Frederick Wiseman understood the subtle architecture of humanity

It was not some sick fetish for bureaucracy that drove Wiseman’s interest in the workings of institutions both seemingly frivolous (he documented the rarified worlds of both modeling and ballet, although he always found meaning in them in the end) and unbearably heavy (1989’s Near Death is particularly sobering). Rather, he wanted to understand how the systems we live in shape human behavior, influencing the way we think and feel about the world. Heartbreaking moments are interspersed with silly ones—Wiseman loved a singing telegram—forming complete portraits of humanity in miniature.

Wiseman’s 1975 masterpiece Welfare is a prime example. Early in this sprawling (yet relatively compact, compared to his later work) documentary, the employees at the New York City welfare office profiled in the film seem callous and unfeeling, denying desperate people emergency assistance on minor technicalities. But as Welfare wears on and the sheer scale of the poverty on display—not to mention the brokenness of the system supposed to address it—becomes apparent, it also becomes clear that the office workers are not sadists who revel in the suffering of others. They simply have no incentive to alleviate it. 

Although it’s subtle, the editing in that film reveals Wiseman’s personal feelings about the welfare system. In his later years, the filmmaker dismissed the more obvious commentary found in his early work as “heavy-handed.” But although he doubled down on his strict verité style over the subsequent decades—Frederick Wiseman documentaries have no interviews, no archival footage, and no narration—the very act of choosing what to include, what to condense, and what to leave out of his documentaries was itself an elegant form a storytelling. He was a master of the wraparound structure, and even when his subjects are tedious, his films are fascinating.

Famously uncompromising and independent, Wiseman refused to alter either the reality of the situations he was filming—in 2005, he admitted to Werner Herzog that he might illuminate a room if it was too dark, but that was about it—or the resulting work. His debut Titicut Follies was banned in Massachusetts from 1967 to 1991, and one of his films, 2004’s The Garden, was shelved due to copyright issues. (Madison Square Garden sued; he countersued; the film remains unreleased.) For decades, the only way to see one of Frederick Wiseman’s movies outside of its initial run was to write a letter to the director’s own Zipporah Films, which would decide whether it would lend out one of the 16mm prints in its possession for an officially sanctioned screening. In 2007, he began selling individual titles on DVD through the Zipporah Films website. In 2018, Zipporah made a deal to make Wiseman’s films accessible through the library-based streaming service Kanopy, but it took until 2023 to digitize all 45 of them.

Why was a filmmaker who was equally interested in the highest and lowest echelons of society so resistant for so long to making his work more widely accessible? The answer may lie in the work. Watch a couple of Frederick Wiseman documentaries, and it becomes obvious that no one understood the ways that individual people work within systems, and how those systems flatten and dehumanize them in turn, better than he did. Perhaps he was afraid of what might happen, to him and to his work, if he entered more deeply into his nearest system: the film industry. After all, he was only one man.