Potting; Working; Play

Cahiers, Frederick Wiseman;

"For you, the camera allows the making of this inventory or this catalogue.

In a certain sense, it’s a Natural History. Each sequence is a small history. The historians of the next century will have all these films in addition to all the books of our time… That’s a heavy blow for them. It’ll be an immense job.”¹

Birds fly past in front of a building situated on the side of a hill-face; coos can be heard calmly with the sounds of crickets chirping; a pan, then a cut: boats in a harbor humming softly, the birds continue to sing undisrupted, but they can no longer be seen, the audio trailing as if the distance marked between the images by the montage did not exist. Cut to a man at a periscope, assumedly on a ship, then to a closer shot of a specific boat in the Panama Canal; back to the man, lenses of mounted binoculars, back to the boat, then the man from behind, the bird chirps still audible, his shirt blowing slightly in the wind; cut outwards, the man walks back with his reflection against the observation deck’s window, he enters the small room at the top of the ship; cut to him inside the room, now on a phone, the birds sounds and the ship’s hum gone.

Thus begins Canal Zone, in these two minutes of shots trailed together, as if the cuts occurred naturally, as if the birds sang between these images. A boat is seen through a pair of periscopes, then the image shifts immediately to the inside of a boat, as if the camera has just displaced itself there. A new history is formed: a history preserving, paralleling and dramatizing the smallest gestures and tones. A history of vision is born and manipulated, as if staged from the filmmaker’s perception of the actual events, from the intuition of a filmmaker at work shooting, recording sound, editing and projecting the film. Here is every sequence of a Frederick Wiseman film, where sound conjoins what does not conjoin, cutting constantly between spaces small and wide. Gestures, speech, communication and social function are preserved in intimate detail.

Frederick Wiseman, in a joint interview with Robert Kramer;

“Well, physicality in the sense that if you have to carry the equipment, you have to carry it yourself. But also for the kind of movies I do you have to move very quickly, you have to always be prepared. Often if you miss the first ten or fifteen seconds of an event you’ve missed the initial part of the explanation that makes it comprehensible to somebody who wasn’t there. You have to make up your mind quickly and you have to move quickly. Often you have to run because the people you’re following are running and you have to keep up with them. You have to run in such a way that flapping the Nagra against your hip doesn’t get on the soundtrack. You have to keep the mike in such a position that you’re recording the sound of the person you’re following for the movie and not your own sound or your own heavy breathing or the other people working with their heavy breathing, or footsteps."²

The vision of a filmmaker that arbitrates what occurs and when is what constitutes Wiseman's cinema. Amidst shooting, the process is one of a careful enclosure of what is taking place in front of and behind the camera: the director handling the microphone, cinematographer close by, always in close working relationship with the former; and, between Titicut Follies and Essene, just one other person passing new film reels to the cinematographer as quickly as possible, with all members hauling their own equipment. They must all remain dedicated to the task at hand: documenting the event engulfing them. Their vision is formed in tandem with their labor, the act of shooting footage in tandem with sound. It is the work of historians.

Indeed, Wiseman’s films are marked with the significance of bodies: those of the film crew and the subjects before the camera. The films are documents of the filmmaker’s labor, as well as the subjects. His involvement with the filmed material at every stage of production results in a cinema formed through the body, hands, eyes & ears of the filmmaker, and his experiences. Conversely, this practical ideal is rather one of taking the utmost care to avoid the presence of the crew: their breathing, even during bouts of intense labor where they run with their equipment in hand to capture sequences in motion; their shadows, or the edge of a hand, which would reveal their presence and disrupt the film space. But the complete elimination of the filmmaker from the film is never possible, as with the historian and their history. A subtle shake of the camera cannot help but carry with it the presence of their input and action, slight zooms and pans betray the helplessness of the filmmakers in the spaces they film. The presence of the filmmaker becomes necessarily spayed; captive to the image, and preserved only to the extent that the filmmakers are forced to work within their own helplessness and self-awareness.

Cahiers, Frederick Wiseman;

“We have the impression that much of the editing is done on the sound. That’s perhaps due to the fact that it’s a live recording…

It’s in order to create a smooth gliding. If one cuts sound the same way as the image, it becomes jarring between sequences and that’s not the reality. I personally try to make films where things give off the impression that they’re happening as if you were there, as if you were seeing them in reality…”³

Starting from Hospital, Wiseman would begin a theme of bookending his films documenting enclosed institutions with shots exterior to the structure. In Hospital, these exterior shots are accompanied with cars that can be seen and heard traveling towards and away—it’s a method of enclosing the space in a greater sense of culture and geography, not unlike Ford’s Doctor Bull. Traveling from the exterior to the interior, the jolt of sound shocks the senses tandem to that of the leap through space: sounds of rushing through the Hospital’s corridors, patients and doctors chattering. Instances of sound taking precedence over the image suggest a distinction between the two tracts—it becomes clear that what is seen and what is heard complement and complicate one another. The rhythm of sound and image are rarely the same, even in the case of a synchronous soundtrack, like in the sequence of an inmate arguing with a psychologist about the impossibility of proving his sanity in Titicut Follies, speech constantly overlaps and disrupts the scene at a meter unequal to that of the subject’s gestures and the stable camera. Often sound will trail between images, staging the constant relations between the cuts, even to the effect of markedly disrupting space and time—recall the opening scene from Canal Zone, where the image leaps from a periscope to a boat. The selection of speech is so measured that it often appears as if the filmmaker is speaking around the filmed speaker, or otherwise including their speech to clarify their social setting, over them individually. The rhythm of an individual’s speech, their accent, the dialogues between real people, or one party speaking at another, become a mode to understanding the logic and rules underlying the spaces filmed.

High School (????)

Wiseman’s tendency to trail sound demarcates a structure of unified yet distinct sequences which delineate events in their entirety. The filmed sequence, in Wiseman, wrestles control away from the subject(s) and places it in the hands of the director. His interest rests not only with the subjects themselves, but with the culmination of their expressions and gestures within the sequence. The subject takes on the role of a filmic element, a canvas for light to fall on, roped into the new context of the film in diverse ways. In this sense, Wiseman's films can be thought of in terms of frescoes: of heads, hands, the walls of interiors and the flora of exteriors.

In this sequence from High School, the individual faces of students are representative of a single group: the student body, a mass of individuals which can only exist in relation to a single instructor. The individuality of these students is not investigated—no names are stated, nothing of their personal lives—despite this the shots of their faces are tended to with a dynamic rhythm considerate of each of their physical details. A cut from one student to another followed by a pan between two students, an isolated close-up followed by a more distant shot capturing multiple students, a pan from a student's face to their class ring—the same worn by so many staff members—such movements unfold constantly with distinct lengths and timings, the rhythm adjusting in regard to the unique qualities of each subject. Behind them, the walls of the class apart at distinct lengths, undisrupted music, space clarified at different levels of focus. Ultimately, space mediates between individuals, establishes culture, defines the collective.

The class listens, expressionless, to a teacher waxing poetics about lyrical interpretation, introducing Simon and Garfunkel's The Dangling Conversation before playing it in full. The music, playing without disruption over top of and completely replacing the sounds of the school, has the effect of suggesting 20 cameras that fill every corner of the classroom. More than the words spoken by the instructor or the students' reactions—although both are preserved—Wiseman instead places his focus on the active cultural dynamics taking place in the class. This teacher, though more involved, still fulfills a relationship founded on the students’ subservience, distinct in tone, but not in effect, from the school's staunch disciplinarians. In a more pronounced edit, rare for Wiseman, he cuts outside of the classroom whilst preserving the music, eliminating any pretense of diegetic sound and actively conjoins a distinct space to the established sequence: a lone student between the shining, empty halls of the school, the camera zooming out to reveal her confinement.

High School (????)

Observation, in every Wiseman film, is an act that retains distance. The filmmaker records undisturbed, hidden in plain sight, unacknowledged and unimpeded. The relationship Wiseman has to the events he films—surrounded by them but not part of them—means that his camera is positioned at a vantage point. Early on, distance was used to justify juvenility of subject, especially in Titicut Follies and Basic Training; such is no doubt an indicator of his inexperience at the beginning of his career, signalled also is a recklessness of technique, as in the replacement of the audio entirely with non-diegetic music in High School, or a cross-cut in Titicut Follies between a man being tube fed and him dead. Shooting the Vietnam war from home was in of itself reckless, a response not mediated or calculated, as with Kramer, and as he would shoot America in Panama and the Sinai, it only made sense for him to discover Vietnam’s core in America, through the high school: to end the film, Wiseman films a speech from the school's principal, reciting a letter from a past student praising the school's absolutism towards respecting authority, and how it now enables him to fight proudly in Vietnam. The shot is an extreme close-up of her face, the crowd heard but not seen, and ends only with her brief commentary on the letter. As Wiseman notes, the value of such a speech is its summarizing effect. Thus, the authority inside seeps through school walls, the film closing with an inference that such culture codifies a connection between the school and the military: Wiseman would return to youth and Vietnam only 3 years later, in Basic Training.

Basic Training (????)

For Wiseman, a hand elucidates the physicality of the human body. Distinct from the faces of High School, which serve a more isolated expressive function, hands are demarcated as the final arbitrator of human action. In the above sequence from Basic Training, shots of hands aren’t shown in isolation, but rather as preceding final states of a variety distinct actions in a variety of light levels: from dark, near chiaroscuro lighting, mapping the contrast of the hand against the earth, to brighter, or neutralizing lighting. They are the hands of young soldiers training to fight, kill, and die in war; Vietnam; young men ordered to the ground, their bodies and faces isolated from the frame by cuts and pans. As in High School, neither the individual nor the significance of their actions are addressed, and the sound unifying the sequence is only the persistent buzzing of cicadas, eschewing synchronization. The hands move almost as if disembodied, compelled in near-silence to complete their ritual. Basic Training thus acts as the concrete answer to High School’s final scene, where one imagines the relative youth of the soldiers’ faces; the fingers and palms of these young men gladly subservient, unquestioningly following authority towards violence.

The Immigrant (????)

Cahiers, Frederick Wiseman;

“When we see a film like Sinai Field Mission, we can very well think of Capra’s Why We Fight series. We find there the same machine which no longer has to produce this violence of war, but which continues to function smoothly, with the same spectacular effects as a musical comedy. And at the same time, there is a humor that recalls the Marx Brothers.

That really pleases me.”⁴

Like Chaplin, Wiseman is a comic whose sequences depend on the structure of narrative and space. It’s with such a rigorously refined structure that both comedy and tragedy can erupt, contrast and be freely articulated.

Take a film like The Immigrant, where this precise freedom of the comic and tragic is in full bloom. Comedy seeps out from everywhere and everything, and small histories are preserved through it: the tension of the buffoonish waiter entering and reentering the dining floor, the Tramp noticing a woman he encountered earlier on the immigration ship that brought him to America, breaking from his seat to meet her and guide her back to his table; the Tramp ordering beans—all he can afford—the woman matching him, the overbearing waiter peering with exaggerated intensity over the Tramp’s shoulder as he eats. But, where comedy pronounces itself, tragedy hides and waits behind each image, pronouncing itself in the irresolution of these small histories. Chaplin goes through the film with barely enough time to keep up, much less revel in each source of comedy, allowing tragedy to be entirely sewn into the background. The film’s ending, where The Tramp discovers romance for the final time (the gesture of a true comic), does not actually resolve the discrimination he faces throughout the film. Chaplin shifts like a natural between comedian and tragedian through his mise en scène. They are like two poles in constant flux, the film never completely giving way to either.

Primate (????)

Thomas R. Atkins, Frederick Wiseman;

“The tone of Primate is slightly more comic — I don't mean in terms of humorous or laughable material as in High School — but its coolness and distance towards the subject. It has the detachment of comedy.

That's a fair statement.

Of course, it's a harrowing type of comedy…”⁵

Comedy and tragedy, in Wiseman’s films, surface from his rigorous organization of real events. The final sequence of Primate is composed of a series of disparate events: researchers discuss the complete lack of direction or significance to their work in a board meeting (a Wiseman favorite), followed by an image of a monkey subjected to a zero-gravity experiment, observed just beyond a wall through CCTV cameras. Of course, it’s very dark—just prior, a nearly ten minute segment of a Capuchin being vivisected alive takes place. Wiseman denies overt resolution, even with how decisively he arranges these events, resolutely allowing the comedy of absurdities to remain at the forefront as their tragedy solidifies.

Wiseman, free in his filmic craft, is able to signify each shot without reducing the filmed material to signs. He can do so through a process evocative of pottery, taking control of his inevitable captivity to the camera, accounting at once for the plasticity of the image and the sequential, continuous nature of real occurrences. When potting, it’s a matter of continuous labor and precise movements that guide the structure of the pot. The spinning of the potter’s wheel requires persistence and dedication, as with Wiseman’s active methods of sound-and-image recording in reaction to what's before him; just as the spinning of the pot reacts to the qualities of the clay. The raw material becomes permanent; the texture and motions of the hand are remembered by the pot, as they are with the handheld camera. Even in the edit is the potter’s craft invoked. Where the firing of the pot seals, refines, and compresses the clay into a final form, likely after multiple attempts and revisions, montage too seals the start and edge of the shot, articulating, compressing, and finalizing some odd hundreds of hours of footage into a singular, refined object.

Wiseman, working with a limited crew, is always necessarily confined to one event at the expense of filming another—especially in his earliest films, where film reels lasted 40 minutes each and were themselves a precious resource. The compromise he has to make between being able to properly capture footage without disrupting the environment, and being careful to preserve the integrity of that footage, requires him to sculpt against the grain of occurrence itself. In order to see what's happening before him within the confines of film, the process had to be one of carefully guiding what ought to be recorded, all the while carefully retaining the spontaneity of its recording.

Primate (????)

In an earlier sequence in Primate, an ape is brought into a room by a group of researchers to participate in a study. It climbs onto a box, strains itself to reach a rope above, hoisting its entire weight upwards in order to pull a lever it has been conditioned to pull. A researcher observes the ape at another side of the room when, finally, it extends its arm to the lever, barely out of reach; in close-up, its hand clasps around the lever and pulls it down with all of its weight. Wiseman crafts a relational shot-reverse-shot between the researcher and ape, the phrase completed with the final cut to the ape’s hand completing the task. This narrativization, in which the continuous unfolding of new motions takes precedence, constructed out of the improvised footage of events, forms a collection of minute, yet ecstatic discoveries: a new chronology is formed by consecutive gestures organized by the découpage. The pursuit of discovery leads gestures to be framed with the utmost scrutiny, both individually and collectively, multiple subjects reacting to or against each other in the latter case. One can see this multiplicity in the final sequence of Law and Order, where the ecstasy of discovery within the documented space does not obfuscate the harrowing nature of the scene: a man argues for the custody of his children with two policemen, his ex-wife and her new partner; the two officers exchanging floor-bound glances as they allow the event to unfold for itself, all the while aggressively pointing to the father as they reproach him; the stern gaze of the Mother and the expressionless face of the child in close-up; the Father’s progressively futile attempts to argue for custody, his gestures becoming lighter, more reserved, until finally the officers depart and the Father runs into the distance, unable to muster up any other action except rejecting the event altogether.

Canal Zone (????)

Peter Kubelka;

“So this is my […] concept of film language. If I have as material for departure, elements which equal reality, how does the material articulate. It articulates between image and next-image. The most strongest—most simple articulation. It articulates between image and sound. At the same time. ‘Sync’. ‘Sync’. It articulates between image, and next sound. It articulates between sound, and previous image. It articulates between sound and next sound, and between sound and previous sound. And not just previous this sound, but all previous sounds since back to the beginning of the film. This is like, in a good poem, in a good piece of music, you cannot come in the middle, you cannot try to understand it. Because, when you miss one word, you have missed an essential thing. Film can give you totally two different elements at the same time…” ⁶

Understandably, Kubelka’s use of film metaphor rests primarily around the relationship between sound and image, both equally vital to the film's meaning and distinct in treatment, a theme continually evoked in his cinema. But, in addition to finding metaphorical value through displacing sound and image—the sounds of violence and the language of the colonizers over the image of poached animals and the geography of Africa in Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise are a noteworthy example—Wiseman‘s endlessly complicating treatment of the relationship between sound and image is founded on false appearances: the appearance of synchronized sound (the sound of someone's voice will never overlap an image of tearing paper, as in Kubelka’s lecture), of represented events.

One of the final sequences of Canal Zone, after hours of observing Americans forming their culture in an occupied Panama—in grocery stores, courts, sports exhibitions, church services, community meetings and construction zones—comprises a series of complex, deliberate shots resolving the singular blatant omission in the film and Wiseman’s career thus far: the explicit depiction of war. The players: soldiers, citizens and the landscape of Panama. First, a shot of paratroopers descending onto an active battlefield, gliding down from a plane, while the sound of gunfire can be heard. The gunshots continue, alongside shots from behind of soldiers obscured within the Panamanian brush; standing by a stream, shot from the side; running through smoke with rifles in hand. After, a house billowing with smoke, partially destroyed, captured by the soldiers; the raising of a flag above, a prisoner of war being taken, commanders on the radio. Whether this sequence depicts a simulated combat drill or an actual conflict is unclear—the placement of the scene geographically and chronologically is shrouded in a complete unknown, alienated by the ease and rapidity with which the film flows between these extremely distinct and complex images. The cut to the plane dropping paratroopers is violent, abstract, a rare moment of Wiseman lingering the camera on the sky, having proceeded from a shot of a high school graduation, with a band playing triumphantly for the students' achievement. The gunfire’s disruption compounds the violence of the cut, with intensity the film has only suggested as yet. Such a reliance on appearances, on omission, widespread in Wiseman’s cinema, predicates a narrative structure facilitating branching metaphors for the omnipresent but invisible threads of culture and systems: what can be captured and what cannot, what can be now and what could not then.

The battle sequence carries immediately into a eulogy given over the water of the titular Canal. A captain and a man in a suit recite a nationalistic parable, dedicating a portion of land where men killed in action will be buried. In Canal Zone, the dead are dedicated patches of occupied land; in High School, the living dedicate their life insurance, their death. Next, a shot of children being instructed to plant miniature American flags into the graves of soldiers. Again, a play on appearances: whether the cemetery is established directly for soldiers killed in action in the conflict just seen is unclear. What instead materializes is a relationship of the children at the graves supplanting the dedication of land, supplanting the conflict, as well as a wholly polyvalent sequence where the aforementioned shots inform one another bidirectionally. One of the film's earliest sequences is recollected, the past now marked by the present: entering the Canal through the harbor, the camera films harbor laborers; a neighborhood meeting discusses the highly military-populated area’s disproportionate domestic violence rate, and a bourgeois group deliberates on where to build a new tennis court. Land is dedicated here too, not to the dead but to living Zonians—Americans, and to all the leisure they can afford. The next and final sequence, a military funeral complete with speech and parade, is anticipated. However, metaphor does not reduce: the shot of children marking graves with American flags in Panama does not relegate the film to a single theme, but rather leads into one of the film’s many arteries—the dedication of this land far from America to soldiers killed in a mystified conflict is itself an expression of power.

The Store marks a major departure for Wiseman. It is his first work in color, a development prompted by one specific, practical reason: a search for fairness, when shooting the products of the Neiman-Marcus department store. His stylistic tendency towards Black-and-White, its efficiency of cost, and its advantages in dimly lit spaces were overcome by the significance of seeing the products and the people who buy them, wear them, sell them in the most vivid light possible. The focus on filming board meetings and concluding speeches in Canal Zone, but also in High School, Essene, and culminating into future films such as Missile, constructed almost entirely out of board meetings and speeches, continues into The Store, becoming a primary way of establishing the rules of the game for the players in the department store to follow. Alongside the shift to color grew Wiseman’s patience: he began to sit more with objects, people, preserving more shots. Individuals become the focus of lengthy shots in ways thus far undiscovered: shots of a coat salesman are returned to again and again, as is a sequence of two women in a changing room deciding between pieces of clothing. Both the salesmen and women are seen multiple times in the film, something highly uncommon to previous Wiseman films (aside from a few like High School, understandable due to the enclosed halls and classes of the high school), even more so when one considers the space of The Store is open, constantly mobile, a variety of shoppers entering and exiting frequently. Oddities, such as a prolonged shot of a man in a chicken suit, hired to sing for an employee’s birthday in one of the store's many back offices, are lingered on. Shots like this become awkward, far more characterizing than previous Wiseman affairs—almost too long, too intimate with the people filmed. But what does such a shot bring to the table? The stuffy malaise of office life? A comedy of overexposure? Small joys disrupting urban mundanity? The birthday-woman's laugh is infectious; the shot sits with her for minutes in the room full of so few people. Going from filming events to filming instances, Wiseman’s desire for retention grows, his presence becoming more sewn into the image, present but less evident. This broadening focus on the less obviously impactful, on people, color and the texture of objects, marks a mature attempt towards a definition of culture through film: the action of the individual and the action of societal order.

This development in Wiseman’s work brings with it, beyond the development of technique, an impression of an overarching study on the interrelations of isolated circumstances, akin to a cinematic equivalent to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. The films themselves operate by delineating closed-off settings, but with each new film a web of interconnected sights form between the body of work. Each film is affected by the films that precede and come after. Metaphorical and thematic relations between films arise and inflect upon one another: as Wiseman’s filmography expands, his earliest films begin to bear the context of future developments, and his latest works become culminations of prior discoveries. The sequence depicting the vivisection of a small capuchin monkey towards the end of Primate invokes the equally harsh scene in Titicut Follies: the cross-cut between a staff member at Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane failing to properly tube-feed a patient, and a shot of the patient’s corpse. The principal’s final speech in High School implies the battlefield of Canal Zone, while the graves filled with American flags of Canal Zone imply what Basic Training and High School omit. It is a cinema of constantly mounting interconnectivity: the films break out of their institutional isolation, and become a collection of scenes that contain the breadth of the history and myth behind the American institution and the authority that mediates it.

In Jackson Heights (????)

It is inevitable, then, that Wiseman’s cinema would arrive at a refined point of small, imperceptible histories: with In Jackson Heights, finer focus is met with expanded scope. Rather than focusing on a specific institution and discovering its context with efficiency in mind, an entire district of Queens is wrought for all its minor histories and anecdotes. After all, discovery can still incur with it an erasure of life: the desire to “conclude” the depiction of an institution implies predicting what is to come from what is. Having acknowledged this, Wiseman proceeds from inward definition to a constant outward expansion, leaving the door open through a collection of minute, disparate details. Thus, what he now starts to inquire into are abstract systems, or rather networks of systems reflecting, contradicting and reinforcing each other: small stores seeking permits, bars at night, omnipresent police, a transgender support group; everything in micro reflecting the macro, everything affected by local law projecting onto the federal, then onto the national. In Jackson Heights shows a Wiseman finally secure in the camera’s ability to capture life beyond the institution. Each cut still marks a departure from the individual, still a cessation from them and their immediate selves, but the shot is now completely unwilling to detach the individual from their possible expanse. The film opens with a shot of the neighborhood, open, unlike the opening shots of early Wiseman films, establishing a wide space replete with varied movement over the boundaries of a single institution. After 3 hours, it ends with a shot of fireworks at night towards Manhattan, people implied but not seen; the sound of live music from the previous scene, a Latin American activist group’s meeting, is carried over. A simple admission that humanity is everywhere, in each shot, yet also beyond the confines of the shot, and that it cannot be contained nor severed.

Titicut Follies opens and closes with a talent show staged by the patients of Bridgewater, a momentary escape for those confined to demonstrate their personhood. Already from his first film, Wiseman’s cinema conceals a desire to escape the limits of the institution, an attitude of reliance necessary in his youth, the period when his abilities as a potter were honed. It was only after these detours that this dormant desire developed past aspiration: a desire for a cinema able to see anything and everything, to freely arbitrate a history of small things, in hopes of a greater whole.

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