Frustrated by her marriage, Sophia Tolstoy addresses her husband Leo in a series of letters that veer from bitter to defiant to pleading. Delivered by the French performer Nathalie Boutefeu, the letters and diary entries detail years of resentment and misunderstandings. A Couple marks a rare turn to narrative filmmaking by Frederick Wiseman, one of the world’s great documentarians. Shot over 17 days by Wiseman’s longtime collaborator John Davey—largely on Belle Ile, an island off the coast of Brittany—the film sets Sophia’s turmoil against the plants and animals that form a seaside garden. Wiseman spoke with Filmmaker before a screening […]

The lineup for the 79th Venice Film Festival is now live, one day after Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise was announced as the opening night film. The films announced today include Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, Joanna Hogg‘s The Eternal Daughter, recently jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s No Bears, Frederick Wiseman‘s narrative turn A Couple and more. White Noise marks the first time that a Netflix film serves as the festival’s opening night film. The streamer is also present with Dominik’s Blonde, the Nicolas Winding Refn mini-series Copenhagen Cowboy and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False […]

If you live outside New England, and if you saw the movie, Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall (2020) was probably your introduction to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, recently nominated to serve as Secretary of Labor in the Biden administration. And it’s a sustained introduction at that. Onscreen for about 45 of the film’s 272 minutes, Walsh is the living center of City Hall’s structure. Wiseman returns to his prepared remarks and public appearances like a buffer between less formal scenes of office talk and offsite labor, framing the mayor kind of like the loudspeaker in M*A*S*H (1970)—that is, if it had […]

In another life, John Davey could have been a doctor. He was studying to become one in 1966 when a mining disaster struck the Welsh village of Aberfan, some 20 miles from his campus. Davey heard the news and set off to volunteer with a group of fellow med students. They didn’t know it at the time, but the avalanche had hit an elementary school, burying more than 100 children alive. Their job, it turned out, was to retrieve the bodies. The experience rattled Davey, who was just 19 at the time. “I realized,” he recalls now, “I wasn’t really […]

In the last 51 years, Frederick Wiseman has made 42 non-fiction films, plus two fiction features. In a sense, each film is the same: The filmmaker, a sprightly and sharp 88, goes to an institution — or, in a handful of cases, a confined area — with a small crew. (Currently it’s his longtime cameraman John Davey and Davey’s assistant Jim Bishop.) Wiseman doesn’t do research; as he’s said countless times, “The shooting is the research.” He does no interviews. There is no onscreen text describing who is who, or even where is where. He rarely shows any person more than once. […]

It’s fitting that the first two films I saw at NYFF after returning from TIFF were Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana and Errol Morris’s American Dharma. It’s not that you never hear Our 45th President’s name in Canada (given that we’re at Twitter war with them or whatever the status is), but it doesn’t come up as much; to return to two movies that wrestle with Trump’s America was very much a “welcome home, whether you like it or not” moment. Monrovia is a highlight among Wiseman’s recent work, while Dharma continues what’s basically been a decade-plus downward spiral for Morris; nonetheless, the two pair […]

Now 87, Frederick Wiseman is showing no signs of slowing down. His most recent documentary Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, which gives an inside look at the esteemed institution, has been shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Staying true to the filmmaker’s distinctive style of organic, no-fuss lensing, with subtle opinions about his subject matter teased out through his editorial process, Wiseman assuredly conveys in this latest work, via 197 minutes of filmic snapshots, the rich intellectual life offered — and symbolized by — the Library and its offering of community events and talks with figures […]

Straight from its premiere at New York City’s Metrograph theater, the new 35mm print of Titicut Follies screened at Portland’s Northwest Film Center on April 21 with director Frederick Wiseman in attendance. The controversial film portrays the wretched conditions at The Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts circa 1967. In unflinching cinema verite-style, Ttticut Follies presents a stark portrayal of the hospital’s predominantly naked inmates as they are mishandled, force-fed, taunted by guards, and locked in empty cells. Titicut Follies was famously banned prior to its planned premiere at the 1967 New York Film Festival. Though Wiseman had gotten the requisite permissions, the state of […]

Having to reschedule interviews is nothing new, but when it’s because the filmmaker has to attend a rehearsal for a ballet adaptation of his 1967 debut film, I have to count that as a first. Titicut Follies — the collaboration between Frederick Wiseman, contemporary ballet choreographer James Sewell and musician/composer Lenny Pickett — was given a preview during the 40th Toronto International Festival ahead of the ballet’s October 2016 premiere at the Skirball Center at NYU. However, the topic of our conversation was the North American premiere of In Jackson Heights at TIFF, with Wiseman arriving shortly after giving an introduction at […]

It’s easy to take Frederick Wiseman for granted when he churns out nonfiction masterpieces at such a hair raising clip, but his latest, In Jackson Heights, is not to be missed. At once a paean and an elegy to the Queens neighborhood, Jackson Heights tracks the gentrification of the historically multicultural area, and the grassroots resistance among its immigrant and queer communities. It opens at New York’s Film Forum on November 4.