Frederick Wiseman on the life of American institutions

Frederick Wiseman has spent more than half a century documenting American institutions

Film-Frederick Wiseman (Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Frederick Wiseman has spent more than half a century documenting American institutions.

With a small crew, he has tirelessly made lengthy, sober, engrossing filmic portraits of life in Jackson Heights, Queens; a Texas boxing gym; a Maine fishing village; small-town Indiana; a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane; a Philadelphia high school; a Colorado meatpacking plant; the New York public library.

Wiseman, 90, records sound himself, holding the boom microphone. He doesn’t research beforehand, instead letting what he sees dictate a film. No one lives more by the dictum of showing, not telling, than Wiseman. After assembling 100-250 hours of rushes, he toils over the footage, assembling sequences that capture life at a certain time and place, stitching together a narrative of expansive, long-take detail. Collectively, the films constitute a sprawling, clear-eyed mosaic of America.

In a time of unprecedented strain on the institutions of federal government, Wiseman’s latest is a profile of a more local, functioning realm of U.S. civic life. “City Hall,” which played to typical acclaim at the Venice, Toronto and New York film festivals over the past few weeks, documents the daily hum and long-range aspirations of the Boston city government under Mayor Marty Walsh. The film opens in virtual theaters Oct. 28.

Wiseman, who spoke in a recent interview from the apartment in Paris that’s been his most regular home for the past 15 years, finished post-production on “City Hall” just as the pandemic was beginning. Aside from walks to relax, he’s stayed mostly inside since March. But sitting still is hard for him. “For the first time in 55 years,” he said, “I don’t have a movie to work on.”

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AP: The communal worlds of your films -- where groups of people are so often in rooms talking to one another -- feels very far away right now, doesn’t it?

WISEMAN: At the moment I can’t work. It’s terrible. To make the kind of movies I make I can encounter a couple hundred people every day.

AP: In “City Hall” we see such a wide scope of civic operations, from garbage collection to homeless outreach, from building inspections to mayoral staff meetings.

WISEMAN: City government touches more aspects of our lives than any other form of government. Among other things, it provides the necessary limits as to what we have to do to get along with each other and live together. Speeding limits. Places to park. Minimum health requirements for restaurants. The control of violence. The monopoly on the right to use force. Providing health services. It goes on and on and on. You sort of, or at least I did, take it for granted.

AP: Do you consider “City Hall” a counter to Donald Trump?

WISEMAN: If I made “City Hall” when Obama was president, one would be measuring Walsh against Obama. But in the current context, we’re measuring him against Trump, so he comes out so much better. Not that he’s not good, but the contrast is extreme. The film doesn’t in any way suggest the government of Boston is perfect. But it does suggest, I hope, that there’s a mayor who cares and is trying to implement programs and raise money for services that will make a difference in people’s lives.

AP: Are you partly motivated to leave these films behind as time capsules to show the way people talked and dressed and moved?

WISEMAN: You’re quite right. I’m very interested in that. I hope 50 years from now they’ll be interested in the films because it’s a body of films which represent the work of one person exploring contemporary American life. I hope they’re always be interested in them. I made “Law and Order” (about the Kansas City police department) in 1968 and the issues that film tries to deal with are very contemporary.

AP: There’s a scene in that where a policeman chokes a black woman.

WISEMAN: That aroused almost no comment when the film was the shown in 1968. It was sort of by the by. It was more tisk-tisk. No protests. There was no political activity in Kansas, Missouri, as a consequence of that sequence, and it’s pretty horrible.

AP: Those kinds of incidents of police brutality are more widely recorded now. Do you think them being better documented will change the behavior?

WISEMAN: Ah, that’s the million-dollar question. I don’t know what changes human behavior. I think human behavior has been set now for 10,000 or 15,000 years.

AP: You have a good line about “verité” filmmaking in which you say you’re “somewhat more conscious than a fly.”

WISEMAN: The whole notion of a fly on the wall I find disgusting. It’s demeaning, really.

AP: And you don’t like the word “documentary,” right?

WISEMAN: I’m happy with the word “movies.” I make movies. Maybe it’s because when I was growing up, “documentary” had an aura about it. You were supposed to see it because it was good for you, a bit like ex-lax. I think a movie should be entertaining, instructive, dramatic, funny. You should look for the same qualities in a documentary as in a fiction film. I hate didacticism in writing and I also hate it in movies. I don’t like to be told what to think. I like to be asked to work and figure out what’s going on, so I discover.

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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP