Close Attention

An interview with Frederick Wiseman.

Still from Central Park (Courtesy of Zipporah Films)

Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries, or “movies” as he likes to call them, are known for being long. His most recent, about a group of high-end restaurants run by a family in France, hits the four-hour mark, but even the shorter ones have a thorough quality. This can create the sense that his use of the camera is neutral—surely he’s showing everything?—but it’s a feeling that doesn’t survive scrutiny. Across more than thirty films on a vast range of subjects, his sensibility is obvious. Whether watching models pose in New York City, a rhino give birth in the Miami zoo, or social care workers do their rounds in small-town Maine, we know we’re watching a Wiseman movie—and a view of society through one man’s eyes.

Wiseman’s first documentary, Titicut Follies, filmed inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in the 1960s, was banned for twenty-two years following a lawsuit by the Massachusetts government. Unfazed by the censorship, he became known for his portraits of state institutions, including a high school, a police department, and a welfare office. His films offer neither a straightforward defense nor a condemnation of their subjects, leaving generous room for interpretation. One of my favorites is Central Park, which depicts the complex collaborative work it took to make the famous green space more inclusive and accessible in the late 1980s.

It can be difficult to describe Wiseman’s films without making them sound boring, but beauty and humor are the guiding lights behind his editing choices. Watching several Wiseman movies over a month or so (an experience I recommend) reveals how our efforts to live and work with other people look remarkably similar even in unusual contexts. In Essene, a movie about Benedictine monastery in rural Michigan whose community is divided by the politics of the Vietnam War, a line from a frustrated monk made me laugh out loud with recognition: “We’ve been talking about this for eighteen years.”

Wiseman has spent his life paying extremely close attention to one thing at a time. Last winter Lincoln Center organized a retrospective of his career featuring most of his films, some of which were made for television and had never been seen before on a big screen. The screenings I attended for Central Park, Model, and Belfast, Maine were all packed. At a moment when many of the institutions he documented are being decimated and our attention is constantly divided, Wiseman’s films are out of time and completely timely.

Natasha Lewis: When you’re approaching somebody to ask if you can film them, how do you introduce yourself?

Frederick Wiseman: I just say my name, and I say I’m making a movie about this welfare center, for example, and is it alright if I record their picture and voice? And they always say yes.

Lewis: Why do you think people say yes?

Wiseman: I think because they like the idea that somebody’s interested in them.

Lewis: You’re often choosing unexpected topics and approaching people who may not have had this kind of request before.

Wiseman: Right, and I make it very clear that I’m not staging anything. I want whatever they’re doing at the welfare center.

Lewis: I was lucky enough to see a few of your films at the recent retrospective at Lincoln Center. Many of these films hadn’t been shown in a cinema before; they first appeared on TV. Did you get a chance to rewatch any on the big screen?

Wiseman: It was very difficult to show them, because most theaters don’t have sixteen-millimeter projectors. I watched them all on a big screen when I did the color grading. I had a grant to color grade the thirty-three films that needed to be regraded and digitized. Now all of my films have DCPs, which are digital versions and can be shown theatrically.

Lewis: Does this mean there will be more DVDs coming out?

Wiseman: The films have been available on DVD on the Zipporah Films website for many years. Also, many public libraries subscribe to the streaming service Kanopy, and they are available to library patrons on this platform as well.

Lewis: How was rewatching all the films? What do you think your films are about?

Wiseman: I don’t think my films are about one thing. I think each film has its both abstract and literal aspects. And those aren’t always the same.

Lewis: At Lincoln Center, I saw Model, Central Park, and Belfast, Maine and there was a packed house for each screening. Why do you think your films or your approach to filmmaking resonate in this moment?

Wiseman: That’s extremely hard for me to answer because different people bring different thoughts about the films and react in different ways. I can tell you what I hope the response will be. I hope they’ll think about the literal and the abstract aspects of each film. For example, Law and Order is nominally about police activity on a daily basis. But in a more abstract way, it’s about the role of police in a democratic society. And when I edit the films, I am always thinking about the relationship between the literal and the abstract. Is Law and Order one of the ones you saw?

Lewis: I haven’t seen that one, unfortunately. But tell me anyway because I’m sure readers would like to hear you talk about it.

Wiseman: The next to last scene is Nixon giving a speech about law and order in the 1968 presidential campaign. If I had started the film with Nixon’s speech, it wouldn’t have the same effect that I hope it has by using it toward the end of the film. By using this sequence toward the end of the film, it raises the question of the political uses of the theme of law and order. Whereas if I used it at the beginning of the film, before the viewer had seen the various encounters that take place between the police and the residents of the neighborhood, it would prompt a very different reaction, a less complex reaction.

Lewis: I had a similar thought about the letter at the end of High School. Vietnam is in the background of the whole film, but the letter brings it out in a way that is very powerful.

Wiseman: Good. The same kind of analysis applies. If I’d started the film with the letter to the principal, it would have been very different than hearing the letter after seeing all the other sequences in the film.

Lewis: I want to talk about editing. In the conversation you had with John Wilson at Lincoln Center, you said you shoot for 100 to 150 hours, and then the ideas emerge in the edit. Did you start shooting more when you moved to digital?

Wiseman: I shot about 5 percent more material when I was shooting digitally, which is not a significant amount. I’ve always shot a lot, because the principle that governs the shooting is chance. And if I make up my mind that what is going on interests me, I have to shoot the whole sequence. The worst thing you can do is stop and start. And sometimes this method succeeds and sometimes it doesn’t. Because I have no idea in advance what people are going to say or do or how they’re going to move, or what metaphors they may come up with. It’s always worth the risk to shoot a lot, because that’s the way that you get the best material.

Lewis: What are you looking for when you’re watching the footage in the edit?

Wiseman: I have to try to understand what’s going on in the sequence. If I don’t understand it, I can’t use it. So, the first thing that happens in the editing is that I look at all the rushes, which takes me about six weeks. And then I put aside about 50 percent of the material. But when I look at a sequence, I have to constantly ask myself why. What’s the significance of somebody asking for a cigarette at a certain moment? Why does somebody look left to right or right to left? Whether I’m right or not, I have to think that I understand what’s going on. Because if I don’t understand, I don’t know how I can reduce it to a usable form, I won’t know where to place it in the final structure. It’s only after I’ve edited all the sequences that I might use in the final film that I begin to work on the structure. The structure is the last thing that emerges.

Lewis: Does it always emerge in the same way?

Wiseman: It emerges from studying the material and trying various combinations. For instance, when the film is finished, I can go through it and tell you how the first ten minutes of the film are related to the last ten minutes of the film. That’s not anything that’s necessarily evident to anybody else, although I hope it is. But it has to be evident to me, because I have to feel the connection. At the risk of sounding pretentious, it’s more a literary analysis. I’m more influenced by the novels I’ve read than by the movies I’ve seen.

Lewis: Which novelists have influenced you the most?

Wiseman: The best book I ever read about film editing is the correspondence between George Sand and Flaubert. Because when they’re writing about writing, I think they’re writing about film editing. Their correspondence deals with the same issues that I think I’m dealing with in editing.

Lewis: What are those issues?

Wiseman: Well, issues of structure, of point of view, of order. Of the relationship between the literal and the abstract.

Lewis: I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov while I’ve been watching your films.

Wiseman: How does it hold up?

Lewis: It’s good! I’m only halfway through but there’s a theme emerging, through Alyosha and the monks, about whether it’s our task to care about everything and everyone in the world. One of the things you’ve done over your career is pay very, very close attention to one thing at a time. How do you think about your own attention?

Wiseman: Part of my job as an editor is to pay close attention. When I am dealing with complex material, I have an obligation to have the final film represent the complexity of the subject matter. I make the film to correspond to my analysis of the situation. I had no idea when I was editing Belfast in 1998 that you would see Belfast in 2025. And I know nothing about your background or your interests, your literary choices, etc. So, I don’t know how to think about an audience and I never do. I cut the film to match my own standards and my own interests. And that’s hard enough to do without creating a fantasy about what someone else’s interests are, which is nothing but a fantasy.

Lewis: I was thinking about the arc of your films, and how several of them—including Belfast, Maine and Welfare—depict the social functions of the state, which Trump and his cronies are now dismantling. How have you seen the state change, or peoples’ ideas about the state change, over the course of your career? That’s a big question, but—

Wiseman: I think it’s too big for me. I’m not very good at cultural generalizations. And so I resist making them. Because I don’t know how.

Lewis: You’re good at the specifics. I want to talk about your first film. I know you had a background in law before that. How did you end up filming Titicut Follies?

Wiseman: I was teaching legal medicine at Boston University Law School and one of the places I took the students on a field trip was the Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane. When I decided I couldn’t stand teaching and wanted to make movies, it occurred to me that Bridgewater would make an interesting movie. I knew the superintendent. I approached him. He supported the idea. The two of us spent a year lobbying the state government, particularly the attorney general, and a man who was the head of all the prisons. It took close to a year to get permission. I made the movie. It was while doing Titicut Follies that I had the idea of the institutional series. The second film in the series was High School, which seemed to me a very good candidate to follow a prison for the criminally insane.

Lewis: Compared to High School, Titicut Follies is a very claustrophobic film. High School is also claustrophobic but people will leave the school, whereas people are stuck in the prison for a very long time.

Wiseman: Some people had been there fifty or sixty years. For example, the man who sings in front of the TV set got picked up for vagrancy. He painted a horse to look like a zebra to pull his ice cream truck. When I made the movie, he’d been there probably close to fifty years already. He just got lost in the system because he was never properly represented.

Lewis: Wow.

Wiseman: He hadn’t committed any really horrible crime. It was just a gimmick to sell ice cream.

Lewis: Did you ask permission from the people who appear in the film?

Wiseman: Yes. I had permission from the superintendent of Bridgewater, the commissioner of correction, and the attorney general, and in addition, I got signed releases not from every inmate, but from most inmates. The trouble started with the film because the attorney general who had participated in giving me permission changed his mind. His name was Elliot Richardson. He became famous later on for his role in the Nixon administration; he became Secretary of State, and he was responsible for the resignation of the original prosecutor in Watergate. Richardson thought his career was going to be jeopardized when it was discovered that he had been instrumental in getting me permission to make the film. That was the origin of the lawsuit.

Lewis: And people were finally able to see Titicut Follies twenty-five years later?

Wiseman: The ban went into effect in ’67, and it was lifted in ’89. So, that’s twenty-two years. I’m very patient.

Lewis: I suppose the conditions inside had already changed by the time that the film was released?

Wiseman: I don’t know. I don’t hold myself as an expert on any of these subjects. I have a hard enough time making a film about one of them. But I have no idea what the conditions are in other prisons for the criminally insane, or what’s going on in other high schools. My job is to make as good a film as I can about the institution I’ve chosen as the subject of my film and it’s up to other people to decide whether it’s similar to or different than other similar places of a certain kind.

Lewis: What are the other films that are part of the institutional series?

Wiseman: Well, they’re all in the series if you accept my rather broad definition of an institution. In Belfast, for instance, the institution is a small town. In Central Park, it’s a big city park, of which there are many in America.

Lewis: How did you choose Belfast as a subject?

Wiseman: The real answer is I don’t know. I was looking for something else to do. I vacation near Belfast in the summer; I knew something about it, among other reasons. I wanted to have a look at the colors in the fall. I’ve made several films about small cities or towns—Aspen, Belfast, Monrovia—in different parts of the country.

Lewis: Belfast, Maine is one of my favorites that I’ve seen.

Wiseman: Oh, good!

Lewis: I was interested in the way you depicted the different kinds of work that people do in Belfast, like social care and the extremely disturbing but also beautiful scenes of a fish-canning factory. How do you think about the relationship between the work that you do as a filmmaker and the work of the people that you depict on the screen, whether that’s the social workers or the people in the factory or the chefs in your most recent film?

Wiseman: The chefs in Menus-Plaisirs are more related to what I do than the workers in the sardine factory. The subject of Menus-Plaisirs is, from my point of view, art. It’s a transitory art in the sense that it gets eaten; it’s consumed right away. But the Troisgros chefs are very concerned not only with the way the food tastes, but the way it looks on the plate. They’re constantly making comments about the aesthetics of the arrangement of the colors and the shapes of the food on the plate, in addition to the taste. Their devotion to shape and color is related, in my mind at least, to the fact that I make similar demands of myself to organize and structure the material so that it has some of those same qualities.

Lewis: I can see that. But the adjective I keep coming back to when I think about your films is democratic whereas the restaurant is obviously a more elite space.

Wiseman: I think that’s right. But those are separate issues. The Troisgros chefs are great artists and although the work is shared with the fifteen or twenty other people who work in the kitchen, the final responsibility rests with either Michel or Cesar. It’s their task to make sure that the dish that’s ordered meets their standards. The events in Belfast, Maine, for example, are linked more to my other films, which have to do with the similarity of tasks shown in the other films. There’s a rehearsal of Death of a Salesman in Belfast, which is linked to the Comedie-Française as theater. There are several examples of people on welfare in Belfast and those sequences are linked to the movie Welfare. In editing Belfast the way I did, I’m also raising the memory, or connecting the daily life of Belfast, to sequences in the other films.

Lewis: There are a lot of meetings in your films; Menus–Plaisirs begins with a meeting. And one of my favorite meetings is about the fate of a tennis club in Central Park. I was almost yelling in the theater.

Wiseman: [laughs] That’s great!

Lewis: At the start, I was really against the demolition of the tennis club. But then the people started talking about why we needed the new tennis club and I joined their side. What is it about meetings that appeals to you when you’re filming?

Wiseman: Well, it’s not so much they appeal to me. There are a lot of meetings in At Berkeley; there are a lot of meetings in many of the films. But that’s not because of my love of meetings. It’s because meetings are important to help people resolve the issues that are the subject of the meeting.

Lewis: There’s the idea that “freedom is an endless meeting,” but I’m not sure there’s anybody in the world who really loves meetings; Oscar Wilde said that socialism takes too many evenings. What kind of meetings do you attend in your own life?

Wiseman: Practically none.

Lewis: Congratulations!

Wiseman: I work independently. Even in terms of raising money, I don’t have to go to any meetings. I deal with individuals in foundations or in public television.

Lewis: I was curious if there was anything that you haven’t yet been able to film, that you would love to film.

Wiseman: The White House. But I don’t think me or anybody else will ever get permission.

Lewis: I’d love to watch a Fred Wiseman film about the New York City subway.

Wiseman: Oh, I thought about doing that once. At least thirty-five years ago, I spent a day riding the subway with the idea in mind. But I couldn’t get good sound.

Lewis: Is that because the trains were too noisy?

Wiseman: Yes, and I couldn’t get good dialogue. I regret not being able to do it. It’s a great subject.

Lewis: You will turn ninety-six next January and have been making films for almost five decades. Do you have any secrets for a long life?

Wiseman: [laughs] No, I don’t have any secrets. I always stayed in shape because it’s important for doing movies. I used to play tennis six times a week until I got a hip problem. First thing every morning I would call the tennis club and make a reservation.

Lewis: Is Menus–Plaisirs your last film?

Wiseman: Yes, it’s my last film. I’ve been sick, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do another. I hope I will, but at the moment, I don’t have the energy.

Lewis: I know that filmmaking for you is very physical.

Wiseman: Shooting can be twelve weeks, long hours, you have to carry equipment, you’re on your feet all day, and then you have to watch rushes at night. I have a hard time acknowledging that I’m ninety-five.

Lewis: What do you miss about filmmaking?

Wiseman: What I miss most is the intensity. I like being completely absorbed for ten, twelve months. The editing alone takes me nine or ten months, and there are all kinds of interesting issues that don’t necessarily get resolved right away, but you have to think about them; you have to come back to them and try different possibilities and choices. And I like that. I never found it painful to work on a film. And I feel very lucky to have found work where that’s the case.

Frederick Wiseman is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and theater director.

Natasha Lewis is co-editor of Dissent.