Frederick Wiseman in the spotlight with a retrospective and 3 masterpieces currently in theaters

In France, he is best known to film buffs. However, the American Frederick Wiseman, 94, is considered by critics to be a documentary god for his fresco of the institutions of his country and, beyond that, of the Western world.

“On the occasion of the restoration of 33 of his films, supported by Steven Spielberg and the Library of Congress in Washington, he is being honored by the Cinémathèque du documentaire, at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, which will screen his complete works,” confirms the programmer Arnaud Hée.

At the same time, Météore Films has re-released a triptych of youth in theaters: Law and Order (1969), on a Kansas City police station, Hospital (1970), about a New York nursing home, and Juvenile Court (1973), about a Memphis juvenile court.

Theatricality of everyday life

By his own admission, since 1967, Wiseman has only made one long documentary about our humanity to which he gradually adds chapters. That is 46 to date. “I have always sought to show the theatricality of everyday life (…): comedy, sadness, courage, cruelty and banality,” he explains.

To achieve this, from the start at the age of 37, this former law professor developed a method that he would never abandon. For a month, he filmed in a limited space, equipped with a portable camera and a tape recorder, with a camera operator and an assistant cameraman, who himself provided the sound. In the end, his films did not feature interviews, commentary or additional music.

But this great admirer of the writer Samuel Beckett does not deliver a simple capture of reality: he gives a dramatic recomposition of it, thanks to rigorous editing which can last a year and only includes 3% of the rushes.

First attempt, masterstroke. In 1967, Titicut Follies, his first feature film about a psychiatric prison in Massachusetts, had the effect of a bomb: we see the prisoners locked up naked in their cells and stupefied with medication. Praised by critics, the pamphlet was banned for twenty-four years. It was the spark for a series of black and white closed-door films in which the director observed, in powerful close-ups, his fellow citizens struggling with institutions: a high school in High School (1968), a military camp in Basic Training (1971) or a social welfare center in Welfare (1975).

” Of the Law and Order, where he thought he was denouncing police violence, he is shaken by his first patrol and offers a nuanced look at the job of peacekeeper,” notes Arnaud Hée. Thus, the forceful arrest of a prostitute and the asylum offered at the police station to an abandoned little girl, whom an officer installs in a park, with toys, collide.

From the 1980s onwards, the fifty-year-old became even more flexible. “He offered the public increasingly long immersions, now in colour, sometimes in larger communities, including the most privileged, such as Central Park in New York,” notes Vincent Souladié, a specialist in American cinema.

The Francophile Bostonian even crossed the Atlantic to meet the ambassadors of European culture: the troupe of the Comédie-Française (1996) and the ballet of the Opera (2009), in Paris, the team of the National Gallery (2014), in London. For Arnaud Hée, “it is a man’s journey towards beauty that culminates with Menus-pleasures. The Troisgros (2023), his latest opus where the sensual creation of the chefs shines.

Wiseman remains more relevant than ever. Maneuver, which follows the deployment of NATO in Germany in the late 1970s, can shed light on the tensions on Europe’s borders linked to the war in Ukraine,” analyzes Arnaud Hée. This visionary production has irrigated the 7th art, including fiction. “Stanley Kubrick was inspired by Basic Training for the part of Full Metal Jacket on the conditioning of GIs during the Vietnam War. Closer to home, Justine Triet, Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2023 with Anatomy of a fall, confided that he had taken advantage of the Wisemanian lesson of the ambiguity of meaning,” adds the programmer. This is a mosaic work to be discovered if only for its exhilarating challenge: that of the intelligence of the spectator.