Titicut Follies <\/em>(which takes its title from the staff talent show, whose mirthless excerpts bookend the picture) also features lengthy interactions and conversations between stubborn parties (in this case, patients and doctors, or patients and other patients), which Wiseman allows to play out past the point of easy conflict or insight. It also features long and hard-to-watch scenes of patients in crises, moving from reportage into the realm of outright discomfort. Those sequences would come back to haunt Wiseman, and his film; the portrait it presented was so distressing that the state of Massachusetts managed to successfully suppress the picture for more than two decades, thanks to the complicity of local courts and a weak-sauce accusation that Wiseman had violated the privacy of the hospital\u2019s patients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s an especially ridiculous argument considering that, then and in the decades that followed, Wiseman would prove to be anything but an activist or rabble-rouser; he\u2019s as much an anthropologist as a filmmaker, capturing (usually without explicit comment) the rituals and routines of daily contemporary life. The films that followed were similarly observational studies of government entities, private organizations, and public communities; he\u2019s made films about schools, medical facilities, modeling agencies, art galleries, and Central Park. In each and every case, he takes the time to poke into every nook and cranny of the organization in question, with the same general approach of honest fascination and general artistry. Watch enough of his work, and you\u2019ll find even the most standard devices have extra juice \u2014 there\u2019s just something about how he frames and cuts (even mere establishing shots) that\u2019s borderline lyrical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But ultimately, what\u2019s so fabulous about his work is its aversion to statements. He doesn\u2019t have Something to Say about his subjects, at least not explicitly, so he\u2019s not working towards some grand overall thesis\u2014and as a result, you don\u2019t feel the gears grinding, the way you do with so much (too much) less accomplished documentary cinema. Without a predetermined destination, we never know exactly where he might go, and nothing that he encounters along the way is obviously dispensable or irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And often, the sidebars are what\u2019s most entertaining anyway. A film like 1991\u2019s Aspen <\/em>fills its 146-minute running time with mini-personality profiles of the instructors, experts, leaders and participants of classes, workshops, meetings, Bible studies, book clubs, meditation groups, and seminars; your mileage may vary, but my favorite is the gregariously clueless instructor of the adult art class who off-handedly notes, of Picasso\u2019s \u201cGuernica,\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s a fun painting.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In that and all of his films, his most peculiar gift (his black magic, frankly) is his ability to make the dullest of events \u2014 an office birthday party, a routine medical procedure, a sales meeting<\/em>, for god\u2019s sake \u2014 riveting. By my reckoning, there are two factors at play here: from a formal perspective, we\u2019re swept up by the skill of his immersion and selection. But more importantly, his films are fueled by his own curiosity, his fascination with how things work, and by his assumption that we share that curiosity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s also important to note that his aversion to grand statements, and his insistence on exploring his subjects to other ends, doesn\u2019t mean his films aren\u2019t saying anything. His themes just sneak up on you. For example, it\u2019s only at the end of 1983\u2019s The Store, <\/em>which explores the goings-on and Neiman Marcus\u2019s flagship store in Dallas, that we realize this is a most piercing portrait of the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan years; we\u2019re nearly in the fourth hour of 2017\u2019s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library<\/em> when the full force of the library, of the variety of its services and locations and scholarship, reveals itself as one of the last vestiges of genuine community in this splintered city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What has shifted over the course of the filmography is less his approach or attitude than his presentation. The expansive running times didn\u2019t come into play until the mid-1970s, and the three-plus hour pictures didn\u2019t become the norm until later; his earlier films are shorter, breezier, more like slices of life. With less time to make his points, the early films are more direct, so in a film like 1968\u2019s High School<\/em>, the subtext of the early scenes, which can be read as a study of the practices and causes of conformity, becomes explicitly stated text in the later passages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The later films are able to take more time, and circle their targets rather than come at them directly. Wiseman is, first and foremost, a humanist filmmaker; he values the people who comprise these institutions, and the individual competence of people who are good at what they do. But, as the double-play of the Lincoln Center retrospective\u2019s title indicates, he is a filmmaker who has dedicated himself to the study of American institutions, and that\u2019s what makes his work such unlikely comfort food: at a moment when our institutions are crumbling around us, here are dispatches (or, perhaps, time capsules) to remind us that they matter, that there are real people who are employed, aided, and lifted up by such institutions, and that they are stronger than the whims of a tinpot despot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This has been Wiseman\u2019s lifelong project: portraying the vastness and complexity of the American experiment. \u201cYou\u2019re a part of a vast and marvelous community,\u201d explains a pastor at the end\u00a0 of Aspen<\/em> \u2014 in a sermon laced with casual racism and condescension. It\u2019s an appropriate closing note, highlighting a combination of optimism and hypocrisy that\u2019s American as apple pie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution” runs at Film at Lincoln Center<\/a> from January 31 through March 5<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/aspen-1024x576.jpg\")
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