P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
MoMA's Affiliation with P.S.1
Visiting P.S.1
To celebrate the recent acquisition of newly struck prints of thirty-six films by Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930, Boston), The Museum of Modern Art presents a comprehensive retrospective of the director’s work. Featuring three to four films each month, this yearlong survey opens with Basic Training (1971), followed by a conversation with Wiseman and curator Josh Siegel, and spans his entire career, from Titicut Follies (1967) to his two most recent projects, La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet (2009) and Boxing Gym (2010).
For more than four decades, Wiseman has used a lightweight 16mm camera and portable sound equipment to study human behavior in all its contradictory and unpredictable manifestations, particularly in institutional or regimented situations where authority creates an imbalance of power, or where democracy is at work. Like the great novelists of the nineteenth century, Wiseman combines epic narrative with intimate portraiture. His films comprise a grand panorama of American life (and more recently, the cultural life of Paris)—a kind of modern-day comédie humaine that, quite astonishingly, never loses its vitality or its currency. And though Wiseman approaches his subjects—doctors, ballet dancers, soldiers, students, welfare recipients, factory workers, fashion models, zookeepers, victims of domestic violence, Benedictine monks, the terminally ill—with a minimum of intrusion or influence, he brings a sensitive but trustworthy eye, a lawyer’s penetrating skepticism, and the dramatic impulses of a
storyteller to arrive at what Eugène Ionesco, one of his favorite playwrights, called an “imaginative truth.” All films are directed, edited, and produced by Wiseman and from the U.S.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film.
Related Film Screenings
Upcoming
Juvenile Court
1973. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Compelled to enter a guilty plea for the armed holdup of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a distraught seventeen-year-old boy cries out, “I feel I am innocent and have been trapped! Is there any justice for me?” At the Memphis Juvenile Court, adolescents and children face charges ranging from shoplifting, drug dealing, and prostitution to armed robbery and the abuse of a minor. As Wiseman poignantly illustrates, the complex cases that come before this court cannot be remedied simply by meting out punishment. Brought before a series of authority figures—parents and policemen, psychiatrists and case-workers, born-again ministers and judges—the juveniles rarely make eye contact; some express fear, sorrow, and anger in inchoate ways, others damn with articulate reasoning. 144 min.
La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet
2009. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Acclaimed as one of the finest dance films ever made, Wiseman’s La Danse has become a true phenomenon, playing to sold out audiences in Paris (in an astonishing eight theaters) and now enjoying tremendous success across the United States. The Paris Opera Ballet, which captivated Edgar Degas in the nineteenth century, is a beehive of activity—quite literally: the film’s opening shots atop the Palais Garnier are an apiarist’s delight—as seamstresses toil away in the theater’s underground chambers, construction workers patch cracks in the opulent theater’s ceiling, and Aurélie Dupont, Nicolas Le Riche, Marie-Agnès Gillot, and Agnès Letestu rehearse the choreography of Mats Ek, Wayne McGregory, Rudolf Nureyev, and Pina Bausch. Nearly stealing the show is the troupe’s artistic director, Brigitte Lefèvre, who is at once imperious and lovable as she seduces potential corporate donors and keeps her corps de ballet in line. 158 min.
Model
1980. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman’s Warholian look at the modeling industry—Warhol himself makes a cameo appearance—reveals the tremendous expense, aspiration, and fuss that goes into selling sleek cars and couture collections. The film, structured around a television commercial for panty hose and an Oscar de la Renta runway show, is a riveting meditation on imagemaking and fantasy (one photographer demands of a confused and impressionable young model, ''A little more innocent! A little more sexual!‖). Model was made in 1980 during a seemingly pivotal moment in the industry, poised between the ethereally glamorous and seductive portraits of the fashion world in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), and William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), and today’s more populist, and somehow more tawdry, reality shows like America’s Next Top Model. 129 min.
La dernière lettre (The Last Letter)
2002. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. The Last Letter is based on an epistolary chapter from Life and Fate, the posthumously published epic novel by the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, and on Wiseman’s own French theatrical adaptation with Catherine Samie, doyenne of the Comédie-Française. Filmed on a stark and shadowy stage to evoke a Nazi-occupied Ukrainian ghetto in 1941, The Last Letter centers on Samie’s devastating performance as Anna Semionova, a Russian Jewish physician who dictates one final letter to her son before facing certain death. One of Wiseman’s most personal works, The Last Letter takes the form of a monologue, inspired in part by his childhood memories of radio broadcasts from war-ravaged Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s In French; English subtitles. 61 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Blind
1986. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. 132 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Deaf
1986. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. 164 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Multi-handicapped
1986. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. 126 min.
Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind: Four Films
Wiseman’s continued examination of American educational models led in 1986 to an ambitious study of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Four distinct but related films— Deaf, Blind, Multi-handicapped, and Adjustment & Work—depict children and adults with various sensory and physical impairments who struggle to achieve some measure of independence in their lives, often with significant success. “One More River to Cross,” the spiritual sung by a dorm parent in Multi-handicapped, could serve as the films’ guiding theme, as we watch a little boy in Blind feeling his way along corridors to make a triumphant solo journey between classrooms on different floors; a boy in Deaf who torments himself in the belief that his parents do not love him; and a woman in Adjustment & Work who has great difficulty in learning to make change in coins. Wiseman’s filmmaking techniques themselves alter our sensual apprehension of the world—rarely has the importance of human touch been so palpably or so poetically evoked—and they not only help us to see and hear better, but also deepen our capacity for empathy and love.
Adjustment & Work
1986. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. 120 min.
Past
Basic Training
1971. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 89 min.
Titicut Follies
1967. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 84 min.
Primate
1974. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 105 min.
High School
1968. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 75 min.
Juvenile Court
1973. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 144 min.
Meat
1976. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 113 min.
Domestic Violence
2001. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 196 min.
Domestic Violence 2
2002. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 160 min.
Model
1980. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 129 min.
Ballet
1995. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 170 min.
La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet
2009. USA. Frederick Wiseman. 158 min.
La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet. 2009. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman