The Art of Documentary No. 1
As a filmmaker, sound engineer, editor, and producer, Frederick Wiseman is tireless in his pursuits and relentless in his exploration. He has made approximately one documentary film a year for the past fifty years, some with run times as long as six hours. His works are often meditations on the subject of power within American institutions, in places such as an asylum for the criminally insane, a public high school, a meatpacking plant, a Miami zoo, a juvenile court, and a Neiman Marcus department store in Texas. He’s also made subjects of the ballet in France, boxing, London’s National Gallery, and geographic locations from Aspen, Colorado, to Jackson Heights. Wiseman, who has made forty-three films to date, 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 made his first forays into film with an 8mm camera, shooting his wife in short Parisian scenes. After two years, the couple returned to Massachusetts, where Wiseman took a position teaching law at Boston University and they had two sons.
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 his debut documentary, Titicut Follies (1967).
Our first conversation took place while Wiseman was finishing his film about the New York Public Library, Ex Libris (2017). I visited him at his editing studio—a top-floor apartment he rents from a friend—on the rue de Dunkerque in Paris. We carried our plastic lunchboxes from the local cafe up six flights of stairs because the lift was broken. “It’s good for you!” Wiseman bellowed as we climbed. The space was Spartan: a bed and a desk alongside two computers and editing equipment, with the odd book lying about. We met a second time in Paris this past June at the Recolléts, a converted convent in the tenth arrondissement where Wiseman has a rented flat. It was in the middle of a heat wave, and a World Cup match had the neighborhood roaring, but we sat in the garden and continued our conversation, undeterred.
INTERVIEWER
What are you working on right now?
WISEMAN
My new film is Monrovia, Indiana. I’ve just finished the color grading and sound mix. The film will open in New York on October 26.
INTERVIEWER
Can you tell me a bit more about your editing process, generally?
WISEMAN
When I come back from a shoot, I look at all the rushes. Sometimes I do it chronologically, and sometimes, if I’m having trouble getting into the material, I’ll start with the sequences that I remember liking. At the start, I might have trouble sitting in the chair because I’m restless. It can take me a couple weeks to get
