For the past three weeks, the Walker Art Center has paid tribute to documentarian Frederick Wiseman with a 12-film retrospective of his work. The series culminates tonight at 8 p.m. with a Regis dialogue between Wiseman and independent director Jim McKay. Wiseman has been frequently named the greatest living non-fiction filmmaker in America; regardless of whether one agrees with this description, few can deny the innovation and artistic integrity that mark his prolific 35-year career.

Wiseman’s documentaries are instantly recognizable for their lack of directorial interference. He uses no title cards, narration, or even interviews in his films, preferring to immerse his audience in the subject through persistent long-takes and close-ups. Wiseman’s perennial subject, he has claimed again and again, is the relationship between individuals and institutions, and he approaches the theme with respect for both sides of the divide. One can recognize his sincerity in details as basic as his straightforward titles (such as High School or The Store).

Last week, I had the chance to conduct a telephone interview with the director. He seemed, in some respects, to project qualities opposite to those most commonly associated with his films. His responses were concise, opinionated and relaxed––though, like his work, Wiseman was also perceptive, modest in regard to technique and devoted to the power of his images. The following are excerpts from that conversation.
 

Mac Weekly: Were you involved with film when you were in college?

Frederick Wiseman: When I was a student, you know, film wasn’t as trendy as it is today.

MW: Were there any other influences in college, then, that inspired what you do today?

FW: I read a lot, and that had some effect on my filmmaking.

MW: Which writers were you interested in?

FW: I don’t know ... Beckett, Ionesco, Melville, Hawthorne.

MW: I wouldn’t think to link your work with the Absurdists. How would you say they inspired you?

FW: [I was interested in] their look at human nature, their comic sense.

MW: Are there any other directors that you feel you have a kinship with?

FW: There’s a French-American documentary filmmaker I admire very much, named Marcel Ophuls, who’s made some great movies. As far as fiction filmmakers go, I think I admire the same directors as most people.

MW: Watching your movies, the director who I’m actually the most often reminded of is Stanley Kubrick, who also had this career-long fascination with institutions and how individuals try to retain their humanity within them.

FW: That’s funny, because Stanley Kubrick has liberally borrowed from me. The first half of Full Metal Jacket is almost a steal from Basic Training [Wiseman’s 1971 film about soldiers preparing to go to Vietnam].

MW: One of the distinct things about your style is the sudden immersion in the subject and location [of the film]. How did you come upon this method?

FW: It just came to be necessary in order to understand what was going on.

MW: Was it something that came to you after you were maybe looking at the footage for your first film?

FW: It’s something I thought about before I even made my first film. I just thought it would be necessary to immerse myself in the subject.

MW: In interviews, you’ve spoken a lot about your editing process. I guess you’ll spend upwards of several months editing a single film.

FW: Anywhere from eight to 14 months.

MW: And you don’t have a game plan going into the editing––

FW: No. I have to learn the material while I’m editing. I don’t even think about structure until maybe six or seven months into it… In [editing] I think of how the sequences might fit together. So I really have to consider the significance of each sequence.

MW: In terms of structure, my favorite of your films that I’ve seen so far is Racetrack (1985). It feels like a novel. The movie begins with the birth of a horse and climaxes with a gala where the guest-of-honor is a 90-year-old man. There’s a passage from birth to death––

FW: That’s exactly the sort of thing I think about after I’ve studied the material.

MW: Another thing I like about Racetrack is that it feels like you’re climbing the social ladder as you watch it. It starts by profiling the lower-class stable hands and ends with the wealthy guests of the party.

FW: It’s not by chance that the movie is structured that way. For me, one of the subjects of the film is class…You’ve got the poor Haitian immigrants sweeping out the stables, and a lot of the horses are owned by some of the richest people in the world. And you have pretty much everything in between.

MW: Yet you’ve insisted in interviews that you don’t believe your movies to make any sociological generalizations.

FW: I don’t think of myself as a sociologist or making any definitive comments on class…I’m illustrating and commenting on various aspects of class, but I don’t think I’m making any generalizations. I mean, you’re making generalizations about human behavior any time you put a human being in a movie.

MW: You’ve said that you don’t want to make films as didactic as you once did with Titicut Follies (1967) and High School (1969). Do you have any other outlets for your political beliefs?

FW: I’m not active politically. Any political thoughts I have are in the movies.

MW: Do you take the stance, then, that you impact the culture through the films you release?

FW: I don’t really know if I have any impact, and it’s not a question I really think about.

MW: What about the ways your films have impacted you? Have some shoots been more eye-opening than others, if just because of the nature of the setting?

FW: Well, some are more intense or more dangerous…but they’re all pretty interesting. I don’t think I’ve been on one yet that hasn’t been completely fascinating. That’s part of the kick of being a documentary filmmaker.

MW: Something a friend of mine pointed out is that when you watch a movie by, say, Martin Scorsese, you get a sense of who he is as a person; you can tell that he’s watched a lot of movies, that he’s really energized. But since you avoid a lot of techniques audiences are used to seeing, you personally seem like something of an enigma.

FW: (He laughs for a minute.) What’s in the movies are my ideas about the experience…The choice of sequences, the order of the sequences and the portions of the sequences I use are all reflections of me.

MW: But it’s still hard to get a sense of your personal history.

FW: I think that’s good.

MW: Do you aim, then, to have a certain distance from your audience?

FW: No. I don’t think of it, again, in those terms…You know, there was a program on the radio when I was young called “The Shadow.” The trailer for it went, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? (He pauses for dramatic effect.) The Shadow knows!”

MW: So that’s you?

FW: No, I’d never say that that’s me. But it is a concept that interests me.
 

Three of Frederick Wiseman’s movies––High School, Missile and Welfare––are available at Macalester Media Services, where they can be viewed for free.