The American documentarian received an Honorary Oscar in 2016
Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman died Monday at the age of 96 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to an announcement from his company, Zipporah Films, with which he made his 45 films.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the peaceful passing of Frederick Wiseman, filmmaker, producer, and theater director. He was 96 years old and called Cambridge, Massachusetts, Northport, Maine, and Paris, France, home. In lieu of flowers, the family and Zipporah Films kindly request that, in memory of Frederick Wiseman, you support your local PBS affiliate or an independent bookstore,” the statement posted on the Zipporah Films website read.
For nearly six decades, the statement continues, Frederick Wiseman created an unparalleled body of work, a sweeping cinematic record of contemporary social institutions and ordinary human experience, primarily in the United States and France.
Born in Boston, he graduated from Williams College and Yale Law School. The first film he produced was The Cool World, directed by Shirley Clarke, about the life of a Harlem gang. He directed and produced his next film, Titicut Follies, which graphically and starkly depicted the daily lives of inmates at a hospital for the criminally insane.
Wiseman’s debut became the only film banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity, immorality, or national security. The documentary exposed the brutal conditions at Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, showing naked men being provoked by cruel guards and an inmate being force-fed through a rubber tube inserted into his nose. Massachusetts officials sued him, and the film was censored and banned from distribution in the United States for two decades, until 1991.
From this solid and powerful debut, Wiseman continued a career in which he transformed the documentary genre with a unique observational style that dispensed with interviews, explanatory texts, and music.
His goal was for institutions such as schools, hospitals, courts, prisons, and art galleries, and their employees, to reveal themselves to the camera without mediation, focusing especially on public agencies to expose the system’s flaws and shortcomings. In fact, as THR recalls, the filmmaker himself referred to his films as “fiction of reality.”
A SNAPSHOT OF AMERICAN SOCIETY
The filmmaker explored organizations, institutions, phenomena, and groups in more than 40 documentaries that offered a snapshot of American society, such as High School (1968), about the abuse of power in the education system; Law & Order (1968), about the Kansas City Police Department; Hospital (1970), where he filmed the daily life of Metropolitan Hospital in New York; Near Death (1989), about terminally ill patients at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston; Public Housing (1997), about people in a Chicago community living in extreme poverty; and Domestic Violence (2001), about victims of domestic violence.
His extensive filmography also includes titles such as The Dance (2009), about the Paris Opera Ballet; National Gallery (2014), where he delves into the secrets of the London art gallery; and Ex Libris (2017), in which he explores the secrets and transformation process of the giant New York Public Library. Or The Big Menu (2023), his last feature film as a director, which follows the daily life of Troisgros, a French restaurant with three Michelin stars for 55 years and four generations.
Wiseman received an honorary Oscar in 2016, as well as the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, and was awarded four Emmy Awards. Upon accepting the Honorary Oscar, he said that making a film was an “adventure” and admitted that he “usually” knew nothing about the subject he was going to film before starting. “I never start with a point of view on the subject or with a thesis I want to prove. I also don’t do any research before filming. I usually don’t know in advance what’s going to be filmed or what I’m going to encounter at any given moment,” he said.
His wife of 65 years, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, passed away in 2021. He is survived by two sons, David and Eric, and three grandchildren, as well as Karen Konicek, his friend and close collaborator, who worked with him for 45 years.
