Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has died. The celebrated documentarian started making documentaries that captured the weirdness and wonder of everyday life in the mid 1960s and did not stop until 2023.
Wiseman died Monday. His family issued a joint statement with Zipporah Films. He was 96.
Making movies was always an adventure, Wiseman said in 2016, during a speech at the Academy Awards when he won an honorary Oscar.
"I usually know nothing about the subject before I start," he said at the black-tie ceremony. "And I know there are those that feel I know nothing about it when it's finished!"
Wiseman was extremely prolific. He made roughly 50 documentaries, many of which chronicled the inner workings of institutions as diverse as the Idaho state legislature (State Legislature, 2007), the New York Public Library (Ex Libris, 2017), and a high school in Philadelphia (High School, 1968).
"I wish I could be more like him," said Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris in an interview with NPR about Wiseman before the elder filmmaker died.
Morris said Wiseman's super-charged yet subtle way of interpreting everyday life had more in common with the Theater of the Absurd than documentary filmmaking. (Indeed, Wiseman also had a career as a theater director in the U.S. and Europe, helming plays by the likes of Samuel Beckett and Luigi Pirandello.)
"He has a way of finding in reality some of the most surreal, absurd moments that I've ever seen anywhere," Morris said.
By way of example, Morris points to a scene in Wiseman's 1993 documentary Zoo, in which an all-women surgical team at Miami zoo castrates a wolf.
"And it seems like the entire scene is populated by women except for the janitor standing by the exit door, looking nervously on with his hands folded over his crotch," Morris said. "To me, this is really almost as good as it gets."
Morris added Wiseman was a mentor to him and a close friend. After Morris lost both his father and brother to heart disease, and was worried about his own fate, the filmmaker said Wiseman organized medical help for him. "I can even credit Fred with saving my life," Morris said.
Frederick Wiseman was born in Boston in 1930. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and living in Paris during the 1950s, he taught law at Boston University.
It was taking his students on field trips to Bridgewater State Hospital, a Massachusetts prison facility for the criminally insane, that compelled the then law professor to direct his first, and most famous, film. Made in 1967, Titicut Follies gets its title from a stage show put on by the inmates at the institution.
After its seemingly benign opening, the movie captures the appalling conditions under which the inmates are kept, with unblinking scenes of bullying, force feeding, strip searches and squalor.
Titicut Follies was so shocking, the state of Massachusetts managed to get it banned from public screenings for more than two decades.
"In order for anyone to see that film, for years you had to sign a declaration saying that you were a professional in one of the following fields, like criminology, law or film studies," said film scholar Barry Keith Grant, author of Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman.
Still, Grant said the movie sealed Wiseman's future.
"It gave him a lot of notoriety and it helped establish his career," Grant said.
Over the years, Wiseman became known for his meticulous, hands-on process. He directed, produced and edited his movies. In a 2014 interview with NPR, the filmmaker described making National Gallery, his documentary about the famed London art museum.
"I was there for three months, every day for twelve weeks, probably twelve, fourteen hours a day," Wiseman said of the shoot, adding he amassed 170 hours of footage. "So the ratio between film shot and film used is about 60 to one."
Wiseman's films were also known for their prodigious length, running for as long as six hours. "I don't tailor the length to meet any commercial needs," Wiseman said. "I assume if people are interested, they'll watch it, whether it's 75 minutes or three hours."
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