Frederick Wiseman

As a filmmaker, sound engineer, editor, and producer, Frederick Wiseman is tireless in his pursuits and relentless in his exploration. He has made forty-one films, thirty-nine of which are documentaries, an average of almost one project each year since 1967. One of the marks of Wiseman’s hand is a protracted run time—sometimes three to four hours, sometimes longer. Since his debut documentary, Titicut Follies (1967), he has been focusing his attention on American institutions, exploring what they reveal about societal inequality and human experience at large. From a public high school to a public library, a welfare center to the French ballet, from Aspen, Colorado, to Jackson Heights, Wiseman’s careful, thoughtful process probes the nuances of each subject. Wiseman has received the Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Film Festival, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
With a skeleton crew (Wiseman himself prefers to be on sound, carrying a boom microphone), he works to position his viewer as a witness to what is happening, avoiding mediations such as voice-over narration, interviews, sound tracks, or titles. However, Wiseman dislikes the term observational cinema, or cinema verité, which for him bespeaks “one thing being as valuable as another, and that is not true. At least, that is not true for me.” The editing process is for Wiseman a careful craft that occupies a year of intensive work.
Born in Boston on January 1, 1930, Wiseman is the only child of the European Jewish immigrant Jacob Wiseman and Gertrude Kotzen, whose family immigrated from Europe just before she was born. After earning a bachelor of arts from Williams College, he followed his father into law, attending Yale Law School. From 1954 to 1956, he served in the U.S. military and then traveled to Paris with his new wife, Zipporah Batshaw, a fellow Yale Law graduate. He started shooting film while there, using an 8mm camera to capture moments such as Parisian marketplace scenes. After two years, the couple returned to Massachusetts, where they had two sons. Wiseman took a position teaching law at Boston University.
Around this time, Wiseman produced his first movie, an adaptation of Warren Miller’s novel The Cool World (1963). Shortly afterward, Wiseman cowrote the script for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway—his first and last encounter with Hollywood. In 1966, Wiseman and his then cameraman shot a huge amount of footage at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, which he would then edit into Titicut Follies.

January 1, 1930