Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman is an American filmmaker documentarian and theatre director Documentarian Frederick Wiseman has been noted for his ability to capture the nuances of life in American institutions such as prisons hospitals welfare offices and high schools He started out in 1963 by producing a fictional feature film The Cool World an examination of the lives of Harlem teenagers In the beginning Wiseman was a staunch social reformist and his films were calls for change Titicut Follies his first documentary is an exposé of life in a prison for the criminally insane in Bridgewater MA It was controversial and left Wiseman with the reputation of being a muckraker His four subsequent documentaries were all exposés of other taxsupported institutions designed to show the ineffectiveness of the bureaucracy that not only threatens to destroy them but also dehumanizes the people they were meant to serve Wiseman toned down his message and began focusing more on American culture to point out the symbolism of daily activities in his film Primate 1974 In the 80s he began examining institutions as they relate to ideology Unlike other documentaries Wisemans work does not progress chronologically rather the segments are arranged thematically like an essay and are linked via rhetorical devices such as comparison and contrast to create a patterned structure His films are never narrated thereby forcing viewers to make connections between the sequences themselves Wiseman has occasionally returned to fictional films albeit in a nonfiction performance style as with Seraphitas Diary 1982 and La Derniere Lettre 2002