These American Lives: The United States of Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman questions authority without ever opening his mouth. How? This isn’t a riddle: It’s a filmmaking manifesto, a technique employed since the very beginning of his career as a documentary filmmaker. This is particularly true of several of Wiseman’s earliest works: High School (1968), Law & Order (1969), Basic Training (1971), and Juvenile Court (1973). Across each of these four films, Wiseman pieces together his most overtly political, surprisingly rebellious mosaic — even when considered more than 50 years later.

A graduate of Yale Law School and a professor at the Boston University Institute of Law and Medicine – not to mention an Army veteran who lucked out, drafted after the Korean War ended in 1953 but before the Vietnam War began in 1955 – Wiseman has extensive experience in the study of right and wrong. Several of his first half-dozen films play into the nation’s wrestling match with morality and justice throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s, pioneering what he has called “reality fiction”: a tongue-in-cheek rejection of labels such as “direct cinema” or “cinéma vérité” (“a pompous French term that has absolutely no meaning,” as he put it) that characterizes his lack of expository narration, on-camera interactions with subjects, or behind-the-scenes insights into the filmmaking process. Instead, Wiseman puts all his weight into strategic long shots and razor-sharp editing — and, in doing so, captures a dramatic rhythm as engrossing as that seen in the best narrative cinema.

After his first film, Titicut Follies (1967), was nearly blocked from premiering at the New York Film Festival and later pulled from distribution by court order from the state of Massachusetts — by no coincidence the same entity managing Bridgewater State Hospital, the nightmarish facility for criminally insane patient-inmates the film uncovered — High School was Wiseman’s de facto debut. And what a time to be documenting an American high school: The Vietnam War was raging, and teen soldiers were being shipped out by the dozen. President Lyndon B. Johnson edged ahead in the Democratic primary, only to drop out of the running soon after. The civil-rights movement was also in full swing, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination looming on the immediate horizon. However, no matter what was going on outside the walls of the classroom, Wiseman’s camera shows that teachers and administrators have no interest in digesting even one scrap of it. No, no: At Northeast High, it’s business as usual.

There’s a passive aggression underneath the surface. Teachers drone on about this and that, trying and — as the unrelenting lens of High School captures so often — utterly failing to intimidate these teenage baby boomers into something even more dangerous than forced compliance: bored ambivalence. It’s clear who Wiseman sides with, even without the use of such obvious tools as talking heads, self-inserts, or voiceover narration (all commonplace in the filmmaking style today but completely absent from Wiseman’s filmography). In fact, High School stands as one of the closest things to a comedy across his more than 40 films. The adults are the butt of the joke, and it’s not due to some lame editing trick: Wiseman’s long takes and few cuts subtly expose the hilarity of their futile efforts to halt the pressure cooker of a sociopolitical movement in their midst.

Wiseman’s High School follow-up, Law & Order, graduates from the classroom and leaves New England but still keeps its finger on the pulse of a nation in transition — this time via the Kansas City Police Department. Filmed in the wake of the 1968 Democratic Convention, where a notorious showdown took place between protestors and law enforcement in the next state over, Wiseman’s doc is a live good-cop-bad-cop routine: Some officers protect children, others exact brutal violence on the unarmed; some cops help the elderly, others demonstrate a cruel disregard for civilians. In effect, Law & Order is debating with itself, making both the “not all cops” argument and the “yes, all cops” counter simply by observing the men on the job.

And the one line of dialogue that recurs throughout? “There’s nothing we can do about it.” As the proverb of the bad apple plays out onscreen, generously serving up firsthand evidence for both sides of the argument, it’s obvious why Wiseman would make such an effort to include the refrain: It doesn’t matter if one apple’s rotten or the entire bunch when the bushel is busted. It’s a radical thesis, and one that continues to reverberate today. After all, you can’t call yourself a good cop if the system is broken. As the reprehensibly bad outweighs the performatively good, the futile gestures of the so-called nice cops seem all the more trivial with each abhorrently violent act that transpires. Forget the petulant leadership Wiseman makes light of in High School: Here, he suggests if the rule-enforcers of Law & Order are this openly hostile with a camera present, imagine what’s going on when no bystanders are around.

Come 1971, Wiseman explored a middle ground between the disciplinary action of High School and the brute force of Law & Order: Basic Training, another examination of power that shows teens not much older than Philly’s Northeast High students being militarized in ways the Kansas City PD could only dream of. Filmed in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, with the anti-war movement gaining strength by the day and morale continuing to plummet, Wiseman couldn’t have predicted his fifth film’s release would coincide with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. However, when considered in this context, Basic Training feels all the more gut-wrenching: The documentary’s subjects are just kids, yet they’ll soon be tasked with carrying out the ultimate authority, martial law, to its most horrific extent on behalf of the United States government. A veteran himself, Wiseman produces a doc that is as much an objection as it is objective.

One young recruit just can’t seem to get the marching part down, earning himself an earful from a drill sergeant. Another faces dishonorable discharge for not following orders, the officer’s threats doing nothing to spur motivation in a young Black trainee who has no interest in fighting for a country that wouldn’t do the same for him. Here at Fort Knox, this simply won’t do. The goal of basic training, as Wiseman expresses through cinematic wide shots straight out of a John Ford movie, is assimilation: with your fellow troops and, on a grander scale, your government’s military agenda. A departure from his usual style of medium coverage and close-ups that allow the viewer to get personal with the subject or task at hand, Wiseman resorts to these all-encompassing angles — which he typically reserves exclusively for establishing location shot — to underline the stripping of identity that takes place during these nine weeks at boot camp.

Juvenile Court, then, has to be the natural endpoint of Wiseman’s early-career examination of recalcitrance and control: Set in the halls of a Memphis, Tenn., courthouse, his 1973 film reveals what due process looks like for those who don’t comply with the rule of law. It’s his first feature to clear the 90-minute mark — and by almost an hour, no less. (Wiseman would continue to test the limits with runtime in the years to come; 1989’s Near Death remains his longest at close to six hours.) But, important to note, this is not the product of hubris or some lack of discernment: Wiseman shoots anywhere from 80 to 120 hours, then trims it down to a glimpse of the big picture. To get that rhythmic structure he’s known for, Wiseman engages in what he calls a “four-way conversation” in the editing bay: a dialogue between his present self, his memory of the shoot, his personal values, and the footage itself. The more complex the scenario, as Wiseman shows in Juvenile Court, the more difficult the task becomes.

For the first time since Titicut Follies, the director bears witness to a governmental arm supposedly meant to rear with a firm hand that, in reality, appears to do more harm than good. Bearing witness to harrowing cases involving delinquent, endangered, or disadvantaged minors (or, on occasion, intersectional examples of all three), Wiseman lets the proceedings unfold in (roughly) real time. But, contrary to Titicut (and Law & Order and Basic Training), authority isn’t a weapon to be brandished in Juvenile Court. As in High School, though, it’s still doing harm: The audience is locked in the room with manipulative prosecutors, well-meaning but ill-advised caseworkers, and a judge trying to find some mythical middle ground for these adolescents caught up in a vicious cycle destined to chew them up and spit them out. Rinse and repeat.

In the half-century after High School, Law & Order, Basic Training, and Juvenile Court, Wiseman has tempered with age, shifting focus away from the piping-hot, politically charged subjects of his early career in favor of much chiller ones, such as French restaurants and public libraries — still fascinating (not to mention still political, in a sense), but undeniably less angry than these earlier works. This is not a sign that the documentarian, now in his 90s, has lost his edge, however: It’s indicative of something much more distressing. These four films are so comprehensive in their scope, so blunt in their messaging, and so astute in their assembly that they remain poignantly relevant to this day. What was broken then is still broken now. What more could Wiseman say about abuse of authority that he didn’t say more than 50 years ago?