by Travis Mackenzie Hoover
The Revival, Toronto|After being lulled into a stupor by the sins and shortcomings of this week's panellists, today's Frederick Wiseman talk was like being slapped back into full consciousness. There was no "drama" and "truth" spouted by this man, there were no sweeping generalizations about the places and people he films. There was simply a desire to explore the things that interest him and widen the scope of institutional life. And with a refreshing blunt humour and low tolerance for bull, Wiseman cut through the pretensions and got to the point of how and why he works as he does.
Wiseman claimed to have come to documentary out of sheer boredom. Dying to escape a career as a law professor, he took a group of students to the prison for the criminally insane and found the germ for his suppressed debut Titicut Follies. With the coincidental development of portable sync-sound film equipment–making unplanned, intimate documentary possible–he trained the camera's gaze on various institutions in an attempt to reveal how they work (or don't work).
Unlike many of his colleagues, Wiseman is uninterested in putting forth a set agenda, and resists Us-vs.-Them dichotomies that tell us who to side with. Asserting "there's no point in doing a film if I know what I think," he takes an "impressionistic" approach to his films, suggesting the vast processes involved without making a point. He scoffed at documentarians who think they can change the world with one film as "arrogant" and pointed out the impossibility of figuring out the relationship of one film to society. Even the moderator's example of The Thin Blue Line's impact on its subject was waved off as a specific case. A documentary to Wiseman is "not an objective document" and he was unwavering on that point.
In any event, the filmmaker showed himself to be far less full of himself than many of the younger directors speaking this week. When asked about the charge that he mocked the ugliness of the teachers in High School, he replied: "I don't think [they're] any uglier than I am." He found several of the moderator's devil's-advocate questions foolish: when pressed on the High School mockery subject, for instance, he deadpanned, "Yeah, well, I guess that's my fault." Such remarks might normally come off as flip, but here it revealed a refusal to play ball with his critics, whom he found much more "condescending" than the films under scrutiny. The search to find secret attitudes in the film reveals only the critics' agendas, which are just as belittling as Wiseman's alleged sins.
Some of his assertions are worth questioning. His refusal to shoot outside of one building disengages that building from the system that gives it life; while he claimed that connecting those dots would lead to a "superficial" film, the pretense of an institution as a microcosm seems pretty superficial to me. And his assumption that documentary can do no social good seemed a bizarre position to take for one who has so tirelessly tracked the social scene. Nevertheless, he seemed positively heroic compared to many of his peers taking part in discussions over the past few days, and whether or not one quarrels with his methods, his attitude is one to which documentarians ought to aspire.
