If you’d asked a couple of days ago who the greatest living American filmmaker was, I’d have had an answer ready to go. But with Frederick Wiseman’s death at the age of 96, the title is up for grabs.
Some of the tributes that poured into the more film-savvy corners of the internet called Wiseman, whose storied career stretched all the way from 1967’s Titicut Follies to 2023’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, the greatest living documentary filmmaker, even the greatest documentarian of all time, but those superlatives still don’t go far enough. Over the course of nearly 60 years and four dozen films, he built an ever-growing portrait of American life that stands with the most monumental oeuvres in any art form.
Over the course of nearly 60 years and four dozen films, he built an ever-growing portrait of American life that stands with the most monumental oeuvres in any art form.
Especially in the later decades of his career, Wiseman’s movies were expansive in size as well as scope. Many ran over three hours; 1989’s Near Death, set in the intensive care unit at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, is just a hair under six. And, with rare exceptions, he wasn’t interested in character-driven storytelling. That’s not to say his movies lack memorable characters—who could forget, to cite just one of a hundred possible examples, the Philadelphia teacher earnestly guiding a class of blank-faced teenagers through the finer points of Simon & Garfunkel’s lyrics in 1968’s High School? But if his movies have protagonists, they’re the ones listed in their titles: Belfast, Maine; Monrovia, Indiana; Central Park.
Wiseman was often called a filmmaker focused on institutions, some world-renowned—the New York Public Library, London’s National Gallery—others, like a welfare claims office or domestic violence shelter, with a substantially lower public profile. But his orientation was always from the bottom up. Even when he took on legendary subjects, it wasn’t the legend that interested him. Whether he was approaching a grand structure or a small town, his fascination was with the individual people who imbue those places with a living spirit.
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Wiseman rejected, sometimes curtly, the idea that he was a neutral observer, or that anyone could be. He would have scoffed at the New York Times obituary that called his movies “rigorously objective,” and when he appeared in a documentary on cinéma vérité, it was to denounce the titular phrase as “a pompous and pretentious French term that has no meaning.” (Wiseman was fluent in French and lived most of his final years in Paris.) Rather, he said, his aim was to “try to organize the dramatic aspects of everyday life”—not to bend real life over the wheel of dramatic structure, but to locate the moments when drama, sometimes fleetingly, made itself known, at least to his acutely perceptive, endlessly curious eye.
In other words: Wiseman loved meetings. From boardrooms to public hearings, he captured the moments when principle collides with practicality, and ideas find their way into the real world. In The Store, shot at the height of the holiday rush at the Neiman-Marcus flagship in Dallas, floor managers struggle to balance the chain’s high-end image with the fact that the business of its wealthiest customers—the ones salespeople woo with tales of how they flew overseas to hand-select the finest pelts for their fur coats—is not enough to keep the stores afloat. Their real business is selling the feeling of luxury to middle-class consumers, fixing prices that feel affordable but not cheap, and, as one strategy session outlines, stocking the food department with French pastries rather than items that make it feel too much like a “Jewish delicatessen.” The movie never tells you it was shot at the tail end of the 1982 recession, but you can feel an undercurrent of anxiety running through those staff meetings, just as Aspen, shot at a luxurious ski retreat nearly a decade later, finds the privileged class more comfortably enjoying its privileges.
Wiseman didn’t just film institutions; he was sustained by them. His movies, especially the longer ones, rarely saw more than a token theatrical release, although he ended his career with an extraordinary run of films that produced, at least on his terms, two breakout hits: 2015’s In Jackson Heights and 2023’s Menus-Plaisirs. But they inevitably found their biggest audiences at home, first through PBS broadcasts and, beginning in 2018, through a landmark deal with the streaming service Kanopy, which made his entire catalog available to participating libraries and universities. That deal, unfortunately, is no longer so comprehensive. Many institutions have scaled back or canceled their subscriptions. The New York Public Library may be the subject of Wiseman’s 2017 film Ex Libris, but if members want to watch one of Wiseman’s movies now, they’ll have to check out the DVD. (Offerings vary widely, and unpredictably, from city to city, so it’s worth at least checking your local library for their holdings, both digital and physical.) In the press release announcing his death, Wiseman’s production company, Zipporah Films, asked that in lieu of sending flowers, those mourning his passing “support your local PBS affiliate or independent bookstore in Frederick Wiseman’s memory.”
Although his movies are anything but autobiographical, it’s not an accident that many of his later ones concerned themselves with institutions trying to hold on to their values in a changing, sometimes hostile world. And when he was asked for advice on how to sustain a lifelong career without bowing to commercial pressure, he had a simple answer: “Marry rich.” It was a stock answer, one I saw him use on a room full of elite liberal arts students a decade before he dropped it on the Times. And it wasn’t the whole story. Although he never had a box-office hit and was never even nominated for an Academy Award (he did receive an honorary Oscar in 2016), he was beloved of film festivals and film studies departments, and could probably have coasted on institutional rentals of Titicut Follies for the rest of his days if he’d wanted to. But it was his way of acknowledging, tersely but memorably, that art like his exists only because of outside support, whether it’s from a wealthy spouse or viewers like you. In a world where so many artists dissemble about how they stay afloat, that little bit of forthrightness might be as important as any movie Wiseman ever made.
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Wiseman didn’t do extensive research before making his movies or spend months building rapport with his subjects; he earned people’s trust with a nod and a pair of wide-open eyes, secured their consent with a simple on-camera yes. (It’s something of a paradox that a former lawyer who had numerous movies banned—and, in the case of his portrait of the inner workings of Madison Square Garden, indefinitely suppressed—was averse to getting buried in paperwork.) But he knew which corners to peek around, and he understood that every element in a human system plays a vital role in making it work. Wiseman’s last movie, Menus-Plaisirs, tracks the sprawling network of relationships that go into making a three-star French restaurant work, the long-term partnerships and hallowed traditions that bring each ingredient into the kitchen, and the time-honed techniques that go into preparing them. But it’s not about flaunting that mastery—either his or the restaurant’s—so much as it is about passing it on, transferring it from one generation to the next. He chose to end his career with a beginning, an invitation to keep doing what he did, even though no one will ever take his place.
