Biography

Frederick Wiseman was probably one of today's greatest documentary filmmakers. For close to thirty years, thanks to the Public Broadcast Service (PBS), he has created an exceptional body of work consisting of thirty full length films devoted primarily to exploring American institutions. The institutions that Wiseman examined early in his career - a hospital, a high school, army basic training, a welfare center, a police precinct - have "problems" that the filmmaker uncovers. His approach reveals the profound acknowledged and unacknowledged conformity and inequality of American society. Wiseman's films are also a reflection on democracy. What do his films portray, the "American dream" or the "air conditioned nightmare"? Both, but also a questioning of the world and of existence.

Occasionally, his films describe less circumscribed institutions - the world of fashion, a public park, and a ski resort. In addition to examining the social and ethical questions he is not afraid to confront the "big" metaphysical questions particularly in the films about handicapped children and dying patients. The filmmaker is trying to encompass all of human experience in his films. He had already made movies outside the borders of his own country, in the Sinai, in Germany, and in Panama. In each of these films, however, his subject was Americans abroad.

In 1993, in his film Ballet, he followed the American Ballet Theatre rehearsals in New York and performances in Europe. For a long time Wiseman had wanted to make a film in France. In 1995, he tackled that most French of institutions, The Comedie Francaise. Both in Ballet and La Comédie-Française Wiseman raises questions about the conditions necessary for artistic creation: how to create those conditions which allow a director, an actor, or a dancer to achieve the goal of a perfect even sublime performance; how the specific dialect for the theatre works, the dialect which both places in opposition and transcends the solitude of individual creation and group collaboration.

"Documentaries, like theatre pieces, novels or poems are forms of fiction", claimed Wiseman. Over the years, his films became a skillful mix of observation, testimony, reflection, an absence of prejudice, and courage, and humor.
- IMDb mini biography by: Philippe Pilard (originally published in La Sept/Arte)

Systematic investigation of institutions and social settings

His films offer an unparalleled social history and critique of daily life in the United States

An all-sided picture of the phenomena he studies, leaving critical judgments to the spectator

The absence of narration, interviews, background music and other similar documentary elements

His works are principally concerned with issues of control and issues of authority

[on editing] My job as editor is to make the film as best I can from the rushes. What I think about the subject matter is what you see in the final film. At least 50% of editing has nothing to do with technique. I ask myself what it is I am seeing and hearing in the rushes. I have to at least delude myself into thinking that I understand what is going on in each of the sequences in order to (1) decide which sequences to use, (2) how to edit them into a usable form and (3) create a narrative, dramatic structure in which each segment has its proper place. This process often takes a year. A month or two before I finish I usually start thinking about what I want to do next. This is my way of avoiding a postpartum depression.

My goal is to make as many films as possible about different aspects of American life.

I like to think that I approach each subject with an open mind, because for me, there's no reason to make a film if I already have a thesis. I don't like to make thesis-oriented films. In one sense, the final film is a report on what I've learned as a consequence of making the film.