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 (????)