Frederick Wiseman Obituary
Stretching from 1967 to 2023, Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking career was a model of consistency. From the unprepossessing titles onwards, Wiseman stripped his portraits of institutions and communities down to their essentials. There is no non-diegetic music in Wiseman films to help guide our emotions, there is no voiceover narration, there are no onscreen captions to add context to what we are seeing, and there are no interviews with the participants. It is documentary filmmaking in its purest form. “His movies are stylistically ur-vérité,” Errol Morris wrote in a Paris Review essay in 2011, before adding, “but Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”
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