American Documentary Filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman Dies Aged 96
Frederick Wiseman, one of the most influential documentary filmmakers in cinema history, has died at the age of ninety-six.
As reported by the Documentary, Experimental, and Animation Film Center (DEFC), as Tony Adam wrote on IMDb and Philippe Pilard noted in an article for La Sept/Arte, Frederick Wiseman was born in 1930, lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association. After years of teaching and/or conducting research at Boston University, Brandeis University, and Harvard University, he turned to filmmaking in 1967. In 1970, he founded Zipporah Films, which continues to distribute his documentaries. Wiseman also wrote and lectured extensively on issues related to law enforcement.
For nearly three decades, with the support of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), he built an extraordinary body of work comprising more than thirty feature-length films, most of them devoted to examining American institutions. The subjects he explored early in his career — a hospital, a high school, army basic training, a welfare office, a police precinct — were institutions marked by underlying tensions and structural problems that his camera patiently revealed. His approach exposed both the acknowledged and unacknowledged forms of conformity and inequality embedded in American society. At the same time, Wiseman’s films stand as meditations on democracy itself: do they depict the “American dream” or the “air-conditioned nightmare”? They suggest both — and, beyond that, pose a deeper inquiry into the nature of society and human existence.
Occasionally, his films describe less circumscribed institutions - the world of fashion, a public park, and a ski resort. In addition to examining the social and ethical questions he is not afraid to confront the "big" metaphysical questions particularly in the films about handicapped children and dying patients. The filmmaker is trying to encompass all of human experience in his films.
In the past, Wiseman had already made movies outside the borders of his own country, in the Sinai, in Germany, and in Panama. In each of these films, however, his subject was Americans abroad.
In 1993, in his film Ballet, he followed the American Ballet Theatre rehearsals in New York and performances in Europe.
For a long time, Wiseman had wanted to make a film in France and in 1995 he tackled that most French of institutions, The Comedie Francaise. Both in Ballet and La Comédie-Française Wiseman raises questions about the conditions necessary for artistic creation: how to create those conditions which allow a director, an actor, or a dancer to achieve the goal of a perfect even sublime performance; how the specific dialect for the theatre works, the dialect which both places in opposition and transcends the solitude of individual creation and group collaboration.
"Documentaries, like theatre pieces, novels or poems are forms of fiction," claims Wiseman. Over the years his films have become more a skillful mix of observation, testimony, reflection, an absence of prejudice, and courage, and humor. A complex body of work, as great works of fiction (novels, drama, music, and film) can be, with the same profundity, contradictions, and questions without answers.
The documentary National Gallery, directed by Frederick Wiseman, was screened in the Special Screenings section of the 8th Iran International Documentary Film Festival, Cinéma Vérité.
His documentary City Hall was likewise shown in the Special Screenings section of the 14th Cinéma Vérité Iran International Documentary Film Festival.