Cinema Expanded: The films of Frederick Wiseman BFI – Blu Ray
3 Disc set
“I try to look at what is going on to discover what kind of power relation relationships exist and differences between ideology and the practice in terms of the way people are treated. The theme that unites the films is the relationship of people to authority.”
Frederick Wiseman.
Why has it taken me so long to get round to watching the films of Frederick Wiseman? Well that’s because of their physical media inaccessibility and rare screenings in the cinema (those enticing clips on YouTube were never enough). But now we have a three-disc set from the BFI of some of his finest work from the 60s and 70s in 4k restorations. They look really good but my slight caveat is the rough sound recording. There is much talking here (but no authorial voice over) making for a bombardment of information. So turn the sound up; listen to these films through headphones or use external loudspeakers. You don’t want to miss a word of these truly remarkable documentaries.
Frederic Wiseman is an ex-lawyer who brings an intense moral gaze to his filmmaking that is never judgemental. Of course he comes with his own prejudices and viewpoint (revealed through the masterly rhythm of his editing) but he still lets his subjects reveal their outer and sometimes inner selves. He’s an original who however admits to the influence of Jean Renoir, Kafka and the theatre of the absurd. Wiseman takes from Renoir his remarkable ability to create the illusion that this is not a film but the enactment of life itself; Kafka attracts with his bureaucratic nightmares and from the theatre comes the bleak philosophy of Samuel Beckett.
Wiseman’s is an unrelenting and neutral vision centred mainly on the function, and attempted functioning, of American institutions.
His first film the 1963 Titicut Follies was set in Bridgewater state hospital for the criminally insane. It’s shot in the then fashionable cinema verite style (small hand held camera and portable sound equipment) borrowed from the French New Wave. This allows for greater intimacy, technical fluidity and at the same time keeps a necessary distance from Wiseman’s subjects. It’s not an Agnes Varda Cleo from 5 to 7 ‘arty’ style but an approach that breaks from say the determined drive of earlier American street docs like On the Bowery (1956) about destitute alcoholics, having more in common with Huston’s 1943 Let There be Light examining the mental health of the army.
The title Titicut Follies is the name of the theatrical revue that the staff and inmates are putting on. Those opening shots (lit from below by foot lights) of the players onstage creates a ghoulish appearance. Yet in a film of mostly despair, humiliation and misery both parties seem to be temporarily enjoying themselves. It’s also a reference to Renoir’s La Grande Illusion and La Regle Du Jeu where a comic and spooky show is staged for prisoners of war or aristocratic house guests. And like Renoir Wiseman is also acutely concerned with issues of class and power.
In Titicut Follies we see lonely naked men standing in an assessment queue who are afterwards escorted, still nude, to their cells: inmates talking wildly to themselves or questioning why they are here labelled with their crude tag description of insanity. Often people are sitting silent and lost or walking aimlessly through the building. It’s a hell of a dumping ground relieved by Wiseman’s camera emphasising the absurdly comic. For me the film’s most memorable scene is a close shot of an inmate decrying the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church whilst in the background a man stands on his head. When Wiseman cuts to this inmate on the grassy lawn he’s singing “for the glory of his love and his holiness.” The juxtaposition of the two men is both, in the moment, mad theatrics and vivid cinema irrespective of whether the patients were ever correctly diagnosed.
High School (1968) has an equally absurd scene when nubile teenage girls are doing their dance / keep fit routine to the banal sound of the bubble gum pop song, Simple Simon Says. Yet that’s almost a moment of innocent physical freedom compared to the rigid mental rules of conformity that the school upholds. 1968 was a highpoint in the Vietnam War and American was facing student rebellion and wide cultural change. A handful of senior grade high school kids are shown discussing how awful the school is; respect for teachers and other adults is strongly underlined; but sex education lessons take place and a teacher bravely tries to teach her English students about the poetry of the lyrics of The Dangling Conversation by Simon and Garfunkel.
Keeping order and maintaining conformity is the message of High School as so much is beginning to be questioned in American society. The US cavalry comes to the rescue and restores order in the form of a teacher addressing the assembled school. She reads them a letter from a student who has gone of to fight in the war against communism in Vietnam. High School ends on a note of patriotism and nationalism, preparing its upcoming citizens to toe the line.
Hospital (1969) depicts the accident and emergency users of a state hospital. Their fears and all the inequalities of income and class are starkly laid out. Equally the plight of suffering patients is compassionately balanced out by the stress of the overworked hospital staff (Wiseman is sympathetic, like he is in 1975’s Welfare, and 1973’s Juvenile Court to the good people who struggle to be effective agents in an over complex system). For me the stand out scene concerns the young man, abandoned by his mother, because of his mental heath issues and confusion over his sexual identity. Some scenes later this is followed by his psychiatrist trying to explain to a welfare administrator (with the ironic name of Miss Hightone) that his schizophrenic (another pat label back then) patient is in dire need of money. His frustration at trying to get Welfare to shift from their negative position speaks volumes today where call phone operatives, and now AI logarithms, are unable to deviate from their well rehearsed and inflexible scripts.
Four years later comes Juvenile Court where we have a paternalistic Texan judge struggling to decide on the fairest sentence he can pass on a teenager who was forced to be an accomplice in an armed robbery. The young man declares his innocence and wishes to take his case for proper trial onto a higher-up court. His attorney, knowing his client will hate him, advises him to plead guilty for that way he will only be sent to a place of correction for six months. To persist in his innocence would mean a minimum jail sentence of twenty years.
Shedding tears of frustration the young offender takes the lesser sentence, though still pleads with the judge over the injustice of what’s happening. It’s a horrible legal situation that Wiseman allows them to argue out and our mixed feelings of compassion and anger are delivered by his brilliant social observation. Wiseman has talked about himself as a manipulative filmmaker. Yet his subjects always speak out deeply for themselves, irrespective of the camera’s gaze.
Of these five films it’s perhaps Welfare (1975) that we can call a masterpiece (though perhaps a flawed great film) for its running time of 167 minutes is overlong. Wiseman lets his camera run with a heated argument, allowing it to reach a screaming plateau, for both victim and their viewer, which has you crying out CUT NOW! Relief comes from more perfunctory action (Seated families or the lost looking elderly) the effect is a much needed profound silence after a musical crescendo.
A claimant is told by her interviewer that they are looking after two and a half million people and that if two and a half thousand people don’t get the welfare money due to them then they are doing a good job: small comfort for her and an indictment of an over-complex system. The crazy mathematics of who gets social security and when; determining claimants are at the correct address; cheques being sent back by hotel managers and people taken off the system are the gist of Welfare’s exhausting debate and dispute. Wiseman records, often in revealing close-up and medium shot, the worn down faces of people pushed to the bottom of the heap: a babble of voices in a bureaucratic maze.
Two sequences stamp themselves on your memory. Firstly a white middle age racist / war veteran who engages in a conversation with a black security guard. The man has been mugged by three black men and vows to kill anyone who tires again. The security guard keeps his cool as the angry veteran goes on and on. Finally he’s escorted out, only to hammer on the door. In a film documenting welfare issues the issue does feel a bit in parenthesis. But deviation from the subject matter or not it’s one of the most powerful moments of racist behaviour that I’ve witnessed in any documentary.
Near the end of Welfare Wiseman shifts his focus from the working class to the middle class – a man who’s been in hospital and forced by his employer to resign from his high salaried job. With no place to stay and hungry he’s reduced to stealing seven bars of chocolate from Woolworths. He admits to saying that stealing is wrong but for him is now a necessity. He says his situation is like being in Waiting for Godot and Godot will never come to save him. Seated waiting for that next social security appointment he talks to God and says he‘ll wait and decide where God will want him to belong –“A place, a home, people, friends, whenever that will be. I’ve got all the time in the world. And thank God, all the patience, strength and all the understanding. Thank you.”
It’s a tragic and devastating epilogue to a masterly documentary that encapsulates Wiseman’s view of the weak and the powerful we’ve encountered throughout the 554 minutes of this set of five searing films.
Alan Price©2026.
Cinema Expanded: The films of Frederick Wiseman BFI – Blu Ray
3 Disc set
“I try to look at what is going on to discover what kind of power relation relationships exist and differences between ideology and the practice in terms of the way people are treated. The theme that unites the films is the relationship of people to authority.”
Frederick Wiseman.
Why has it taken me so long to get round to watching the films of Frederick Wiseman? Well that’s because of their physical media inaccessibility and rare screenings in the cinema (those enticing clips on YouTube were never enough). But now we have a three-disc set from the BFI of some of his finest work from the 60s and 70s in 4k restorations. They look really good but my slight caveat is the rough sound recording. There is much talking here (but no authorial voice over) making for a bombardment of information. So turn the sound up; listen to these films through headphones or use external loudspeakers. You don’t want to miss a word of these truly remarkable documentaries.
Frederic Wiseman is an ex-lawyer who brings an intense moral gaze to his filmmaking that is never judgemental. Of course he comes with his own prejudices and viewpoint (revealed through the masterly rhythm of his editing) but he still lets his subjects reveal their outer and sometimes inner selves. He’s an original who however admits to the influence of Jean Renoir, Kafka and the theatre of the absurd. Wiseman takes from Renoir his remarkable ability to create the illusion that this is not a film but the enactment of life itself; Kafka attracts with his bureaucratic nightmares and from the theatre comes the bleak philosophy of Samuel Beckett.
Wiseman’s is an unrelenting and neutral vision centred mainly on the function, and attempted functioning, of American institutions.
His first film the 1963 Titicut Follies was set in Bridgewater state hospital for the criminally insane. It’s shot in the then fashionable cinema verite style (small hand held camera and portable sound equipment) borrowed from the French New Wave. This allows for greater intimacy, technical fluidity and at the same time keeps a necessary distance from Wiseman’s subjects. It’s not an Agnes Varda Cleo from 5 to 7 ‘arty’ style but an approach that breaks from say the determined drive of earlier American street docs like On the Bowery (1956) about destitute alcoholics, having more in common with Huston’s 1943 Let There be Light examining the mental health of the army.
The title Titicut Follies is the name of the theatrical revue that the staff and inmates are putting on. Those opening shots (lit from below by foot lights) of the players onstage creates a ghoulish appearance. Yet in a film of mostly despair, humiliation and misery both parties seem to be temporarily enjoying themselves. It’s also a reference to Renoir’s La Grande Illusion and La Regle Du Jeu where a comic and spooky show is staged for prisoners of war or aristocratic house guests. And like Renoir Wiseman is also acutely concerned with issues of class and power.
In Titicut Follies we see lonely naked men standing in an assessment queue who are afterwards escorted, still nude, to their cells: inmates talking wildly to themselves or questioning why they are here labelled with their crude tag description of insanity. Often people are sitting silent and lost or walking aimlessly through the building. It’s a hell of a dumping ground relieved by Wiseman’s camera emphasising the absurdly comic. For me the film’s most memorable scene is a close shot of an inmate decrying the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church whilst in the background a man stands on his head. When Wiseman cuts to this inmate on the grassy lawn he’s singing “for the glory of his love and his holiness.” The juxtaposition of the two men is both, in the moment, mad theatrics and vivid cinema irrespective of whether the patients were ever correctly diagnosed.
High School (1968) has an equally absurd scene when nubile teenage girls are doing their dance / keep fit routine to the banal sound of the bubble gum pop song, Simple Simon Says. Yet that’s almost a moment of innocent physical freedom compared to the rigid mental rules of conformity that the school upholds. 1968 was a highpoint in the Vietnam War and American was facing student rebellion and wide cultural change. A handful of senior grade high school kids are shown discussing how awful the school is; respect for teachers and other adults is strongly underlined; but sex education lessons take place and a teacher bravely tries to teach her English students about the poetry of the lyrics of The Dangling Conversation by Simon and Garfunkel.
Keeping order and maintaining conformity is the message of High School as so much is beginning to be questioned in American society. The US cavalry comes to the rescue and restores order in the form of a teacher addressing the assembled school. She reads them a letter from a student who has gone of to fight in the war against communism in Vietnam. High School ends on a note of patriotism and nationalism, preparing its upcoming citizens to toe the line.
Hospital (1969) depicts the accident and emergency users of a state hospital. Their fears and all the inequalities of income and class are starkly laid out. Equally the plight of suffering patients is compassionately balanced out by the stress of the overworked hospital staff (Wiseman is sympathetic, like he is in 1975’s Welfare, and 1973’s Juvenile Court to the good people who struggle to be effective agents in an over complex system). For me the stand out scene concerns the young man, abandoned by his mother, because of his mental heath issues and confusion over his sexual identity. Some scenes later this is followed by his psychiatrist trying to explain to a welfare administrator (with the ironic name of Miss Hightone) that his schizophrenic (another pat label back then) patient is in dire need of money. His frustration at trying to get Welfare to shift from their negative position speaks volumes today where call phone operatives, and now AI logarithms, are unable to deviate from their well rehearsed and inflexible scripts.
Four years later comes Juvenile Court where we have a paternalistic Texan judge struggling to decide on the fairest sentence he can pass on a teenager who was forced to be an accomplice in an armed robbery. The young man declares his innocence and wishes to take his case for proper trial onto a higher-up court. His attorney, knowing his client will hate him, advises him to plead guilty for that way he will only be sent to a place of correction for six months. To persist in his innocence would mean a minimum jail sentence of twenty years.
Shedding tears of frustration the young offender takes the lesser sentence, though still pleads with the judge over the injustice of what’s happening. It’s a horrible legal situation that Wiseman allows them to argue out and our mixed feelings of compassion and anger are delivered by his brilliant social observation. Wiseman has talked about himself as a manipulative filmmaker. Yet his subjects always speak out deeply for themselves, irrespective of the camera’s gaze.
Of these five films it’s perhaps Welfare (1975) that we can call a masterpiece (though perhaps a flawed great film) for its running time of 167 minutes is overlong. Wiseman lets his camera run with a heated argument, allowing it to reach a screaming plateau, for both victim and their viewer, which has you crying out CUT NOW! Relief comes from more perfunctory action (Seated families or the lost looking elderly) the effect is a much needed profound silence after a musical crescendo.
A claimant is told by her interviewer that they are looking after two and a half million people and that if two and a half thousand people don’t get the welfare money due to them then they are doing a good job: small comfort for her and an indictment of an over-complex system. The crazy mathematics of who gets social security and when; determining claimants are at the correct address; cheques being sent back by hotel managers and people taken off the system are the gist of Welfare’s exhausting debate and dispute. Wiseman records, often in revealing close-up and medium shot, the worn down faces of people pushed to the bottom of the heap: a babble of voices in a bureaucratic maze.
Two sequences stamp themselves on your memory. Firstly a white middle age racist / war veteran who engages in a conversation with a black security guard. The man has been mugged by three black men and vows to kill anyone who tires again. The security guard keeps his cool as the angry veteran goes on and on. Finally he’s escorted out, only to hammer on the door. In a film documenting welfare issues the issue does feel a bit in parenthesis. But deviation from the subject matter or not it’s one of the most powerful moments of racist behaviour that I’ve witnessed in any documentary.
Near the end of Welfare Wiseman shifts his focus from the working class to the middle class – a man who’s been in hospital and forced by his employer to resign from his high salaried job. With no place to stay and hungry he’s reduced to stealing seven bars of chocolate from Woolworths. He admits to saying that stealing is wrong but for him is now a necessity. He says his situation is like being in Waiting for Godot and Godot will never come to save him. Seated waiting for that next social security appointment he talks to God and says he‘ll wait and decide where God will want him to belong –“A place, a home, people, friends, whenever that will be. I’ve got all the time in the world. And thank God, all the patience, strength and all the understanding. Thank you.”
It’s a tragic and devastating epilogue to a masterly documentary that encapsulates Wiseman’s view of the weak and the powerful we’ve encountered throughout the 554 minutes of this set of five searing films.
Alan Price©2026.
By Alan Price • added recently on London Grip, film • Tags: Alan Price, film