“I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
ince his legendary 1967 debut, , the now 90-year-old Frederick Wiseman has completed more than 40 features, which, taken together, constitute a prodigious catalogue of the American experience over the last half-century as revealed through the country’s institutions: its cities and farms, schools and prisons, museums and libraries, courts and legislatures, gyms and theatres, parks and neighbourhoods. Not simply records of cultural customs and institutional procedures, these films incorporate their deceptively plain depictions of regional rituals and diurnal labour into a clear conceptual ordering. Wiseman’s understanding of the world he captures could be summed up by something like, can find the order behind the disarray of appearances. Essence is found through (or betrayed by) process.
