Arts writer Derek McArthur looks at the life and work of film documentarian Frederick Wiseman in the wake of his passing.

Frederick Wiseman, the long-working documentary filmmaker who shifted the relationship between the camera and our lives under institutions, died on Monday at the grand age of 96.

Wiseman’s innovations were plentiful, and most importantly, thoughtful. Pairing a lightweight camera with high-speed film gave him an opening to document what was not possible before, his particular interest focusing on the institutional framework of America and the people within it.

He would shoot 100 hours of footage to get maybe 3 or 4 hours. The substance and narrative of the film would come from vast amounts of editing, where he would meticulously edit nearly all his films himself. Many tributes will talk about Wiseman’s objective look at reality through the camera, but he knew no such thing existed. His editing decisions were just as reality-shaping as what the camera took in.

“A fiction film has a script,” he said, “so at the very least the chronology is determined in advance. But a documentary film of the kind I make, it’s reversed: I write the script in the editing.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t choices in the editing in a fiction film, because of course there are. But the range of choices aren’t anywhere near as great as they are in a documentary.”

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Wiseman’s way of working eschewed the many modern tropes of documentary filmmaking. His subjects were presented as is, forgoing the narrative-setting of narration. No interviews took place, the sit-down interview being such an unnatural setting that it would be pointless to hint at any greater truth. No music appears except for any that exists in the world being recorded itself. His films never broke the fourth wall, a true embodiment of the fly on the wall. The few times subjects look into the camera feel almost alien, aberrations that weren’t meant to be seen.

His work points to a way of making documentaries that doesn’t just represent our reality but extends and strengthens our understanding of it. He worked on the opposite end of the spectrum in what is seen and mass-produced today, a far cry from the production assembly line of streaming service documentaries and amateur-dressed-up YouTube content. Wiseman had a perspective, a mindset, a range of feelings and considerations that rejected falling into the trap of the documentary being mere entertainment, easily forgotten after it ends.

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His 1967 debut film Titicut Follies took his camera into the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane. It remains the only film to be banned in the United States outside of obscene or moral reasons, as the observation of patients was considered too much an invasion of privacy. It now airs freely on PBS, America’s publicly funded broadcaster, and as part of film festivals around the world, showcasing the little-seen perspective of what life is truly like for those put into institutions and left outside the margins of polite society. Perhaps his work came to be somewhat sublimated by the same institutional framework that he wished to reveal.

Wiseman's debut film Titicut Follies gave a look inside a mental institution for the criminally insane (Image: Frederick Wiseman)

But his look into the institutional framework of America didn’t just extend to the unrelatable and titillating hook of the criminally insane and other similar subjects. His 1968 film High School observed a Philadelphia high school in all its daily goings-on, becoming an unvarnished look at the role and infrastructure of the education system. His creative decision of observing interactions between students and teachers from a place of assumed objectivity upended what was seen as the early traditions of documentary filmmaking, becoming so standard in the modern day that it comes off as unremarkable.

Other filmmakers would gravitate toward subjects with natural charisma, but Wiseman had no interest in tailoring his films in such a way. The revolutionary aspect of High School is in how ordinary the situations are, how non-special its subjects truly are. It allows our eyes and brain to move from the people featured towards what something as benign as a high school can reveal about our cultural and governmental institutions.

Through his sense of filmmaking, the scenes manage to highlight the indoctrination that institutions rely so heavily on to function. The repeated nuclear family houses passed in the opening drive to school immaculately set up the conformism it manifests inside the classroom.

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Wiseman would make a number of what are now considered classic documentary films, and his choice of subject was wherever it led him and whatever he took an interest in. But he always returned to the same essential question: how do institutions shape the people inside them, and how do those people, in turn, shape the institution?

Unlike a lot of innovative heavyweights who burn candles on both ends and see themselves peter out, Wiseman never stopped working. He tackled documentaries well into the 21st century with subjects like the National Gallery in London and, a touch more familiar to homebase, the University of California, Berkeley. His last ever film documented the everyday life of a Michelin 3-star French restaurant.

He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, and also a way of seeing - one that insists reality is complicated, constructed, and worth the time it takes to understand.

© Herald Scotland