Frederick Wiseman Dies at 96: The Documentary Legend Was One of Cinema’s Greatest Masters

Frederick Wiseman, the legendary documentarian who made groundbreaking portraits of social institutions for over half a century, has died at 96 years old. The news was announced by his family and his Zipporah Films, Inc.. 

One the most important filmmakers of the last 50-plus years, Wiseman was also one of the most prolific. His body of work remained masterful well passed the age of 80, as his most recent films “Monrovia, Indiana,” “Ex Libris,” “In Jackson Heights,” “National Gallery,” and “At Berkeley” (on IndieWire’s Top 100 of the decade) received effusive and near-universal critical praise for being every bit as richly complex and razor sharp as the earlier films that carved his place on the Mt. Rushmore of documentary film.

Wiseman is best known for first film, 1967’s “Titicut Follies,” a harrowing look at the inhumane treatment of the criminally insane. After the controversial debut, there were no mainstream breakthroughs or Oscar nominations (though he did receive an honorary Oscar in 2016). There is no well-accepted canon or top 5 from his catalogue of 40+ feature films. Yet each of Wiseman’s films stands an ambitious cinematic achievement and, as a whole, his oeuvre serves as an invaluable anthropological study of institutional function. From the hospital in “Titicut Follies” (1967) right through to “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros” (2023), Wiseman’s focus has remained the same.

“I systematically wanted to select as subjects institutions that are important in the functioning of American society,” said Wiseman in a career retrospective interview with IndieWire on the anniversary of his 50th year as filmmaker in 2017. “Every society has schools, hospitals, prisons, some form of welfare, some form of the arts, so on one hand it was a way of looking at contemporary American life through institutions that are important and by implication have their counterparts elsewhere.”

Wiseman’s formalism was consistent through the decades: He always avoided narration, title cards, commentary, and any mode of spoon-feeding context to his audience. And although he avoided making his presence as a filmmaker felt to any blatant degree, and trained his camera on collective work rather than individuals in private, his films were hardly clinical or cold. To watch any one of Wiseman’s films is to fall under the spell of a master who used the medium to make the viewer a more empathetic and enlightened person, supplying the pleasure of watching human nature through the perceptive eye of a humorous, unpretentious man with insatiable curiosity.

‘Ex Libris’

Despite a deep body of work that spanned seven decades, Wiseman didn’t decide he even wanted to make films for living until he reached his mid-thirties. After getting his law degree at Yale University, he served in the military from 1954-56, then, living off the GI Bill, spent another two years in Paris, before accepting a teaching position at Boston University Law School.

Wiseman often said he hated law school the first time around — never attending class and reading novels for three years – but didn’t take any better to teaching, admitting that he moved back home to Boston simply because he needed a job. It was an unpleasant decision that came with a sobering realization. “I reached the witching age of 30 and figured I better do something I liked,” he told the AP.

While in Paris, Wiseman had enjoyed shooting 8mm footage of street scenes as well as his wife Zipporah (the namesake of his production company, which owns the copyright to all his films). He always had an intense interest in movies, but knew nothing about how to make them. To jumpstart his self-education, Wiseman optioned Warren Miller’s 1959 novel “Cool World,” and asked Shirley Clarke — whose movie “The Connection” Wiseman greatly admired — to direct the adaptation, which he then produced.

The film, which interweaved documentary footage of Harlem into the dramatic fictional story of a youth gang, demystified the filmmaking process for Wiseman, and convinced him it was both a worthwhile profession and one he could do himself.

It was around this same period when Wiseman saw the 1962 documentary “Mooney vs Fowle” (also known as “Football”), produced by Drew Associates, that opened yet another door of possibility. Robert Drew was one of the pioneering nonfiction filmmakers to take advantage of the 1959 technological breakthrough of 16mm cameras with a crystal sync — which allowed sound to be recorded independently of the camera and later synchronized in post-production, giving filmmakers a tremendous new freedom to follow subjects and capture everyday life.

Now in his mid-thirties, Wiseman knew he wanted to try his hand at this new way of filming a documentary and used his BU teaching job to find his first subject. Wiseman taught a class on legal medicine, and would often take his students on field trips to observe the real world places this type of law was practiced, including courtrooms, hospitals, and prisons. One regular stop was the Bridgewater State Hospital, which became the setting for his controversial first film “Titicut Follies.”

Although Wiseman received permission to shoot at Bridgewater for 29 days, and obtained release waivers from his subjects, the state of Massachusetts, ahead of the film’s screening at the 1967 New York Film Festival, sued to ban the film’s release for a violation of privacy — a legally dubious claim, but one that nonetheless prevented the film from being publicly shown until 1991.

‘Titicut Follies’Zipporah Films

Due to the controversy that surrounded “Titicut,” combined with the police brutality Wiseman captured in his third film about the Kansas City Police Department, “Law and Order” (1969), the filmmaker gained the misleading reputation of being a muckraking journalist. Over time, Wiseman would say that felt he had also been mis-categorized as a product of the “direct cinema” and “cinéma vérité” movement that grew out the 1960s. He famously bristling at being called an observational documentarian by stating, “I am not a fly on the wall.”

In reality, Wiseman was not a journalist, nor a passive documenter, but rather one of the most influential and trailblazing practitioners of the cinematic art form in its first 100 years, producing a body of work that reveals as much about human nature as any artist of his generation. His films, even those now 40-plus years old, have proved to be just as relevant and insightful today as when they were made. In retrospect, what is evident in “Titicut Follies” is not a muckraker, but a filmmaker who found his life-long subject with his very first film: society’s institutions.

“Nobody with an ounce of awareness could go into Bridgewater and think it was a good place, so the film does show the horrors of the place, but that’s not the sole reason for making the film,” Wiseman explained to IndieWire. “What I’m interested in, generally speaking, is exploring as many different aspects of human behavior as I can in different contexts. And the institution is really only an excuse, in a sense that it provides boundaries and rules for that exploration.”

Wiseman didn’t follow his subjects beyond the confines of their job. He had no interest in the stories of individuals. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he didn’t trail the famous, or infamous, nor film a protagonist until a three-act story emerged. The absence of those factors is likely why none of his films broke through to reach a wider audience or became awards season darlings. Despite consistently glowing reviews, and the devoted admiration of his peers, Wiseman was never even nominated for an Academy Award prior to being given an Honorary Oscar in 2016.

What Wiseman’s early films did attract was vital support from the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Ford Foundation, which allowed him in his first two decades to consistently keep making films rather than hunt for funding. Throughout his career, Wiseman remained productive with a consistent output of a new film approximately every 18 months. Institutions not only supplied a framework for his exploration; they put limits on that exploration. For the first half of Wiseman’s career, he would only film for four to six weeks, and even in the last two decades, as the running time on his films nearly doubled from 90 minutes to three-hours, his productions rarely stretched on longer than eight weeks.

Frederick Wiseman accepts his honorary Oscar at the Governors AwardsChris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Beyond what was necessary to find his subjects and then secure written, unfettered access to film them, Wiseman did little prep prior to rolling his cameras. Shooting was the research, and he followed his instincts as he probed the confines of each institution in his crosshairs. Working with a two-person crew, Wiseman recorded his own sound, allowing him to keep one eye on the larger scene unfolding around of him and one eye on his cameraperson.

But it was in serving as his own editor where Wiseman was able to evolve into a great filmmaker. A lifelong admirer of the art of dance performance — the main subject of two of his films, “Ballet” and “La Danse” — Wiseman learned early how to harness the power of movement and rhythm in the editing room, which in turn taught him how to better shoot his films. And although they lacked a traditional hero’s three-act journey, he consistently found a way to craft a compelling dramatic structure, with scene and sequence transitions that demonstrate the art of cinematic storytelling in a nutshell.

Modern tellings of film history associate Wiseman with a generation of the trailblazing documentarians like Drew, David and Albert Mayles, DA Pennebaker, Agnès Varda, and the Kartemquin collective, whose work in the 1960s altered the course of American nonfiction film. This is a reasonable way to position his work. At the same time, Wiseman’s ultimate legacy deserves to be seen as one of a singular film artist and true auteur whose work expanded film language, and remains poised to inspire filmmakers for generations to come.