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To celebrate the recent acquisition of newly struck prints of thirty-six films by Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930, Boston), The Museum of Modern Art presents a comprehensive retrospective of the director’s work. Featuring three to four films each month, this yearlong survey opens with Basic Training (1971), followed by a conversation with Wiseman and curator Josh Siegel, and spans his entire career, from Titicut Follies (1967) to his two most recent projects, La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet (2009) and Boxing Gym (2010).
For more than four decades, Wiseman has used a lightweight 16mm camera and portable sound equipment to study human behavior in all its contradictory and unpredictable manifestations, particularly in institutional or regimented situations where authority creates an imbalance of power, or where democracy is at work. Like the great novelists of the nineteenth century, Wiseman combines epic narrative with intimate portraiture. His films comprise a grand panorama of American life (and more recently, the cultural life of Paris)—a kind of modern-day comédie humaine that, quite astonishingly, never loses its vitality or its currency. And though Wiseman approaches his subjects—doctors, ballet dancers, soldiers, students, welfare recipients, factory workers, fashion models, zookeepers, victims of domestic violence, Benedictine monks, the terminally ill—with a minimum of intrusion or influence, he brings a sensitive but trustworthy eye, a lawyer’s penetrating skepticism, and the dramatic impulses of a
storyteller to arrive at what Eugène Ionesco, one of his favorite playwrights, called an “imaginative truth.” All films are directed, edited, and produced by Wiseman and from the U.S.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film.
Related Film Screenings
Upcoming
The Store
1983. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Together with Racetrack, Aspen, and Central Park, The Store is a masterly study of leisure, consumer culture, and class in America. Wiseman’s wanderings through the showrooms and corporate offices of Neiman-Marcus at Christmastime are both hilarious and depressing. Insatiable need, ostentatious greed, and desperate loneliness hang in the air, as sales clerks smooth-talk rich, insecure Texans into buying furs and jewels and other “indispensable” luxury goods, and employers and management gather together over holiday celebrations filled with sad tinsel decorations and even sadder conversations. 118 min.
Past
Juvenile Court
1973. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 144 min.
Model
1980. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 129 min.
Ballet
1995. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 170 min.
La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet
2009. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 158 min.
La dernière lettre (The Last Letter)
2002. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 61 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Blind
1986. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 132 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Deaf
1986. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 164 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Multi-handicapped
1986. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 126 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Adjustment & Work
1986. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 120 min.
Central Park
1989. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 176 min.
Racetrack
1985. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 114 min.
The Store
1983. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 118 min.