Frederick Wiseman Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Karl E. Meyer

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 welfare center, the documentary confronts us with the quotidian miseries of the poor as they are shuffled through the corridors of the welfare bureaucracy. We are in effect at the elbow of the bureaucrat as we hear tales from purgatory told by the often subliterate applicants for welfare money. We are in the world of the misfit and the mendacious, of the addict and the whore, of the crippled and the partly insane, and of the normally invisible poor.

It is strong stuff, unflinchingly presented. Without a word of narration, it makes dismayingly clear how our present welfare system degrades both the supplicant and the donor….

Wiseman's cinéma verité technique is here wholly suited to his subject,...
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