Frederick Wiseman, America’s Best Living Filmmaker
Every so often, the work of a filmmaker is given a major critical and public reassessment, allowing them to enter the pantheon of great directors.
It happened in the 1950s, when French critics declared that Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Samuel Fuller were not only skillful helmers of genre flicks, but auteurs with distinct personal visions. Later, John Ford was revisited by Peter Bogdanovich and Lindsay Anderson, in books claiming he was more than just a maker of great Westerns. In the 1990s, the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, both of whom had been working steadily in their homelands since the 70s, were finally celebrated abroad. More recently, the filmography of Agnès Varda was excavated in retrospectives and festivals, shining a light on a forgotten member of the New Wave.
It’s time the same thing happened for Frederick Wiseman.
First off, let’s not kid ourselves: The 95-year-old Boston native is already considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest of all, documentary filmmakers. With 46 features in nearly 60 years, he’s widely recognized as the major chronicler of American institutions, as well as a few French ones.
His movies, which have running times ranging from 75 to 358 minutes, have all been self-produced through his company Zipporah Films (named after the director’s late wife), with funding coming from PBS and other public outlets in the U.S. and, more recently, in France. They tend to have banal titles — Basic Training, Meat, Zoo, City Hall and State Legislature, to name a few — which do a clever job masking what they really are: veritable human comedies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, populated by people from all races, classes and walks of life struggling within systems they never fully control.
Over the last decade or so, Wiseman’s true greatness has been acknowledged on a bigger scale. A New York Times Magazine piece from 2020, titled “What if the Great American Novelist Didn’t Write Novels?”, argued that his output isn’t merely a collection of institutional portraits, but a series of “long, strange and uncompromising” films made by an “artist of extraordinary vision.” A year later, Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden launched the excellent Wiseman Podcast, celebrating each movie with in-depth analyses and interviews, including one with the man himself. And back in 2010, a MoMA retrospective featured a catalogue in which Wiseman’s work was praised by artists and intellectuals outside the documentary realm.
With career-spanning retrospectives taking place this past year in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, including 33 works restored through the support of Steven Spielberg, a new generation of moviegoers has had the chance to not only discover or rediscover his films in pristine form, but to grasp the profound scope of his ambition.
I’ve personally sat through 20 or so of his movies in Paris since September, presenting a few of them to packed theaters. And with each new screening, I became increasingly attuned to the fact that Wiseman is not simply a great documentary filmmaker, which is a label he’s always rejected. He’s a great filmmaker, period. And to my mind, he’s the greatest American filmmaker living right now (even if he currently resides in France).
His films, which are set in schools, libraries, museums, offices, police precincts, department stores, museums and other public or private places, are not just faceless, factual accounts of bureaucracies and those employed by them. They are carefully structured narratives marked by moments of high drama, dark comedy and raw emotion, all starring real people giving some of the best natural performances you’ll ever see on screen.
To cite some examples: the finale of High School, during which a teacher reads the letter of a former student proudly fighting in Vietnam; the scene in Welfare in which a man compares his humiliating experience to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; the moment in Missile when two female Air Force trainees give each other high-fives after launching a mock nuclear attack; the epic leg surgery of a thoroughbred horse in Racetrack; the drugged-out hipster in Hospital who has a vomiting fit worthy of The Exorcist; the NATO exercises in Manoeuvre that become surreal war games; the adorable little girl walking with her cane for the first time in Blind; a wolf getting shot point blank in Belfast, Maine; the heartbreaking scene in Public Housing where an elderly man is evicted from his apartment, unaware of where he’ll go next.
Wiseman of course didn’t direct any of these scenes, at least in the traditional sense of calling “action” and “cut.” But he captured them, operating sound while regular cameramen William Brayne and John Davey handled the cinematography, then shaped them afterwards into moments of pure cinema.
For those unfamiliar with his process, his movies are usually shot in stretches lasting from six to ten weeks, then edited by the director for roughly nine months to a year. If editing is what separates cinema from other art forms, offering the ability to mold time and events as one chooses, then Wiseman’s genius lies in the way he’s been able to create layered, emotional works out of all the footage he’s culled together. It’s not quite direct cinema or cinéma vérité — two documentary forms that preceded him — but the transformation of raw material into “reality fictions,” as he calls his films.
I would defy, for instance, any director to recreate the emotional power elicited by two remarkable sequences in the Kansas City-set Law and Order: one in which a hot-headed teenager is restrained by a squad of cops, the other in which a female sex worker is sadistically choked by a detective.
Not only are these scenes harrowing in their brutality, but their depictions of Black citizens being violently subdued by white policemen resonate as much in 2025 as they did back in 1969. Each scene in a Wiseman movie is meant to be grasped on two levels — the literal action on the surface and the more symbolic meaning behind it — and those scenes from Law and Order speak volumes about America both then and now.
Which brings us to what makes Wiseman so important today.
We live in a time of major political and social unrest, when the country appears to be changing in ways never imagined. Wiseman’s movies provide lots of clues as to what got us here, unveiling the deep currents of capitalism, patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism and classism that have always been present, to varying degrees, in the United States.
Despite their warmth and humanism, his films can sometimes seem scathing or pessimistic — tragic comedies sculpted from the granite of American life. Yet they also reinforce a more heartening truth about the country, which is that no matter how individualistic a society we’ve become over the years, we’re still capable of laboring together for a greater cause.
In that sense, perhaps the quintessential Wiseman scene is one of people sitting around a meeting room, debating an issue until they manage to reach a decision. For the director’s detractors, these can be chunks of pure tedium, indicative of his hands-off, fly-on-the wall approach to cinema.
But at a time when our institutions seem to be in great peril, these scenes now appear to be hammering home a theme Wiseman has been slyly emphasizing all along, from decade to decade and from film to film, in a body of work that’s suddenly become more relevant than ever: the everyday miracle, now under threat, of democracy in action.
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