Close-Up on Frederick Wiseman

“I attempt to create a dramatic structure drawn from ordinary experience and un-staged, everyday events.” – Frederick Wiseman

“Wiseman's documentaries, shot vérité-style, are meticulously edited narratives chronicling life’s complexities through rich portraits of social and cultural institutions. Wiseman’s themes are expansive: democracy, power, inequality and community, to name a few; but his focus is compellingly specific and humane. Whether revealing shortcomings in social support or celebrating culinary excellence, he has a unique eye – and ear – for detail. All films are new digital 4K restorations, which were overseen by Wiseman himself.” – Sandra Hebron

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Titicut Follies
Frederick Wiseman, 1967, 84 min

Wiseman’s landmark debut film takes us inside a Massachusetts institution for the criminally insane, unflinchingly documenting the treatment and mistreatment of inmates. Often blurring the distinction between doctors and patients, and at times harrowing to watch, the film was prohibited from general distribution in the USA for almost 25 years.

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High School
Frederick Wiseman, 1968, 75 min

Wiseman ventures inside a large city high school – the most everyday of American institutions – where lessons range from debates on existentialism to a simulated space flight. Assembled with dry humour, a series of formal and informal encounters between teachers, students, parents and administrators shows how education is steeped in the passing on of social and moral values.

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Welfare
Frederick Wiseman, 1975, 167 min

Unfolding like a Kafkaesque novel, this remarkable, clear-sighted film reveals the absurdities of New York’s welfare system from the point of view of the staff administering it and the claimants attempting to access it. Deeply serious yet playful in parts, Welfare reveals the myriad reasons why people seek help and the complex tangle of regulations that frequently deny it.