At a recent NYFF talk on the trustworthiness of the documentary image, Frederick Wiseman quipped that back in 1968, having immersed himself in a prison for the criminally insane for his first film, Titicut Follies (1967), the logical milieu for a follow-up was that of a high school; hence, the subsequent year’s High School. Given the stylistic consistency yet markedly disparate subject matter of his vast oeuvre to date, it is curious to consider what, if anything, constituted the precedent for his latest film, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, a typically protracted look at an historically family-run restaurant near Lyon. What can the artist tell us about the institution when it seems he has, from the perspective of a certain cinema culture, become one himself?
The contemporary emergence of food as an instrument of
