Frederick Wiseman’s Real-Life Epics

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Richard Brody
Staff writer

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Frederick Wiseman has redefined the art of nonfiction filmmaking in a directorial career, begun in 1967, that includes forty-six documentaries to date. Forty of them (thirty-three in new restorations) are featured in “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution,” a retrospective of his work that runs Jan. 31-March 5 at Film at Lincoln Center. What’s amazing about Wiseman’s movies, with their rigorous cinematic analyses of complex environments, is that anyone ever let him in to make them. Almost all of his films are centered not on individuals or groups but on institutions, ranging from the ultra-local (“Hospital,” “High School”) and the large-scale (“Canal Zone,” “Aspen”) to the abstract (“Welfare,” “Public Housing”). They involve filming behind closed doors, in sensitive situations, to witness the intricate negotiations and bitter confrontations of civic life; yet Wiseman does get in, and his method (usually involving a crew of three that includes a cinematographer and an assistant) is so immersive that the participants appear to work and speak as if they weren’t being recorded.

“Missile,” from 1987.

Photograph courtesy Zipporah Films

Wiseman’s overarching subject is power. A former law-school professor, Wiseman discerns the force of law—which is to say, the implicit or explicit threat of violence—at work in daily life. That’s why an unofficial trilogy of life-and-death stories, featuring “Law and Order” (1969), “Missile” (1987), and “Near Death” (1989), has a special place in his œuvre: in the face of his subjects’ ultimate stakes, his own sense of concentration is at its peak. In “Law and Order,” Wiseman embeds with the police department in Kansas City, Missouri, and has extraordinary access to discussions and interrogations in the station house; travelling in police cars, he follows officers to crime scenes. The movie’s shocking centerpiece involves two white plainclothesmen who capture a Black woman who’s suspected of prostitution. Though she offers no resistance, an officer puts her in a chokehold, threatens to kill her, and then denies he was choking her at all. The horrifying brutality is amplified by the impunity with which the officer flaunts it—and denies it—on camera.

In “Missile,” Wiseman films at an Air Force base in California where officers are trained to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles—in other words, to fire nuclear weapons in a likely apocalyptic act of war. The training is as much psychological as technical, as much moral as practical; the trainees are made aware of the grave implications of their work, yet life on the base is eerily chipper, complete with picnics and sports. The heart of the movie is its view of the immensely complicated systems, with codes and keys and a repertory of precise gestures, that a launch requires—a chillingly abstract and impersonal vision of the end of the world.

“Near Death” may well be Wiseman’s supreme masterwork; running nearly six monumental hours, it’s set in the intensive-care unit of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, where patients and their families confront end-of-life decisions under great pressure. Wiseman films doctors and nurses delivering both care and counsel, and speaking candidly among themselves, in virtuosically extended sequences, about their cases’ scientific and emotional demands and the elaborate protocols, both legal and medical, for unforgiving quandaries.

About Town

Dance

Urban Bush Women’s “Scat!. . . The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar,” a valedictory work by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, who in 2019 stepped down as artistic director of the company she founded decades ago, treats the lives and unfulfilled dreams of her parents as myth. Shaped like the revues of her childhood, it jumps around in time, sampling Black vernacular steps to a live period-inspired jazz score by Craig Harris.—Brian Seibert (PAC NYC; Feb. 5-8.)

Classical

Lunar New Year officially fell on Jan. 29, and the New York Philharmonic rings in the Year of the Snake in its usual festive manner, with a vibrant gala and a concert. Conducted by Tianyi Lu, the program features Li Huanzhi’s “Spring Festival Overture,” inspired by music from the Shanbei region of China; a selection from Alfredo Casella’s “La donna serpente,” a hypnotic work drawing from the same fantastical fable that brought about Wagner’s “Die Feen”; Chen Yi’s “Chinese Folk Dance Suite,” a work in three movements, each of which emulates a different traditional dance; and the prologue from the opera “Alice in Wonderland” ’s “A Mad Tea-Party,” composed by Unsuk Chin. The concert ends with the crowd-pleasing, yet eyebrow-raising choice of “Carmen”—one can only hope that the year ahead is not so tragic.—Jane Bua (David Geffen Hall; Feb. 11.)

Art

“Low Tide,” 2023.

Photograph by Mary Mattingly / Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery

Mary Mattingly’s photographs of moonlit gardens turn the Robert Mann gallery into a hallucinatory hothouse. Vivid and wild with masses of real, handmade, and computer-generated flowers, Mattingly’s compact landscapes are at once otherworldly—sci-fi at its most seductive—and as familiar as natural-history dioramas. But they’re not just pretty pictures. The artist has long been known for work (including site-specific sculpture) that takes on environmental issues with engaging subtlety. Here, the gardens often appear to be sinking or submerged as rising seas threaten to turn earthly Edens into swampland. In one image, translucent, jewel-like jellyfish caps float like a squadron of U.F.O.s above a darkened field of flowers, invaders from our own mutating planet.—Vince Aletti (Robert Mann; through Feb. 22.)

Neo Soul

The multihyphenate Dua Saleh, a Sudanese American nonbinary Muslim artist raised in Minnesota, navigates the nuances of intersectionality as an avant-pop musician, actor, activist, and poet. Fittingly, Saleh’s shapeshifting, spellbinding music unpacks the range of all of those descriptors. Since meeting Psymun, the producer at the center of a progressive local scene bending hip-hop and R. & B., Saleh’s songs have grown looser and more unbound. After releasing three EPs—the spooky neo soul of “Nūr” (2019), the distorted, electronic “ROSETTA” (2020), and the confident, pulsing, and diasporic breakthrough “CROSSOVER” (2021)—that successfully mapped out the breadth of their sound, Saleh’s début album, “I SHOULD CALL THEM,” takes an even more ambitious, conceptual turn, imagining romantic dissolution on the fringes of an apocalypse.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; Feb. 7.)

Dance

Camille A. Brown.

Photograph by Whitney Browne

“I Am,” performed by Camille A. Brown & Dancers, takes its title from an episode of HBO’s “Lovecraft Country,” in which a character travels through multiple dimensions to find herself. In Brown’s work, the dancers—who include the choreographer, queen of Broadway and opera—already know who they are. To a live score that incorporates nineties-era hip-hop and R. & B., gospel jams, and original compositions, they don’t perform so much as just be themselves, in glorious dance.—B.S. (Joyce Theatre; Feb. 5-9.)

Movies

In a career that began in 1988, Rob Tregenza has made only five features and—devising an original style based on extended takes and intricate camera movements—won major acclaim, albeit below the industry’s radar. His latest film, “The Fishing Place,” opens new dimensions in his work and in the modern cinema. It’s set in a Norwegian village under German occupation during the Second World War. There, a recently arrived priest comes under an S.S. officer’s suspicion; a housekeeper, secretly meeting with the officer, is sent to spy on the clergyman. Sketching the townspeople’s high-stakes personal and political relationships, Tregenza reveals a wide and troubling web of conflicting principles and ambiguous loyalties; in a spectacular concluding flourish that’s too good to spoil, he thrusts historical drama into the present tense.—Richard Brody (MOMA; opens Feb. 6.)

Pick Three

The staff writer Michael Schulman on new works of cultural archeology.

Illustration by Rozalina Burkova

1. The documentary-theatre troupe the Civilians does inventive things with found material. Its latest show is “Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air” (at 59E59, through Feb. 9). Conceived and directed by Steve Cosson, the piece draws from archival WNYC interviews with Kenneth Anger, Yvonne Rainer, and other avant-garde luminaries, reënacted by a cast of five. (The original audio is piped into their ears as they speak.) It’s a kooky, loving tribute to a bygone age of New York intellectualism, and to the joys of pretentiousness.

2. Ira Madison III co-hosts (with Louis Virtel) the waggish pop-culture podcast “Keep It,” one of my weekly appointment listens. Madison has a new book of essays, “Pure Innocent Fun”: part memoir of growing up Black, gay, and TV-obsessed in Milwaukee, in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands; part deconstruction of such elder-millennial preoccupations as “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Daria,” “Survivor,” and Oprah Winfrey’s public weight-loss saga.

3. The Criterion Channel’s new series “Cast Against Type: Heroes as Villains” features Golden Age stars in roles that subvert their sunny personae. Selections include “Don’t Bother to Knock” (1952), starring Marilyn Monroe as a troubled babysitter who causes havoc when she’s left to look after a little girl; “The Boston Strangler” (1968), with Tony Curtis as the serial killer; and the eerily timely Elia Kazan film “A Face in the Crowd” (1957), starring Andy Griffith as a charming Everyman whose overnight radio fame turns him into a mad demagogue.

P.S. Good stuff on the Internet: