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...

[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 [Wiseman's] previous films. A monastery in a rural setting—what could constitute a more radical departure from the concerns of those earlier visions of institutional inhumanity? In Essene we watch instead the rituals, routines, exchanges among a group of men committed to a life which secludes them from the deterioration of cities, the pro...

To reverse the Faulknerian rhetoric, the people in ["Welfare"] (as in "High School," "Juvenile Court," and "Titicut Follies") don't prevail but endure—barely. Anger hangs in the air and not all of the anger belongs to the welfare petitioners…. It is Wiseman's most tendentious film, hard-bearing and bitter-edged, and those who expect comprehensiveness or balanced-scale fairness are going to be infuriated. And they'll h...

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 flow, yet by the time the actual slaughtering arrives, it has already taken its place within a more involved process…. This isn't just meat, it's the meat industry—mechanized, scientific, diversified. The connection between the packing house workers and the animals they're doing in is not pressed too hard, bu...

[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 are many levels at which his work can be examined. This arises in good part out of the non-narrative structure of his films, which makes his films both more complex and open to many interpretations. Repeated viewing of his films underlines the importance of structure. To take Law and Order as a case in point, one is aware that time is passing, but it ...

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 mendaci...

[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 the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta. What he gives us—unfairly, according to Yerkes people—is a dismaying study of what he obviously believes to be idiot savants. Wiseman sees men and women apparently devoting their lives to tormenting our closest neighbors on the evolutionary scale, apes and monkeys, for reasons he cons...

[Canal Zone is] a deliberate summation of Wiseman's previous work…. Its slow pace encourages the audience to consider Wiseman's long-standing preoccupation with the way institutions preserve order by demanding individual obedience. (p. 59) Respectful of ambiguities, Wiseman brings a compassionate as well as a critical eye to the Canal Zone. Drawn to society's victims, he focuses on a wide range of flotsam and jetsam…. (pp. 59-60)

The style [of "Primate"] is typical of a Wiseman film: leisurely, flat, unnarrated, often repetitive, utterly free of polemic. But the subject matter is intensely emotional. Not only is it grisly, with enough vivesection, exotic behavior modification, implantations, vomiting and probing to turn the strongest stomach, but also profound in the questions it raises about science, compassion and the eternal tension between the rational and spiritual sides of man's nature. Wiseman raises thes...

[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…. Much of Wiseman's film confirms and illuminates my memories…. I recall the Panama of my childhood as a spontaneous outburst of lush vegetation, sleek black panthers, huge boa constrictors, Latin hospitality, panoramas charged with such vivid hues that surely any filmmaker would want to capture them in gorgeous tropical color. Not W...

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 here. There is no narrative overtly manipulating the audience's responses and despite the choice involved in the shooting and editing of the material, a film of this length which does not incorporate an analytical structure may well serve to reinforce the prejudices and attitudes which the audience already brings to it. It is not possible t...

[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 the world of fashion in all aspects—agencies, photographers, commercials, techniques. Here as elsewhere Wiseman aims not to present a point of view but to show his subject as it is (or as it appears to be)…. This absence of a point of view makes the film more, not less, interesting: we have all the fascination of looking into a...