tieman64
Along with Emile de Antonio, Frederick Wiseman is one of the godfathers of documentary cinema, having established the standard for what is now known as "observational" or "objective" documentary film-making (a term which Wiseman fully rejects). But unlike most in his field, Wiseman's films all focus on institutions. His subjects are whole organisations, and he conjures up drama by simply observing the various cogs and people at work within these societal machines. High schools, welfare offices, zoos, hospitals, ballet groups, army basic training camps, small towns, ICBM bases and business corporations are just some of the institutions he's tackled.The end result is a vast canvas, which when put together with all of Wiseman's other documentaries, creates a human panorama akin to Balzak. This is the late 20th/early 21st century rendered, in all its expansiveness, in all its complexity, with humility by a little man and a tiny camera.But the importance of Wiseman is that he dares to show, not only how much humanity has accomplished, but to what extent we've become slaves to the institutions, facilities, jobs and social structures that we inhabit and/or create. Whilst most films centre on a hero or heroes scheming to overcome some obstacle or complete some quest, Wiseman's world is one in which systemic forces exert tremendous pressure on the individual, shaping how he thinks and behaves. To Wiseman, society is a complex lattice of overlapping social structures and institutions and mankind is both the God who creates them, and the pawn who succumbs to the tides of their walls.And this juxtaposition (man as God/man as pawn) permeates Wiseman's entire filmography. Though touted as a kind of "anthropological" director, or a film-maker concerned about "studying institutions", Wiseman's larger preoccupation seems to be that of capturing the follies and sheer absurdity of human beings. Think the monkeys masturbating in "Primate", the city street-sweepers who sweep snow with futility during a blizzard because "that's their job", the suburban white kids being shown how to put a condom on a giant black phallus in "High School" or the doctors of "Near Death", so desensitised to suffering that they joke about their vegetable patients. This is black comedy at its darkest, its most absurd.Wiseman's films, when viewed in tandem, start revealing patterns, rhymes and rhythms. Watch how "Ballet" mirrors "Le Dance", "Zoo" mirrors "Primate", "Basic Training" mirrors "Missile", "High School's 1 and 2" echo his work in "Juvenile Court" and "Public Housing". Likewise, observe how "Hospital" mirrors "Near Death" and "Deaf" mirrors "Blind". Wiseman says he jumps randomly from institution to institution, but there's also a sense of a calculated human portrait on a grand scale.That said, Wiseman's "Belfast Maine", regarded by many as one of his masterpieces, works well as an individual film. At four hours long, this is a mammoth survey of the bay-side town of Belfast, Maine. Wiseman takes us through the town's gorgeous natural environments, introduces us to its population, social workers and institutions, and delves into everything from sardine factories, police stations, hospitals, high schools etc.Labelled "sociological" or "anthropological", it's also a strangely apocalyptic work. Wiseman captures the indifference of school teachers, their sense of hopelessness for their children's futures and the way various characters seem trapped in various blue collar jobs. This is, as one Pentecostal preacher states, "a broken world". But it's not all bleak. When Wiseman locates kindness, he finds it hiding in care homes, amongst pensioners, churches and other nooks and crannies which oozes a sort of communal spirit.Wiseman punctuates his film with shots of the town's docks and waterways, the lapping tides suggesting a cyclical pattern, a life of gentle repetitions in which townsfolk adhere to fairly rigid daily routines: wake up, go to work, attend to business, play, come home, sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat.Ultimately, Wiseman sees this town as an almost spiritual project, everyone, and the town itself, moving, they hope, toward intellectual, physical, spiritual and financial betterment. It's no coincidence that Wiseman focuses, within the documentary, on a local production of "Death of a Salesman", a play about a man who believed himself destined for a greatness he never achieved.And so we watch as the characters of this film perform thankless jobs, refer to their factories as "jails" and "assembly lines", fail to find "Moby Dick" like mythos in their work, but trudge along nevertheless in the hope of a better tomorrow. What the film asks is whether and where this hope can be found, and what little pockets of humanity are lost in the journey from blue collar to white.9/10 – This mammoth 4 hour film pushes aside Norman Rockwell's brand of small town kitsch and taps into something far more…human.
Stewart Caswell
At first, when the movie came on, I thought it was a fairly good representation of the lobster fishermen that make their living fishing on the Belfast coast. But as I got deeper in to the "documentary" itself, my heart started sinking lower into my stomach. Watching one woman pick lice from another woman's head, is not an impression I want people to have about the town that I grew up in.There are some good spots in the movie, the lecture on the Civil War, the plant sculpturing class, etc. But other scenes in the documentary made Belfast look, in my father's words, "Appalachian." In my opinion, Frederick Wiseman did not represent the full aspect of the city, he documented the aspects that he wanted to document, and as a result his documentation is a faulty one.If you want to see Maine life accurately portrayed, this movie definitely isn't the movie to see.
nunculus
The summing-up of the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman's life's work--a four-hour record of a mid-sized Maine town that features local ringers for the cast of Wiseman's other movies: high-school teacher, cops, ER receptionists, social workers, homebound elderly folks, ministers, babies, meat-handlers, the dying. An English-class lecture late in the film on the meaning of MOBY DICK opens up this oracular work, which combines a hard-nosed appraisal of the facts of everyday, small-town life with a Whitmanesque embrace that leaves you overwhelmed and grateful.Wiseman's films make even the masters of American narrative movies look like self-promoting, candy-flinging hucksters. The hallmark of a Wiseman scene is a whipsaw between unbearable heartbreak and Swiftian laughter. The piece de resistance here features an extremely large, slovenly-clad teacher who resembles a popular weatherman, reading from a book on meteorology to a roomful of profoundly retarded elderly men. The sincerity of the teacher's work, and the look of dutifulness and agonizing boredom on the face of the pupils, make you want to laugh, cry and scream all in the same instant.
Building to a soaring epiphany in a Belfast church, this movie functions on so many cylinders--spiritual, political, metaphorical--it seems insane that Wiseman hasn't been embraced as a national treasure. See it where you can, even if it's late-night public TV: this is the most penetrating, insightful and boundlessly rich community mosaic since NASHVILLE.
