These American Lives: The United States of Frederick Wiseman

Though the American public wouldn’t get to see Frederick Wiseman’s debut documentary Titicut Follies (1967) until 1991 – when the Massachusetts Superior Court at last rescinded its decades-long ban and allowed it to premiere on PBS in 1992 – its spirit hovers over many of the director’s subsequent works. Namely, Hospital (1970), Welfare (1975), and Public Housing (1997) – three films that, like Titicut Follies before them, toss viewers into the nation’s social safety net. The goal? To throw open the doors and welcome audiences to the halls of vital institutions that few have seen and even fewer understand. Wiseman knows from personal experience that changing hearts is too much to ask of any one project. (Much less changing policy.) However, as he demonstrates in this trio of documentaries, to cast a sympathetic lens on people society would often rather ignore or outright pretend didn’t exist — the sick, the disadvantaged, the struggling — is no less profound. It’s less walking a mile in their shoes than following in their footsteps.

There’s a sense that the staff at Metropolitan Hospital Center (MHC) in East Harlem, New York City, have seen it all. From its emergency department to its outpatient center to the doctor’s offices, there’s a uniquely terrible day happening behind any given door. Wiseman is here to let it all progress unperturbed, silently rolling as staff members wrestle with the big question: How do you reconcile what needs to be done with what can be done? The enormity of MHC (and, in turn, the enormity of its problems) is merely a piece of the puzzle that is New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation – the largest municipal hospital and healthcare system in the U.S. Formed in 1969, the same year Wiseman’s camera was allowed to observe MHC’s daily goings-on, the institution presiding over Hospital’s hospital boils down to what is essentially a for-profit nonprofit: a “public benefit corporation” that aims to benefit society for the benefit of its bottom line.

It’s a capitalist chicken-and-egg scenario still being debated 55 years later: Which comes first, the treatment or the payment? A woman arrives from another hospital with no information for the MHC staff. An injured child cannot receive proper attention until the circumstances surrounding his injury are investigated. A man is left alone to come down from a bad drug trip, his simple request for a song ignored. A queer teen seeks affirming care and gets slapped with a schizophrenia diagnosis instead. It doesn’t make sense, as one ambulance driver says. Through it all, Hospital refuses to shy away: This is what medical care looks like – not just in New York, but in every state. If you haven’t experienced it personally, then you must know someone who has. This is it — and no camera flourishes, no editing tricks, and no emotional score are required on Wiseman’s part to prove it. He doesn’t blame patients for showing up, nor does he blame the professionals for being bound to the ways of the Health and Hospitals Corporation. By observing (and, by extension, feeling), it’s abundantly clear that the system deserves the scorn.

Welfare takes the simmering heat of Hospital and cranks the intensity up to the most hard-boiled levels in Wiseman’s career up to that point. Broken systems are perhaps his most recurrent pet theme, but with Welfare, Wiseman gives the topic the floor like never before. Called in equal measure his most essential and least necessary film, the documentary distills everything at the very soul of the director’s oeuvre and compresses it into one airtight package. Objections of “nothing we can do” and “not our responsibility” show up often enough throughout Wiseman’s work, but never like this. Here, they make up the chorus to the same old song and dance that no down-on-their-luck, nowhere-left-to-turn claimant wants to hear. The bureaucratic nightmare starts out heartbreaking, evolves into something infuriating, and, eventually, becomes so soul-deadeningly bleak that not even the most iron-willed Kafka character could endure without feeling stripped of their humanity.

Nobody but the willingly ignorant would argue that the country’s welfare system is in any way easy or sufficient. Given the way people regard the DMV, a place that will forever live in infamy, there’s an understanding that any interaction with the Department of Social Services is sure to be an unpleasant one. However, for those who don’t rely on public assistance, for those who never have to think about the process of obtaining it beyond a consoling but ultimately dismissive “must be tough,” it becomes incredibly easy to overlook all the ways in which the system can fail a person in need. Wiseman, undoubtedly aware of this assumption, poses a challenge to the viewer: You think you know what it’s like? Stand in line, wait your turn, and then talk to me about tough. With Welfare, the on-the-nose nature of his subject matter is the point. Everybody knows it’s a thing that exists, but how many dare to consider – really, truly consider – what it’s like?

Released a few years after High School II (1994), Wiseman’s follow-up to his 1968 film that ingeniously applies his earlier approach at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School to an alternative high school in Spanish Harlem, Public Housing could similarly be called a return to form. The form in this instance being the gently prying, curiously probing approach to themes explored in Hospital and Welfare: What’s going on here? Where does this lead to? What’s this room for? It’s a silent inquisitiveness, a nonjudgmental desire to know all there is to know about reality for millions in the U.S. Perhaps spurred by recent Chicago-based, projects-set films like Candyman (1992) and Hoop Dreams (1994), Wiseman’s 29th documentary enters Chicago’s Ida B. Wells public-housing development at a turning point for the South Side neighborhood: Filmed in 1995, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s takeover of Wells had just taken place, with its demolition, stretched out between 2002 and 2011, over the horizon.

By showing up and rolling his camera, Wiseman succeeds where so many others have failed the people of Ida B. Wells. Refusing to invoke cheap pity or exploit the project’s highly publicized problems and neglect, he recognizes the tenants not as political talking points but as living beings stripped of their human rights by governmental half-measures and societal omission. Employees stretch insufficient funds as best they can with programs designed to empower and enlighten. Cops stop by to harass residents just trying to survive. All the while, the community works tirelessly to reinforce their right to simply continue existing. Any one of these aspects could warrant a feature-length doc of its own, but, when stitched together by Wiseman, it becomes something much more authentic — and emblematic of the nation as a whole. “Don’t you see,” it argues, “any one of us is two steps away from obscurity in the eyes of our leaders?”

Hospitals, welfare, public housing: Places that Americans know exist, buildings we drive by with a passing glance every day (as underlined in the closing shot of Hospital), institutions we understand are there to assist people who need them. However, there is condescension in this, and an assuring thought that “They’re probably fine, yeah, they’re good” when passing a person in distress does not, in fact, make it so. By daring to capture what goes on at the scene, telling these stories not with pity but with pragmatism, Wiseman pushes back on our instinct to overlook and dismiss, effectively grabbing the audience by the hand and guiding us through the real and confounding process of seeking help in the United States.