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, department store, zoo, and other public institutions....

I must acknowledge from the outset that the mostly derisive reviews of John Maybury's The Jacket placed it very low on my reviewing priority list-until my astute Freudian-auteurist friend, Stephen Gottlieb, told me to reconsider the film. He warned me that its narrative construction didn't...

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 Follies is, indeed, a disturbing document, but not for quite the reasons I, or presumably Bridgewater's directors, had expected…. Having gone to see Titicut Follies expecting to be shocked by the exotic horrors of the snake pit, I emerged with a much sadder sense that what I had seen differed only in degree from everyday life. These patie...

[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. Where they do not, where the air of pointlessness and tedium we normally associate with institutional life takes over, it is in the case of institutions whose very reason to exist is saturated with ambiguity. The most extreme instance of this sort of tedium arises in Essene, Wiseman's study of monastic life, in which a great deal of the mon...

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's selection of material with clear affinities to concerns in his other films. The most certain connections in this case are between Basic Training and High School, although I think a more complex web of connections between all the films could be explored (dealing with, for instance, such things as the function of the church services in b...