Frederick Wiseman, The Art of Documentary No. 1

Frederick Wiseman, The Art of Documentary No. 1

Interviewed by Lola Peploe

Issue 226, Fall 2018

As a filmmaker, sound engineer, editor, and producer, Frederick Wiseman is tireless in his pursuits and relentless in his exploration. He has made forty-one films, thirty-nine of which are documentaries, an average of almost one project each year since 1967. One of the marks of Wiseman’s hand is a protracted run time—sometimes three to four hours, sometimes longer. Since his debut documentary, Titicut Follies (1967), he has been focusing his attention on American institutions, exploring what they reveal about societal inequality and human experience at large. From a public high school to a public library, a welfare center to the French ballet, from Aspen, Colorado, to Jackson Heights, Wiseman’s careful, thoughtful process probes the nuances of each subject. Wiseman has received the Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Film Festival, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

With a skeleton crew (Wiseman himself prefers to be on sound, carrying a boom microphone), he works to position his viewer as a witness to what is happening, avoiding mediations such as voice-over narration, interviews, sound tracks, or titles. However, Wiseman dislikes the term observational cinema, or cinema verité, which for him bespeaks “one thing being as valuable as another, and that is not true. At least, that is not true for me.” The editing process is for Wiseman a careful craft that occupies a year of intensive work.

Born in Boston on January 1, 1930, Wiseman is the only child of the European Jewish immigrant Jacob Wiseman and Gertrude Kotzen, whose family immigrated from Europe just before she was born. After earning a bachelor of arts from Williams College, he followed his father into law, attending Yale Law School. From 1954 to 1956, he served in the U.S. military and then traveled to Paris with his new wife, Zipporah Batshaw, a fellow Yale Law graduate. He started shooting film while there, using an 8mm camera to capture moments such as Parisian marketplace scenes. After two years, the couple returned to Massachusetts, where they had two sons. Wiseman took a position teaching law at Boston University.

Around this time, Wiseman produced his first movie, an adaptation of Warren Miller’s novel The Cool World (1963). Shortly afterward, Wiseman cowrote the script for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway—his first and last encounter with Hollywood. In 1966, Wiseman and his then cameraman shot a huge amount of footage at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, which he would then edit into Titicut Follies.

Our first conversation took place while Wiseman was finishing his film about the New York Public Library, Ex Libris (2017). I visited him at his editing studio—a top-floor apartment he rents from a friend—on the rue de Dunkerque in Paris. We carried our plastic lunchboxes from the local café up six flights of stairs because the lift was broken. “It’s good for you!” Wiseman bellowed as we climbed. The space was Spartan: a bed and a desk alongside two computers and editing equipment, with the odd book lying about. We met a second time in Paris this past June at the Récollets, a converted convent in the tenth arrondissement where Wiseman has a rented flat. It was in the middle of a heat wave, and a World Cup match had the neighborhood roaring, but we sat in the garden and continued our conversation, undeterred.


INTERVIEWER

What are you working on right now?

WISEMAN

My new film is Monrovia, Indiana. I’ve just finished the color grading and sound mix. The film will open in New York on October 26.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell me a bit more about your editing process, generally?

WISEMAN

When I come back from a shoot, I look at all the rushes. Sometimes I do it chronologically, and sometimes, if I’m having trouble getting into the material, I’ll start with the sequences that I remember liking. At the start, I might have trouble sitting in the chair because I’m restless. It can take me a couple weeks to get going. I know that once I start, everything else, or practically everything else, is going to be excluded. Inevitably, it reaches the point where I’m sitting in the chair for very long periods of time, getting intravenously fed. The first phase is to review all of the material. This takes four to six weeks. I make notes and have a grading system adapted from the Michelin Guide. Each sequence is given one, two, or three stars—or none. At the end of this first period of editing, I set aside forty to fifty percent of the rushes. I then start to edit the sequences that I might use.

INTERVIEWER

What happens to those sequences?

WISEMAN

It takes me six months to select and edit those sequences. It’s only when I’ve edited those so-called candidate sequences that I begin to work on structure. I have no idea, in advance, of the film’s structure or what its point of view will be. It evolves from studying the material. Then I try to figure out how they might fit together, to determine what meaning might be attached to the way they’re ordered. In doing that, so as to both edit an individual sequence and to create a structure, I have to think I understand—however delusional that may be—what’s going on in each sequence and, subsequently, in their selected and proposed order. Now you’re wondering what I mean by that.

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

WISEMAN

I have to explain to myself what’s going on within a sequence in order to know whether I want to use it, and then I have to edit it down from its original length to a usable version without changing what I consider my understanding of the event. For example, I have to constantly ask myself the question, Why? Why are the participants saying what they’re saying? What is the significance of their choice of words? Why do they look left rather than right? Why does somebody ask for a cigarette at a certain point in the conversation? Is there any significance to the clothes people are wearing? Unless I think I understand what’s going on in each sequence, I can’t make the choices that will allow me to condense it into a usable form. For example, in At Berkeley (2013), some of the meetings of the chancellor’s cabinet went on for an hour and a half, and in the final film, they’re reduced to nine or ten minutes. Those nine or ten minutes are assembled from the original ninety and edited to appear as if the sequence originally took place the way it’s seen in the final film. The edited sequence is a fictional form of the original. Unless I think I understand the original sequence, I cannot make the choice, one, to use it, two, to reduce it to a usable form, and three, to know where to place it in the structure of the film. Unless I can offer myself an explanation, correct or incorrect, as to why I’m making the choices I’m making, I’m lost. Although I may be lost anyway. Before the film is finished, I have to be able to put into words why I have selected each shot and the meaning I attach to the order of the sequences.

That’s equally true when I start working on the structure. Unless I can explain to myself why sequence 2 follows sequence 1, or how sequence 32 is related to sequence 4, or how the first sequence is related to the last, it’s too random. I have to have a theory. It’s not necessary that anyone else reconstructs that theory—although if someone wants to, I think there are always enough clues—but I have to have a theory. Those choices are the way I express my point of view about the material.

INTERVIEWER

What happens if your theory shifts? Are you stuck saying, Oh God, I have to change my point of view completely? That could get frustrating.

WISEMAN

The theory shifts as I discover the structure. I try to avoid imposing a preconceived view on the material. Editing is a process that combines the rational and the nonrational. I have learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material. My associations are often as valuable as my attempts at deductive logic. It’s the old cliché—you find a solution to a problem because you dream it, or you’re walking down the street and it occurs to you, or you think of it in the shower. I’ve resolved editing problems many times that way, by trying to be alert to the way my mind—or what’s left of it—thinks about the material, even when I’m not formally editing. That’s why for me, total absorption is absolutely crucial. I can’t edit in a half-assed way. Editing almost kills every other aspect of my life.

INTERVIEWER

So when you’re editing, you don’t go to the movies or the theater?

WISEMAN

No, I rarely go to the movies. I try to read a lot, but the day is taken with the editing. At the end of the day, I may take a walk, and once every two or three weeks, I may go to the ballet or the theater. But the only way I can get a film done is to be totally immersed. It’s really interesting to see the film emerge, even though it takes a long time. It’s like a sculptor finding the statue under the stone. When I edit, I’m finding the film in the rushes. I want to find the film. There’s always the anxiety that it’s not going to work, a fear of failure. But that anxiety is a motor to get it done.

INTERVIEWER

Do you get feedback from anyone else during the edit?

WISEMAN

At the risk of sounding arrogant, no. I don’t show it to anyone until it’s done. And then I’ll show it to a couple friends, but I don’t solicit opinions because I think I know better than anybody what does or doesn’t work. I know the material inside out. In the very beginning, I did ask a few people what they thought, and then it just got too confusing—each person brings a different experience and a different viewpoint to the material. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s to trust my own judgment. Which is not to say that it’s right—it’s just mine.

INTERVIEWER

What about your family? Are they involved along the way?

WISEMAN

No. I show them the film when it’s done.

INTERVIEWER

Does it get lonely?

WISEMAN

Of course it gets lonely. Basically, I’m in the editing room ten or twelve hours a day for long periods of time. But my family’s always been extremely supportive, and my friends, too. It’s the only way I know how to get the work done. I have to be completely obsessed by it, and everything else falls by the wayside. Well, my family doesn’t, but pretty much everything else does.

INTERVIEWER

When you pick a subject, do you just know that it’s a subject you want to tackle, or do you do extensive research before you begin?

WISEMAN

I often don’t know anything about a subject before the filming begins. For Ex Libris, I spent six hours at the New York Public Library before I started. I visited four of the ninety-two branches. For me, the shooting is the research. I don’t like to be at a place, observing, and not be prepared to film. I would have been very upset if I’d been at that little library in Harlem as an observer and not filming the day that group was meeting and discussing small examples of racism in their daily lives. Since none of the events in the films are staged, I always try to be prepared to film.

INTERVIEWER

You mean you want to be ready to shoot at any moment?

WISEMAN

Yes. There’s no point in being there for research and not being prepared to shoot. At least if I’m not there, I don’t know what I’ve missed. But if I’m there and not prepared and something great happens, I’ll tear out what’s left of the hair on my balding head because I missed a good sequence.

INTERVIEWER

If you don’t visit sites for research before shooting, do you prepare by reading?

WISEMAN

What am I going to read? I don’t like to read sociology, and there’s no novel I know of that’s been written about the New York Public Library or most of the subjects of my films. The one time I did read something was before Hospital (1970). I read Jan de Hartog’s account of the time he spent observing at a hospital in Houston, as well as Kenneth Fearing’s novel Hospital.

INTERVIEWER

So your research is the process of filming—that’s your investigation.

WISEMAN

Yes. 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.

INTERVIEWER

How do you know when you’ve gathered enough material? Is there a moment that comes, and you just say, That’s it, I’m ready?

WISEMAN

Well, yes, sort of. During the shooting, I keep a list of the shot sequences. At a certain point in each film, I think I have enough material, usually between a hundred and a hundred fifty hours. It may be also a function of fatigue or an uncomfortable motel mattress. Six months later, in the editing room, I find out whether I made the right decision in stopping.

INTERVIEWER

Have there been times when you didn’t have enough?

WISEMAN

Twice. For Law and Order (1969), after about three months of editing, I felt I didn’t have enough material in the district station house. So I went back to Kansas City for ten days and really concentrated on the station house, and some of those sequences appear in the final film. And for the series about the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind, I originally went down there with the idea of making one film. In my ignorance, I didn’t realize how different the School for the Blind was from the School for the Deaf, and how they were both different from the school for people who had more than one handicap, and how the problems of adults were different from those of children. After a couple days there, I decided I really had to make four movies, so I spent time shooting in all four places and then edited for a while and then came back for another ten days to fill in the holes that I identified as a consequence of editing. Those are the only two times I’ve returned.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s talk more about the shooting itself, the logistics. You work intensively for weeks, seven days a week. Are you holding the boom for all those hours?

WISEMAN

The shortest period of shooting was four weeks, and some films have been twelve weeks. It’s now usually about eight weeks. I direct and do the sound, working with a cameraman and an assistant. I work very closely with the cameraman, John Davey, in deciding what to shoot and how to shoot it. We’ve worked together for a long time, and because of that we’re able to communicate quickly and easily. We’re constantly moving around, looking at each other, signaling, and trying to cover whatever it is we are shooting. There is a third person on the crew who assists both of us.

INTERVIEWER

To what degree does your crew influence you? Is the filming process an exchange of ideas and collaboration among you, or is it more of a one-man show—they’re getting what you want done?

WISEMAN

I decide what events will be shot. I’ve worked with John for forty years, and we work together well and collaboratively. Before John, I worked with Bill Brayne for ten years.

INTERVIEWER

It can be hard to carry a boom with such precision. Do you find it exhausting?

WISEMAN

No, I don’t. When I’m running around with equipment for twelve or fourteen hours, I’m tired at the end of the day. It’s the good kind of tired. I wake up the next morning full of energy. I like working. I also work out very conscientiously to stay fit. One of the things I like about making movies is that the process puts demands on all my capacities—physical, mental, and emotional.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever released something when you weren’t entirely happy with the material?

WISEMAN

No. I state the obvious, but I always try to make the best film I can with the material I have. I’m also very lucky in that I’ve always been able to maintain complete editorial control of the film.

INTERVIEWER

What’s an example of a difficult decision you’ve had to make in editing?

WISEMAN

In Ex Libris, the interview with Patti Smith at the New York Public Library, which lasted for about an hour, was really interesting, and at the end of it, she sang. I couldn’t use both the singing and the conversation, so I had to make a choice between the them. I made the choice based on the fact that her voice and her records are well known. I thought it would be more interesting to hear her speak—she was so witty and intelligent.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think you’re fairly objective making these decisions?

WISEMAN

Not objective but detached. I like to think I know what works for me. Whether it works for anybody else is not for me to say. I’ve learned to be quite hard on the material. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to make the choices.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve learned to be tough?

WISEMAN

I’ve learned to make decisions. Editing is always a manic-depressive special—moments when you overestimate what you have and moments when you underestimate, but neither is usually true. The manic depression continues all the way through, but hopefully I finish in a sensible, reasonable way. I need to convince myself the film works, that I’ve done the best I could with the material.

INTERVIEWER

Your work has covered so many different parts of society, but it all orbits this idea of institutions. Can you explain that a bit?

WISEMAN

I don’t have a very precise definition of an institution, other than it’s a place that has existed for a while and has a geographical boundary. The selection of an institution is only an excuse to have a look at human behavior in a wide variety of situations and to impose a form upon that experience. The choice of place is often simply a question of chance and what happens to interest me at the moment I want to start a new film. Chance plays an important role in my decision. I knew about the prison where I shot Titicut Follies because when I taught law, I took students there. While doing Titicut, I had the idea of a so-called institutional series. It seemed to me that a very appropriate institution to follow one for the criminally insane would be a high school.

My choices of subjects are obvious. The institutions that I pick exist in all societies. The form they take is different. Whether it’s a witch doctor or a neurological specialist, they’re both dealing with human illness. Every society has the equivalent of doctors and hospitals, of police departments, armies, schools, theater and dance companies, et cetera. The overall goal is to do an impressionistic account of contemporary life through institutions that are common and have analogues in other places. While I have made a few films in France and one in England, American society is really my subject.

INTERVIEWER

And within that, how do you choose your subjects?

WISEMAN

It’s a roll of the dice. Whatever interests me.

INTERVIEWER

But there must be a moment when you could feel a little bit spoiled for choice.

WISEMAN

Usually, one thing stands out in my mind, or there’s one thing I feel more energetic about doing. For example, when I was forty-eight, I was in a dentist’s office reading People magazine—which is the only place I acknowledge reading People magazine—and there was an article about a modeling agency. So, I thought, Forty-eight is a great age to do a movie about a modeling agency. I called up a couple, and two of them agreed. I went to visit and chose one.

INTERVIEWER

So it’s partly random, but something leads you there.

WISEMAN

It’s random within this very loose definition of institutions. I mean, my definition of an institution is sufficiently elastic to suit whatever subject I want to do at a given moment. I have a running list of ideas in my head, but it changes all the time because I have to be able to generate enthusiasm in myself and in others. I like the idea of randomness. My roll of the dice has taken me to seventeen American states.

INTERVIEWER

What happens to you once you’ve finished a film?

WISEMAN

It’s very depressing. I’m a workaholic—I know it’s an overused word, but I like to work, and when I’m not working, I find it depressing. I tend to sit around and daydream. I feel completely at odds and ends.

INTERVIEWER

But you’re so prolific, you can’t be sitting about for too long. Do you have something lined up for when you finish Monrovia, Indiana?

WISEMAN

Well, I’m looking for another subject to shoot in the fall, and I’m preparing to direct a play in Paris called The Realistic Joneses, by Will Eno.

INTERVIEWER

When you began, you had no voice-overs or interviews in your films. You’ve said you’d seen a few films with similar techniques and found the constraints appealing. Do you remember what they were?

WISEMAN

Documentary existed from the beginning of film. The Lumières brothers made documentaries. But sync-sound docs were relatively new. They only figured out how to run the tape recorder and the camera at the same speed around 1959. That meant you could make a movie about anything as long as there was enough light and you weren’t encumbered by a cable linking the camera and the tape recorder.

INTERVIEWER

Where did you first encounter synchronized sound?

WISEMAN

I saw a movie where it was used—Mooney vs. Fowle. It’s about two high school football teams getting ready for a championship game in Miami. I had been aware of the technique before, but watching that movie made me realize its possibilities.

INTERVIEWER

You started making films when you were thirty-six. Before that, you were teaching law.

WISEMAN

When I got out of law school, I went into the army for two years, and then I lived in Paris for two years. Then I came back to Boston and got a job teaching law at Boston University. One of the courses I taught was Law and Medicine, and I thought to make the course more interesting, I would take the students to the kinds of places they should know about if they represented criminal or mentally ill defendants. The State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, for instance. I took my students to criminal trials, probation and board hearings, and mental hospitals.

INTERVIEWER

Did you enjoy teaching?

WISEMAN

Not especially. Being a teacher is essentially being an actor. It’s a performance.

But primarily, I didn’t like law school or teaching for the same reason—whatever I had to read was so badly written. I like to read novels and plays. When I was in college, I was taught close reading, to pay attention to the choice of words, their rhythm and order, and not look for an explanation outside the text. I became a snob about wanting to read only good writing, and appellate court decisions did not meet my very arbitrary standards. I got by in law school because I could apply the techniques of close reading to the hypothetical questions on the exams.

INTERVIEWER

Wasn’t your mother an actress?

WISEMAN

Yes, and she was a very good actress, but had no professional career. She would impersonate people, so I had a living theater at home. Her imitations were dead on, and she got people instantly—gestures and voice—within ten or fifteen seconds of meeting them.

INTERVIEWER

When you switched to film, were you intimidated by having no professional training?

WISEMAN

I was too naive to be intimidated. It was before there was a film school on every corner. When I got started, people learned by doing. It was more like being an apprentice. I worked on the production of a feature film, a film that was part documentary and part fiction, called The Cool World, based on a novel by Warren Miller. I had the idea to make a movie out of the novel but had no experience directing, so I approached Shirley Clarke to direct it. I had seen and liked the film she made of Jack Gelber’s play. Working on The Cool World demystified the process of filmmaking for me. I thought that if that group could make a movie, so could I.

People can learn a lot in film school. I’m surprised, however, by students’ dominant interest in technology rather than content. I think the technology should be at the service of the content, not the other way around. When I speak at film schools, I always talk about the importance of reading—novels and poems—because literature teaches you not only about human experience, but also the forms you can use to convey that experience. In an abstract way, the issues are the same no matter what form you use. What’s important is how you adapt the ideas to the particular medium you’re using. Every form—novels, poems, plays, painting, sculpture—deals with abstraction, passage of time, and characterization. The choice of form largely controls the means of expression.

INTERVIEWER

Can you give an example from one of your own films?

WISEMAN

For me, when a film works, it works because it proceeds on two levels simultaneously. It proceeds on the literal level—who says what to whom, what people are wearing, the way that people turn, the gestures they make. The abstract level is what is suggested by the literal events. An example would be after the main title of Welfare (1975), when you see people’s pictures being taken and you hear the click of the camera, and you see—I’ve forgotten how many people—let’s say ten or twelve people being photographed. The literal aspect is that applicants for welfare need an ID card to be eligible to receive welfare. The abstract aspect is how the photographs selected for use in that sequence tell something important about the applicants, who are white, black, Asian, and perhaps of mixed race. The film was made in 1973, when a common view was that only black people were on welfare. My choice of applicants plays against that. This is done with no explicit statement in words but requires an inference from the choice of photographs. This is my way of conveying an idea in film with no need for a literal, verbal statement about race or ethnicity. Also, at the same time, the sequence conveys literally that the administration of welfare requires recipients to have ID cards to prevent fraud when public funds are distributed.

INTERVIEWER

Did your parents ever see your work?

WISEMAN

My father died in ’71, when I’d already made five movies, and my mother in ’76. They both liked what they saw. I think my father was nervous when I left law because he felt I was taking an uncharted course. He was a lawyer in Boston for sixty years and thought it was a more reasonable career. When I went to New York for movie reasons, he would make this joke that I was going to see my hippie friends. I was as much of a hippie as Santa Claus!

INTERVIEWER

In other interviews, you’ve talked about nineteenth-century American writers—Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James—as being writers you admire. Do you think of any specifically when you work?

WISEMAN

No.

INTERVIEWER

No novel influenced any one film? Apart from the one fiction film, The Last Letter (2002).

WISEMAN

The Last Letter is taken from a chapter of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, which I think is one of the great novels not only of our time but of all time. I took one chapter and made a play out of it. I didn’t change the dialogue much, if at all. I then made a movie using the same material, but the movie was not a filmed version of the play. I did not enjoy the filming process as much as I do making a documentary.

One of the nice things about documentary is that nothing is ever repeated. The same event doesn’t happen again. I always have to be on the alert for something new and interesting. Sometimes there is nothing, but that is inherent in the roll of the dice. I like taking a risk. I have to be prepared. There’s only one chance to get a sequence. The only exception is when there’s a repetitive act, like the killing of the cows in Meat or the canning of the sardines in Belfast, Maine. If an act is repeated, it’s possible to shoot it different ways at different times. This gives more choices in editing.

But as for literary influences, I leave that up to academics. I don’t really think about influences. I learned a lot from the books I’ve read, but I cannot think of a specific connection, in the sense of a cause-and-effect relationship, an identifiable link. When I read a novel that I like and I think about its structure, I also try to think about the relationship of the novels I have liked to the structural problems I’m trying to resolve in the film I’m currently working on. I don’t get a specific solution to my immediate structural problem, but I try to think about how people working in other forms solve their structural issues. When a novelist wants to deal with abstractions, they can use abstract words. If I want to go to abstraction, unless someone has expressed those thoughts, I have to do it in the editing, in the choice and juxtaposition of images.

INTERVIEWER

There’s something almost like nineteenth-century novels in your films, in their detail, precision, and scope.

WISEMAN

I’ve said this before, but I think that my films are more novelistic than journalistic. When I first went to Paris, after college, I thought I was going to write a novel, like thousands and thousands of others before me. I didn’t write a single paragraph, but I had fantasies. In the end, I transferred those aspirations to movies.

A novelist is limited only by the range of his or her imagination. I’m limited by my imagination in relation to a specific number of hours of rushes. With one hundred forty hours of rushes, I still have a very wide choice, and my imagination has to engage with the rushes in order to find the film. I try to avoid didacticism, and I try to edit in such a way that the viewer, in the same way as the reader of a novel, has to make up their own mind about what’s going on. My job is to give them enough information so they can make up their own mind, but I’m not telling them precisely what to think because what they think is partially dependent on their own experience and values.

The best example of that, in my experience, was with my second movie, High School, which is about a high school in Philadelphia. I think it’s quite funny, but what’s going on is also very sad because the students are being exposed to the worst kind of moral idiocies and told to conform to values that are certainly not my own, like, Always do what you’re told. When the film was finished there was a screening in Boston, and somebody brought a member of the Boston School Committee. Maybe she’d also been on the city council, and she was extremely conservative. I thought she was going to hate the film, but afterward, she said to me, Mr. Wiseman, that’s such a great high school—how can we get good schools like that in Boston? I don’t think that was a failure of the film. She was just on the other side of all the value issues. The things that I thought were absurd or funny, she thought were great. In her mind, that’s what schools were supposed to do.

INTERVIEWER

How do novels compare to journalism for you?

WISEMAN

In journalism, often, in the first sentence you have to say who, what, when, where, and why. The point of view of the writer is pretty clear from the first paragraph. If I know a novelist’s point of view about the character from the first page of the novel, I’m going to be bored. I like a book like The Good Soldier, where you suddenly discover that everything one of the characters has said is a lie. The novelist doesn’t say a character is good or bad or evil—the novelist gives you the dialogue and the situation and the event, and you have to decide. That’s what I think I’m doing. It’s novelistic in
that sense.

INTERVIEWER

Even with this line between novelistic and journalistic, you still don’t mind your films being called documentaries?

WISEMAN

Well, I prefer they be called movies. They’re based on real events, but there’s a necessary and obviously fictional aspect to them. The selection of sequences, their reduction to a usable form, the order of sequences, and the structure are all fictional.

INTERVIEWER

I think your approach to cutaways is related to this.

WISEMAN

To some extent, it is. If I make a jump cut, it makes the viewer too conscious of the cut. Often one cutaway doesn’t work. It might as well have a big subtitle under it that says cutaway. The alternative is to use shots of three or four people, their hand or eyeball movements or whatever works. This can create the illusion that they’re actually listening to what’s being said, when in fact they’re not. The shot might have been taken twenty minutes later or an hour earlier. This is part of creating the illusion that the event took place the way the audience is seeing it in the film.

When I’m shooting, I follow the actions and words that interest me, but I also have to collect shots of people silently listening because I need those to give a sense of who else is at the meeting and for the cutaways I just described. The availability of those shots allows me to reduce a sequence to a usable form. The first stage of editing a sequence is to edit it for content. This edited version may make sense content-wise, but visually it’s a mess because there are jump cuts in many places. I then have to find shots of people who are present but not talking—participants who are scratching their chin, pulling on an earlobe, rolling their eyes, folding or unfolding their hands, but not speaking. I try out various combinations of these shots to determine which selection works best as a transition from one part of the sequence to the other. The goal is to create the illusion that the sequence actually took place the way it’s finally edited. The sequence is not “true” because it didn’t happen that way in real time. If successful, the sequence is an illusion, a fiction created by the editing. This has to be done to make a dramatic structure, a movie, from a hundred fifty hours of rushes.

INTERVIEWER

Why not just use additional cameras? With another camera, another person could shoot those reaction shots as they occur, and in editing, you could sync up the two cameras, for “accurate” reactions.

WISEMAN

I don’t for a variety of reasons. It is too expensive to have a second camera. It is important to keep the crew small. More people draw more attention to the film. And you run the risk of filming each other.

INTERVIEWER

Your whole life you’ve been considered and labeled and put into the category of documentary filmmaker, and that has limitations.

WISEMAN

Well, that’s because documentary films have always been considered second class. I mean, even today, with all of the documentary films being made, that’s the case. Documentary films carry the unnecessary burden of being thought too educational. They’re meant to serve the same function as Ex-Lax—films that are supposed to be good for you and purge your foolish thoughts. There’s no reason that a so-called documentary film has to be didactic. It can be as complex as a fiction film or a novel. It’s only recently that the major film festivals have begun to show documentaries in competition.

INTERVIEWER

They’re supposed to teach you a moral lesson.

WISEMAN

I try to avoid that, because if you do that, there’s no ambiguity, there’s no complexity, and it’s too simpleminded.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a favorite film or a specific influence or moment that changed your way of thinking about cinema?

WISEMAN

My favorite movie is Duck Soup. I’m one of the few people in the world who recognizes that Duck Soup is a documentary.

INTERVIEWER

How? In what way?

WISEMAN

Think of the Trump presidency, and then Groucho in Freedonia . . .

INTERVIEWER

Who in particular in documentary film has interested you?

WISEMAN

I like Marcel Ophüls’s films, even if his approach to filmmaking is very different from mine. The Sorrow and the Pity and Hôtel Terminus are brilliant, great movies. It would be totally presumptuous of me to think my approach to filmmaking is the right way. You can make great movies following any technique.

INTERVIEWER

I wanted to ask how you explain the length of your films, but I don’t dare.

WISEMAN

I feel I have a greater obligation to the people who give me permission to film aspects of their lives than I do to any distributor or TV network. I make films on complicated subjects, and I think the final film should reflect the complexity and ambiguity of the events filmed. That takes time. The length of the film is whatever length emerges from the editing.

In America the only TV network that has supported and shown my films is PBS, and I’m grateful for their support over the last fifty years. I insisted from the beginning that I have complete editorial control, and they agreed.

INTERVIEWER

Can we talk a little about how you secure funding for your films?

WISEMAN

Titicut was made on credit cards and lab deferments. Since Public Broadcasting started in ’67, they’ve always participated, contributing on average around fifteen percent, but that fifteen percent is very important. I can then guarantee to a foundation that the film will be broadcast. From 1971 to 1981, I had two five-year grants from the Ford Foundation. Fred Friendly liked my movies, so he arranged for the Ford Foundation to give Channel 13 a five-year grant to cover the costs of me making one film a year for five years. It was renewed in 1976. So for ten years, I didn’t need to raise any money. The Ford Foundation, along with PBS, have been my principal benefactors. The rest of the money comes from other foundations, such as MacArthur, Sundance, and LEF. When I need to raise more money, I sing and sell pencils in front of Saks Fifth Avenue.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have someone who helps you raise these funds?

WISEMAN

No, I do it all myself, with the assistance of Karen Konicek, who has worked with me at Zipporah Films for thirty-seven years.

INTERVIEWER

It hasn’t become easier as your reputation has grown?

WISEMAN

If anything, it’s become harder, as there are more people asking for money. Often I will raise enough money to shoot the movie and, on the basis of shooting, seek the money to finish. I’ve never allowed myself to be held up by not having enough money. Occasionally, I’ve borrowed money because I was afraid permission might be withdrawn unless I acted quickly to shoot the movie. I make the movie and then gamble that I’ll get the money back. So far, my gambles have worked!

INTERVIEWER

So you manage to just about break even?

WISEMAN

I’m lucky, and I try to get a salary out of it. The way I make a living is by making one film a year. Also, I own all the rights, and those have become increasingly more valuable. I give a certain number of talks at universities every year, which are well paid. I can make more money talking about ­movies than making them, but I have to make them in order to talk about them.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said you believe your films are all connected. Have you ever thought of doing a marathon, stringing them all together?

WISEMAN

No. I don’t believe in torture.

INTERVIEWER

But you believe they’re all related and that one film speaks to all the others.

WISEMAN

I think the films are thematically connected. For example, High School is related to Basic Training (1971) is connected to Juvenile Court (1973). All three are about the young people in the seventeen-to-twenty age group. They are undergoing different experiences, but the institutions they are in aim to impose the same code of conduct. In my films I am trying to show people from different social classes, races, and ethnicities at work and play, and to cumulatively present a complex portrait of contemporary American life, at least as I have experienced it since I started making films in 1966.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel a sense of responsibility in your work?

WISEMAN

I feel a sense of responsibility to the people who have given me permission to make the film, and particularly to the people in the film, to not distort the experience or twist any of the sequences in the editing to conform to any particular preconceived ideological explanation. I also have a responsibility to tell a story that I think is a fair representation of my experience. In one sense, the final film is a report on the experience that I had in making it. My primary responsibility is to make as good of a film as I can.

INTERVIEWER

Of your films, which is your favorite?

WISEMAN

It’s usually the one I just finished, because that’s the one I remember the best.

 


Editor's note: The introduction of the web version of this interview has been updated. The original borrowed language from the work of Sean Cooper, without attribution. We apologize for this lack of oversight.


Source: the paris review