Wise Words

Penn Cinema Studies Presents Frederick Wiseman

by Shaun Brady

Descriptions of Frederick Wiseman's films could sound like pitches for new reality shows: His fly-on-the-wall cameras followed the inhabitants of state legislatures, police forces and the Miami Zoo. But the 78-year-old documentarian's films observe these institutions with a veneer of detached objectivity, their tacit commentary emerging from an accumulation of images.

"The most I've ever seen of reality TV has been about two minutes, which I've intensely disliked," says Wiseman from his Cambridge, Mass., office. Philly viewers can see the difference when Penn Cinema Studies screens two of Wiseman's early, seminal films: Titicut Follies, the director's debut, which looks inside a prison for the criminally insane; and High School, a tract on enforced conformity shot at Philly's Northeast High in 1968. Wiseman will speak on "Shooting and Editing a Documentary Film."

"Some people think that to make a documentary film, all you really need to do is have a camera and shoot," Wiseman says. "In my experience, it means shooting over a long period of time, it means trying to think your way through the material you have in order to impose a form on it."

Media savvy has increased exponentially over the 40 years he has been making docs. But Wiseman insists his subjects have not become more self-aware in front of his camera.

"It's very hard for someone who's not an actor to become somebody else," he claims. "It would appear phony. It would make the person to whom you're talking uncomfortable in a way they may not identify, but they'll feel something strange. Obviously, if I feel that way during the course of shooting I don't use it. In any profession where you deal with a lot of people, for survival purposes your bullshit meter has to be pretty good."

Wiseman recognizes revolutions in technology have occurred recently but he says new media comes with too many drawbacks.

"I don't explore the Internet at all because nowadays copyright is being eroded, and it's particularly damaging to independent filmmakers like me. Some people do it for the glory of having it available, but because I both like to make movies and like to eat, I can't do that."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Penn Cinema Studies Presents Frederick Wiseman, Sun.-Mon., Sept. 14-15, free, various times and venues, 215-898-8782, cinemastudies.upenn.edu.