Frederick Wiseman’s architectural portraiture

Institutional architecture. Is there another two-word phrase quite so drab?

Not in the hands of Frederick Wiseman, who died this week at 96. He made a staggering four dozen vérité documentaries—he preferred the term “non-fiction films”—across five decades, after abandoning a brief legal career that began with a decision to enroll at Yale Law School in part to avoid the Korean War. (New Haven wasn’t a complete bust: Wiseman met his wife of 66 years, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, at Yale.) In nearly all of Wiseman’s films, hovering somewhere between backdrop and subject, is the architecture of American civic, cultural, and commercial life, from operating rooms and high-school auditoria to the corridors of the Brutalist City Hall in Boston, the filmmaker’s hometown.

In some of these films the goal is hold a certain broken or oppressive bureaucratic operation up for scrutiny, with almost painful detail, as with his 1967 debut, “Titicut Follies,” set inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts. (The film was banned by the state from 1967 and 1991 and carries this coda: “The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has ordered that ‘a brief explanation shall be included in the film that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts correctional institution Bridgewater since 1966.’”) In other cases Wiseman’s aim was to burrow inside a public institution as a means of celebrating those who keep it running, typically anonymously or with meager funding, from day to day.

Always, he was patient. An unblinking and steadfast camera—still but discerning—is the Wiseman trademark above all. This approach produced run times sometimes exceeding four hours (though “Titicut Follies” clocks in at an efficient 84 minutes). True, it’s hard to set aside an uninterrupted block of time like that for much of anything these days. But the commitment in my experience is almost always worth it. You might think of Wiseman as the Georges Perec of filmmakers. His finest documentaries deliver us to revelation by way of meditation. I also see a certain kinship between Wiseman and some of Joan Didion’s L.A. essays, like “Quiet Days in Malibu,” which does for lifeguards and orchid growers what the Wiseman filmography does for teachers, nurses, cooks, and associate deans.

As Errol Morris put it: “I am reminded of a remark made to me by Sidney Coleman, a Harvard quantum field theorist, about the artist and designer Robert Wilson. Sidney said, ‘Slow is not boring. Only boring is boring.’ The same could be said about these films. Slow, yes, but endlessly fascinating.”

I’ll leave it to the film critics to explain in detail Wiseman’s particular cinematic approach, which gained its consistency in part from the fact that he edited and served as sound engineer on nearly all his films. (Richard Brody’s remembrance is here, and Alissa Wilkinson’s here.) And you can go down your own Wiseman rabbit hole, if you have a library card or university affiliation, at Kanopy, which strikes me as just the sort of public-minded outfit that the filmmaker loved to spotlight. There is also a well-established podcast that has episodes on Wiseman’s films that rival some of their subjects in length, which is another of way of saying it is hosted by dudes.

I’m more interested, as you might guess, in how Wiseman used architecture (broadly speaking) to underscore his larger goals. One through line is an emphasis—again, un-showy but persistent—on those who clean, maintain, and fix buildings and other spaces. Often you think you’re watching a transitional scene, palate-cleansing B-roll between one set of people talking in a room and another set of people talking in a room, only to realize that Wiseman is giving you, with real intention, a few seconds to watch a gardener or janitor at work. Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper and tour guide in Ila Bêka’s and Louise Lemoine’s 2008 documentary “Koolhaas Houselife,” is a Wiseman character by association.

You could even say Wiseman, in this very sense, was a Wiseman character. He toiled away for half a century and never won a competitive Oscar.

There is also Wiseman’s talent for using an architectural mise en scène to signal the kind of complicated grace that massive and imperfect bureaucratic institutions, when their aims are true, can occasionally bestow. There’s a very brief scene near the end of the four-hour-long “At Berkeley,” filmed in what seems every far-flung corner of the University of California campus and released in 2013, that shows a spacious entry hall to a classroom building, somewhere between a very wide corridor and a proper lobby. Students sit on the floor or on the steps; the architecture is not as accommodating as it might be. You might even say it’s indifferent. But sun streams in from the right side of the frame, through beautifully arched windows, making beautifully arched patches of light on the floor. The overall effect is one of respite, protection, and calm. The students are sitting on the floor inside this building because, in the midst of a giant public university, it is a pleasant and quiet place to be.

Finally there is an architectural shift that takes place not in a single film but across Wiseman’s career, one that Brody and others have noted. Many of the early films take place in closed and even dank institutional spaces, many of the later ones on campuses or across small cities or even, as in 1990’s “Central Park,” fully outside. It is as if over time Wiseman’s camera began to seek the same kind of release from claustrophobic architecture that some of the people in those first few documentaries so clearly yearn for. That and the fact that filming for weeks inside mental institutions, prisons, and courtrooms, even for an artist as tireless as Wiseman, is very much a young person’s game.

News & Notes

Hilariously, Wiseman sat for a Reddit AMA (actually, an AMAA, for Ask Me Almost Anything) in 2015. And indeed there were some questions he declined to answer, including one about “Grey Gardens.” (“I don't like to comment on other people's work.”) Asked to name “a subject that you’ve always wanted to document, but haven’t been able to,” he answered, “The White House.”

A Lorraine Wild memory spurred by last week’s Punch List: “Maybe 1977 (?) I heard Rem K give a talk at the inst for arch & urban studies where he referred to the work of elders as ‘coronary bypass architecture.’”

After equivocating for a few days, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass now says she thinks Casey Wasserman, the beleaguered chair of the LA28 Olympic planning group, should step down. She joins a growing chorus following the release, in the latest batch of Epstein files, of emails detailing the extent of Wasserman’s ties to Ghislaine Maxwell. For now, at least, Wasserman is digging in his heels, Bill Clinton style, though he has separately decided to put his talent agency up for sale.

In other mayoral news, Zohran Mamdani faces a decision on whether to release roughly $2 billion in remaining public subsidies for Hudson Yards, in what Politico calls “a defining early test of how he tangles with the city’s most powerful developers.”

A federal judge has ordered that “all panels, displays, and video exhibits” removed from the President’s House display in Philadelphia, as covered in a recent Punch List, be restored.

Fred Bernstein on Frank Gehry’s grit: “Neither a ‘temperamental artist’ nor the mad genius seen on ‘The Simpsons,’ Gehry was endlessly industrious and, for an architect of his stature, surprisingly willing to compromise to bring worthwhile projects to fruition.”

Bill Fulton adds some useful context to Conor Doughterty’s recent piece defending California Forever and the tabula rasa city.

I’m happy to be in such good company, in this recent Architect’s Newspaper piece, in lamenting the disappearance of much of the Curbed online archive; the old city-based Curbed sites, Patrick Sisson reports, are merely “the latest in a string of digital publications, alternative weeklies, and local media sites that remain difficult or impossible to access due to ownership decisions.”

Michael Silverblatt RIP. Here’s Silverblatt in conversation with Susan Sontag, from 2002.

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