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Frederick Wiseman.
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Frederick Wiseman (born 1930) was an American documentary filmmaker whose "fly-on-the-wall" films revealed what happens in a hospital, school, meat-packing plant, police department, modeling agency, d...
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Critical Essay by Donald E. Mcwilliams
[To say] that a Wiseman film is about the institution or is primarily about the institution is to be superficial and ignore the complexity of his films. There ar...
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Critical Essay by Edgar Z. Friedenberg
The delayed development of hostile reactions by the subjects of Wiseman's films is one of the more revealing social responses his work evokes. Titicut Fol...
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Critical Essay by Patrick Sullivan
[Essene] pays its attention to an Anglican religious community which on the surface has little or no connection to the urgent social and economic problems of [Wisema...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Mamber
While [Basic Training] is open to individual analysis apart from the director's other work, a more sophisticated argument can be developed in terms of Wiseman&#...
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Critical Essay by Jane Larkin Crain
[The] first thing to be remarked of [Wiseman's] movies is that they possess, for the most part, a style and verve that put Dragnet and Emergency! to shame. W...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Tarratt
For Juvenile Court [Wiseman] spent over a month in the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn and shot 62 hours of film, four per cent of which is used he...
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Critical Essay by Chuck Kraemer
The style [of "Primate"] is typical of a Wiseman film: leisurely, flat, unnarrated, often repetitive, utterly free of polemic. But the subject matter is i...
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Critical Essay by Richard Schickel
[Primate] is perhaps Wiseman's most important work. It differs from its predecessors in that his camera discovers no saving human grace among the employees of...
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Critical Essay by Karl E. Meyer
At its best, [Welfare] is very good indeed, if one can use the word good about a film whose subject is appalling and depressing. Shot in black and white at a New York w...
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Critical Essay by James Wolcott
To reverse the Faulknerian rhetoric, the people in ["Welfare"] (as in "High School," "Juvenile Court," and "Titicut Fol...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Mamber
Frederick Wiseman's extraordinary new film Meat is and is not about slaughterhouses. From the first shots of cows on an open range there is no doubt blood will ...
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Critical Essay by Shepherd Bliss
[Watching Canal Zone] must be disturbing for people who know little of the Zone. I can testify that it is also an intense experience for an old-line Zonian…. Mu...
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Critical Essay by Louise Sweet
[Canal Zone is] a deliberate summation of Wiseman's previous work…. Its slow pace encourages the audience to consider Wiseman's long-standing preocc...
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Critical Essay by Mary Frazer
[All Frederick Wiseman's films] have had as their subject a particular aspect of American society: an organization, a profession or an occupation. Model observes t...
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Frederick Wiseman
Critical Essay by Donald E. Mcwilliams
