anti-Sociology <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Many commentators have written about Fred as though he is a social scientist\u2014a prolific chronicler of institutional behavior. But this gets it backward. Fred likes institutions like Fellini likes the circus. They are a backdrop or a metaphor for something else. I prefer to think of Fred as an entomologist who has poked his camera into some truly nasty termite pile and watches with bemused satisfaction as the termites scurry around carrying odd parcels and such. What are they doing? Can we ever know?<\/p>\n<p><strong>5. Irony <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Irony is, properly considered, a weapon. Often it\u2019s a way of showing a disconnection between what people <em>think <\/em>they are doing and what they <em>are <\/em>doing. Irony abounds in Wiseman\u2019s films. No one, absolutely no one, really knows what he is doing. And Wiseman, the observer, is fascinated by a reality (hidden just below the surface) that nobody in the film seems to notice.<\/p>\n<p><strong>6. Religion <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When Wiseman turns to \u201cevangelical\u201d subjects, as in <em>Aspen <\/em>(1991) and <em>Essene <\/em>(1972) as well as in <em>Sinai Field Mission<\/em>, we characteristically feel the absence of God rather than his presence. The preacher in <em>Sinai Field Mission <\/em>is instructing his soldiers that life has a purpose, that each man fulfills an important and valuable role, but everything he says and the context in which he says it seem to suggest the exact opposite.<\/p>\n<p><strong>7. Sex <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Dreiser has nothing on him. Sex has never looked as tawdry and sad as it does in a Wiseman film. The lab technicians masturbating a monkey in <em>Primate <\/em>(1974). Humans are portrayed admirably as evil primates. The female veterinarians castrating a wolf in <em>Zoo <\/em>(1993) as a male janitor looks on nervously, his hands folded over his crotch. Fred has a gift for filming condom demonstrations. In <em>High School II <\/em>(1994), white middle-class students are shown how to put a condom on a huge black dildo. In <em>Public Housing <\/em>(1997), the students are black teenage mothers. This time the dildo is small and white.<\/p>\n<p><strong>8. Repetition <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Every Wiseman scene recalls other Wiseman scenes. Look at <em>High School <\/em>and the hapless teenagers in gym class dancing to \u201cSimon Says\u201d (the 1910 Fruit Gum Company version) and the Ghanaians marching in <em>Sinai Field Mission<\/em>. Wiseman proves that redundancy is the spice of life. Everything recalls everything, but, more to the point, everything repeats everything.<\/p>\n<p><strong>9. The Meaning of Meaninglessness <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Sinai Field Mission <\/em>. . . a man with a large push broom is sweeping sand in the desert. What more can you say? Oh yes, it\u2019s about the UN peacekeeping forces in the Sinai. Trapped inside a windowless bunker and surrounded by a chain-link fence and razor wire, the Texans, Finns, and Ghanaians try to keep the peace. After a short while, they inevitability start fighting with each other. <em>The Store <\/em>(1983) is an excursion into Neiman Marcus during the holiday season. The employee and employer birthday parties at the conclusion are surreal and desperate. Does it matter whether we are rich or poor, owner or lowliest worker? It\u2019s all depressing. In <em>Near Death<\/em>, one of the terminal patients explains how she has finally found a way to lose weight. Dying. If you don\u2019t pay attention, you might consider the film life affirming. <em>Essene <\/em>takes place in a monastery. A monk pursues a fly unendingly with a flyswatter. This is the height of boredom as religious ecstasy. When a Spanish teacher in <em>High School <\/em>drills in the line, \u201cSartre is an existentialist philosopher,\u201d or a helpless welfare recipient in <em>Welfare <\/em>(1975) refers to Godot in the closing minutes of the film, I can imagine Wiseman smiling. These are his roots\u2014not Grierson and Flaherty but Beckett, Anouilh, Ionesco, and Sartre, the theater of hopeless irony and the absurd. It\u2019s no wonder he lives now in France. Wiseman\u2019s films can be considered as extended essays on the meaning of meaninglessness. And they are incredibly bitter and funny. Really, really funny.<\/p>\n<p>These forty-odd films are highly personal and idiosyncratic works. They create a world, equal to the worlds of Renoir and Hitchcock and Fellini. For me, Wiseman is the undisputed king of misanthropic cinema.<\/p>\n<p><em>Errol Morris is a filmmaker and author. This essay is excerpted from <\/em>Frederick Wiseman<em>, a catalog of essays edited by Joshua Siegel and Marie-Christine de Navacelle and published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, to accompany the Wiseman retrospective that opened there in the fall.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fred Wiseman has been my idol for a long time. In the 1970s it wasn\u2019t all that easy to see his films. For a while I had seen only Basic Training (1971) and High School (1968). Nothing else. Titicut Follies (1967) was almost impossible to see because it was under a court injunction. Videocassettes had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1890,1891,1892],"class_list":["post-11763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-errol-morris","tag-frederick-wiseman","tag-sinai-field-mission"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Frederick Wiseman: The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality by Errol Morris<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 28, 2011 \u2013 Fred Wiseman has been my idol for a long time. In the 1970s it wasn\u2019t all that easy to see his films. 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