There’s no precise view of what constitutes an institution: Frederick Wiseman, 1930-2026

Frederick Wiseman was on my mind last week. An unhoused man froze to death after being locked outside of South Station in Boston, which has long been an unofficial warm place at night in winter for people on the street. There has been a lot of talk about how systems failed and how this can never happen again, and what came to mind was one of the many scenes of Boston officials meeting in Wiseman’s 2020 film City Hall, talking about the same dynamic but with a focus on South Station merchants being unhappy. A cop on hand doubts some of these guys are even homeless, the transit official on hand makes a joke about the T’s shitty train service. Wiseman lets this play out (along with reactions from the city’s housing chief, who does not look pleased by this line of talk but doesn’t say much to counter it) and then moves on, his four-hour documentary has a lot to cover. But he made sure to cover this.

One way to mourn Wiseman, who died yesterday at the age of 96, would be to assemble a look at his life as comprehensive and penetrating as his films’ views of their subjects. This will not be that. I’ve only seen two of Wiseman’s films, the above-mentioned City Hall and 1983’s The Store, about the flagship Dallas location of Neiman Marcus (a downright svelte two hours). City Hall covered an institution I knew pretty well, The Store looked at one I knew nothing about, but both show entire worlds within their structures. Wiseman shows how these institutions work and who works there, and who those institutions work for and why is contained in the films as well. 

Wiseman famously shows this without narration or interviews or often even title cards to orient the viewer. The footage is unaffected by any overt intrusion from the filmmaker, and this gets called “verite” (which Wiseman rejected) or “fly-on-the-wall,” which is also simplistic and inaccurate. Wiseman doesn’t do gotchas — he will film boredom at a public meeting but not intercut cheap shots of a dull technicality with a yawning audience member — but he and his crew decide what to focus on and what to leave out and where to place what’s left to create rhythms, contrasts, currents that flow throughout however long the movie needs to be. This is not the work of a fly, I doubt a fly would discuss its wall-watching like this: “The structure of my films is abstract. But the real movie exists in the relationship between the literal and the abstract. It sounds like phony baloney, but that’s the way I think about it. In the editing I’m always concerned about those two paths and their relationship to each other.” It’s the work of someone with deep patience and a point of view that emerges through that patient sifting but guides the shots and especially the editing in the first place.

And what he decided to film — high school, public libraries, mental institutions, boxing gyms, hospitals, courts, neighborhoods, entire towns — is life itself. Or the places where life functions (or not) in specific ways that the people who live it have decided are worth maintaining. Does Wiseman think they are worth maintaining? I think that is conditional. But even as he makes subtle emphasis, crafting drama out of footage, he lets the viewer interpret the story. And this makes for work that is incredibly rich and its own form of institution, carrying forward a record of what we — the people who live and die within these worlds on film– did over the past 60 years. Our own C.D Ploughman put it best: 

“After our institutions have finally been pulverized into dust by a neglectful ruling class, or maybe we evolve into anarchic beings of pure light, his portraits of places and institutions will be a great corrective to the history books that list the names of presidents but possibly neglect to mention [the city gardener] or point out that there was an army of dudes who got up every day to remove the trash. He’s thorough but never without a point of view, so we have a work more valuable and judiciously managed than simple archives of meetings and whatnot. But by keeping a distance, we’re still free to notice things that stand out. It would be interesting to know what stands out in these films in the future.”

And here we are in the future, eight years after that blithe discussion of frozen homeless people was filmed and six years after it first screened, and it stands out for me. But I already know Boston’s City Hall, when I watched Wiseman’s movie I wrestled with how my knowledge slipped into the film when things were unstated or possibly elided. I did not know anything about Neiman-Marcus and shortly learned, from The Store’s opening scene of said store’s president speaking to his troops, that all the luxuries and pleasantries and fripperies the store offers are besides the point, that the only thing that matters is sales of clothes. I also learned, from one of those salesmen, that “style is the perfection of a point of view.”

And while the movie depicts salesmen skilled and not pushing goods assembled by ignored workers in the basement, and customers working relationships with trusted shopping aides, and boardroom execs forecasting new trends in consumption, what stood out to me 40 years down the road from the movie’s filming was the penultimate scene in the breakroom, when the sales have stopped for a few minutes for a birthday party. This celebration involves a rather caustic guy in a chicken costume who roasts and serenades the celebrant before performing a striptease — as in out of his costume, by the end he is clad only in bikini briefs and chicken head — and the birthday woman is almost on the floor, she’s laughing so hard. It is a truly bizarre scene that Wiseman plays out from beginning to end. The movie closes with a pompous banquet honoring the store’s founder and all his works, but Neiman Marcus’ store is not Wiseman’s Store and what Wiseman documents in that institution’s breakroom is his choice about what matters, what lingers. The perfection of a point of view.