Frederick Wiseman, prolific documentary film-maker, dies aged 96 | Frederick Wiseman
Prolific filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, whose documentaries primarily examined U.S. public institutions and communities, has died at the age of 96.
His death was announced Monday in a joint statement by the Wiseman family and production company Zipporah Films.
“Over the course of nearly sixty years, Frederick Wiseman created an unparalleled body of work that includes a comprehensive cinematic record of contemporary social institutions and ordinary human experience, primarily in the United States and France,” the statement said. “His films, from Titicut Follies (1967) to his most recent work, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023), are praised for their complexity, narrative power and humanistic outlook.”
Wiseman, whose extraordinary career was awarded an Academy Honorary Award in 2016, includes City Hall (2020), about Boston city government; Ex Libris on the New York Public Library (2017); and In Jackson Heights (2015), about a neighborhood in New York’s Queens borough.
Often directly associated with the cinema and verité movements, he never conducted interviews or organized events for his documentaries and used only natural light and diegetic sound, without voice-overs or scores. He did no research before starting each project, and came up with a sense of curiosity and a desire to learn.
“Making a movie is always an adventure,” Wiseman said while accepting his Academy Award in 2016. “I usually don’t know anything about the subject before I start… I never start with a point of view on the subject or a thesis that I want to prove. I also don’t do any research before shooting. I usually don’t know in advance what will be shot or what I will encounter on any given day or at any given moment of any day.”
He documented hundreds of hours of footage of his subjects and put them through an intensive editing process that could take up to 10 months.
Although he is associated with the true style of documentary making, he has described his films as closer to “visual novels” than journalistic narratives.
Born in Boston, Wiseman attended Williams College and then Yale law school. After graduating in 1954, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served as a court reporter for two years, then studied law in Paris under the GI Bill. When he returned to the USA, he started teaching at Boston University Graduate School of Law and Medicine.
During this period, Wiseman became interested in documentary filmmaking and produced the 1963 semi-documentary The Cool World, based on Warren Miller’s novel about life in the Harlem gang. Four years later, he made his directorial debut with Titicut Follies, which documented the lives of the criminally insane at the Bridgewater state hospital in Massachusetts.
It was virtually his last film: His harrowing account of the inhumane treatment of hospital residents was banned from public screening by the Massachusetts supreme court, and until 1991 it could be shown privately only to medical professionals. But Wiseman kept pushing forward and made three films over the next three years.
Wiseman has long had a passion for theater and dance, as evidenced in films such as La Danse (2009), which shows behind the scenes of the Paris Opera Ballet, and Crazy Horse (2011), which follows the infamous Parisian cabaret club.
His progressive political views were evident in his work, including films such as Welfare (1975), about the New York welfare system, but Wiseman said he had no interest in ideological filmmaking and resisted the idea that documentaries were forces for political or social change. Writing for Dox: Documentary Quarterly in 1994, he said: “Documentaries, like plays, novels, poems, are fictional in form and have no measurable social benefit.”
His latest film, 2023’s Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, went behind the scenes at the famous Michelin three-star restaurant in France.
Wiseman talking about his approach to choosing the subject. he said in 2016: “Every film is also an opportunity, an opportunity to learn about a new subject. I have attended 50 years of adult education, where I am a so-called adult studying a new subject every year.
“The range and complexity of human behavior observed in the making of one of the films, and all the films cumulatively, is astonishing, and I think it is as important to document kindness, gentleness and generosity of spirit as it is to show cruelty, mediocrity and indifference.”
Wiseman is survived by his two sons, David and Eric, and three grandchildren, as well as his friend and colleague Karen Konicek, who worked with him for 45 years. His wife of 65 years, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, died in 2021.
