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Frederick Wiseman Is Here

Summarizing Sean Cooper in Tablet · Published Wednesday, September 13, 2017
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JL;DR SUMMARY Frederick Wiseman, a pioneering documentary filmmaker, is renowned for his in-depth explorations of American institutions, capturing the subtleties of power dynamics without commentary or narrative intrusion. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Documentary  Cultural Critique  American Institutions  New Journalism  Frederick Wiseman  Cinematic Style  Cinema Verité  Artistic Struggle  Film Editing  Public Library 

Places mentioned

New York, United States
"Ex Libris, an examination of the New York Public Library, which recently debuted in competition at the Venice Film Festival and opens tonight at New Yorks Film Forum."
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
"From Philadelphia, where I live, up to Belfast, Maine, near where Wiseman often spends his summer with his family, I rely upon cab, train, shuttle, plane, and car to make my way north, which is to say I require the help and services of some three dozen or more employees and agents with whom I interact, some for 45 seconds, others for 30 minutes or more, and who in each of their own ways embody the rules, protocol, agenda, and anxieties of enterprises as varied as the private security firm in the AirTrain of Newark Liberty International Airport and the Portland, Maine, cab company wilting against the force of Uber and Lyft."
Belfast, Maine, United States
"From Philadelphia, where I live, up to Belfast, Maine, near where Wiseman often spends his summer with his family, I rely upon cab, train, shuttle, plane, and car to make my way north, which is to say I require the help and services of some three dozen or more employees and agents with whom I interact, some for 45 seconds, others for 30 minutes or more, and who in each of their own ways embody the rules, protocol, agenda, and anxieties of enterprises as varied as the private security firm in the AirTrain of Newark Liberty International Airport and the Portland, Maine, cab company wilting against the force of Uber and Lyft."
Portland, Maine, United States
"From Philadelphia, where I live, up to Belfast, Maine, near where Wiseman often spends his summer with his family, I rely upon cab, train, shuttle, plane, and car to make my way north, which is to say I require the help and services of some three dozen or more employees and agents with whom I interact, some for 45 seconds, others for 30 minutes or more, and who in each of their own ways embody the rules, protocol, agenda, and anxieties of enterprises as varied as the private security firm in the AirTrain of Newark Liberty International Airport and the Portland, Maine, cab company wilting against the force of Uber and Lyft."
New Jersey, United States
"From Philadelphia, where I live, up to Belfast, Maine, near where Wiseman often spends his summer with his family, I rely upon cab, train, shuttle, plane, and car to make my way north, which is to say I require the help and services of some three dozen or more employees and agents with whom I interact, some for 45 seconds, others for 30 minutes or more, and who in each of their own ways embody the rules, protocol, agenda, and anxieties of enterprises as varied as the private security firm in the AirTrain of Newark Liberty International Airport and the Portland, Maine, cab company wilting against the force of Uber and Lyft."
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
"In response to Near Death, one of Wisemans most affecting films, a six-hour black-and-white soul-punch at the ICU of Bostons Beth Israel Hospital, a doctor writing in the New England Journal of Medicine criticized the absence of a tidy takeaway message about end-of-life care: The film provides no overarching commentary to put into perspective the practices it depicts."
Texas, United States
"Since 1967, when Wiseman was 37, he has made roughly one feature-length film a yearalmost all documentaries, and some as long as six hoursprimarily focused on the subject of power within American institutions in places as varied as a public high school, meatpacking plant, city zoo, juvenile court, and a Neiman Marcus department store in Texas."
Aspen, Colorado, United States
"Hes also made films about the ballet and boxing, and physical places, like Aspen, Colorado, and Jackson Heights in Queens."
Jackson Heights, New York, United States
"Hes also made films about the ballet and boxing, and physical places, like Aspen, Colorado, and Jackson Heights in Queens."
Talladega, Alabama, United States
"It begins at the Talladega race track for a NASCAR Winston 500, where a NASCAR driver practices by revving up his car and zooming down the track, the brutal volume drowning out the announcer, who was just about to introduce something, to instruct or give context; a voice of reason from above."
Venice, Veneto, Italy
"Ex Libris, an examination of the New York Public Library, which recently debuted in competition at the Venice Film Festival and opens tonight at New Yorks Film Forum."
Massachusetts, United States
"In his proposal to the administration of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, outside Boston, a prison that housed a section of criminally insane inmates Wiseman wished to film, he hints at the possibility of seeing society at large through a single institution."
Paris, Île-de-France, France
"After a stint in the Army as a court reporter, with stops in Georgia and Philadelphia, Wiseman was accepted to study law in 1956 at the Sorbonne, where he says he spent little time going to class and more time absorbing a foreign culture. He lived in Paris with his new wife, Zipporah Batshaw, a Yale Law graduate whose father, Judge Harry Batshaw, was a representative at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem and the first Jewish member of the Canadian high court."
Kyiv, Ukraine
"Wiseman was born on the first of January 1930, the only child of Jacob and Gertrude Wiseman. His father emigrated with his family from Kiev, Russia, to Boston in 1890."
Uman, Cherkashchyna, Ukraine
"In the filmed version, the camera comes at Samie from the side or just off-center, as well as head-on, and you imagine that she is both talking to her son and talking to you, the viewer. Semionovas routines take on a charged, heightened meaning. And Im busy myself from morning till nightvisiting my patients, giving lessons, darning my clothes, doing my washing As if to suggest, among many things, that the routines are what we absorb ourselves in when we dont want to directly face, or need to take refuge from, the larger forces that dictate our lives, the lack of control we have, or of the control we can have if at key moments we are able to break away from the comfort of our routines to face hard and difficult realities. In his films, Frederick Wiseman has given his audience a model to achieve this freedom, through an honest confrontation with who we are and how we live."
Lake Charles, Louisiana, United States
"In the filmed version, the camera comes at Samie from the side or just off-center, as well as head-on, and you imagine that she is both talking to her son and talking to you, the viewer. Semionovas routines take on a charged, heightened meaning. And Im busy myself from morning till nightvisiting my patients, giving lessons, darning my clothes, doing my washing As if to suggest, among many things, that the routines are what we absorb ourselves in when we dont want to directly face, or need to take refuge from, the larger forces that dictate our lives, the lack of control we have, or of the control we can have if at key moments we are able to break away from the comfort of our routines to face hard and difficult realities. In his films, Frederick Wiseman has given his audience a model to achieve this freedom, through an honest confrontation with who we are and how we live."

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Retrieved 2026-02-18 05:30:51 UTC
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