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Frederick Wiseman's Best Scenes
Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris writes about his favorite scenes from the films of documentary film pioneer Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman’s latest, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, has just been released nationally. Watch clips below chosen from The Daily Beast’s Curator.
Fred Wiseman is one of the great living filmmakers. The author of some 40 films, his films represent for me a pinnacle of cinematic achievement.
Although he sometimes refers to his technique as “woobly-scope,” his films show only a superficial connection with the pretenses of cinema verité. Yes, he works with available light, and handheld camera, but his interest is in the essential absurdity of the world.
When one of his characters in Welfare refers to “Godot” in the closing minutes of the film, the viewer is reminded that Wiseman’s roots are not in Grierson and Flaherty but in Beckett, Anouilh, Ionesco, and Sarte—the theater of hopeless irony. They are extended essays on the meaning of meaninglessness. And they are incredibly bitter and funny. Really, really funny.
Allow me, please, to provide two lists. First, a list of the most perverted sex scenes in Wiseman’s films and second, my favorite moments of utter hopelessness.
MOST PERVERTED SEX SCENES
1. Masturbating the monkey in Primate. Humans are portrayed admirably as evil primates.
2. Castrating the wolf in Zoo. A group of female veterinarians are castrating a wolf.
3. The dildo in High School II. Fred has a gift for filming condom demonstrations. Middle-class white students are provided instruction how to put a condom on a huge black dildo...
4. The dildo in Public Housing. Yet, one more condom demonstration. Black teenage mothers are instructed in condom use. This time it’s a small white dildo...
5. Semen collection in Racetrack.
Humans rarely look as depraved and as silly as they do in a Wiseman film.
GREAT MOMENTS OF QUINTESSENTIAL MEANINGLESSNESS
1. Sinai Field Mission: A man with a large push-broom is sweeping sand off a road in a windstorm. What more can you say? Oh yes, it’s about the U.N. peacekeeping forces in the Sinai. Trapped inside a windowless bunker and surrounded by chain-link fence, microwave dishes and razor wire, several nationalities and a group of Texans try to keep the peace. After a short while, they start fighting with each other.
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Paul Schrodt is a writer living in New York City. He has contributed to New York magazine, Radar, and Esquire.com.
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As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono. McKinnon is co-chair of Arts & Labs, a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers.
marantzsteve
"They create a world equal to the worlds of Renoir or Hitchcock or Fellini."
Talk about a meaningless existential throwaway line. Equal in what way? Surrealism? But surrealism is by definition not quatifiable, or qualifiable. This is what happens when writers do puff pieces. Their mission to 'sell' the subject clouds their common sense.
spittingoutteeth
Morris isn't a writer; he's an accomplished documentary filmmaker. And while the phrase is awkward, he's basically trying to convey that Wiseman, despite the typical perception of documentary filmmakers as journalists or social anthropologists, is actually an auteur in his own right.
Not sure where you got so lost with this, or how you equate Renoir or Hitchcock with surrealism. Even Fellini is a stretch.
TracyFord
Frederick Wiseman is my favorite documentary film maker by far. I've been collecting his movie for almost two decades now and love every one of them. Thank you Errol Morris for sharing this with us.
GaryDC
Most movies would be substantially improved if they were 15 to 30 minutes shorter. But it is the rare movie that desperately needs to be 45 minutes or an hour (or even more) shorter. "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet" is one of those movies.
Let me start by saying that I like ballet and modern dance, and have been to a modern dance performance at the Paris Opera Ballet (Duato/Locke/Millepied) and enjoyed it. So I did not approach it as a hater. But mon Dieu, it is WAY too long -- 2 hours and 38 minutes. It's nice to get a feel for behind the scenes activities, but do we really need two full minutes of a guy spackling a ceiling?
As for the selection of dance performances, if the director set out to pick the most unappealing modern/contemporary pieces -- with the most annoying "music" and the worst, most gimmicky, "Is she dancing or having a seizure?" kind of choreography -- then he succeeded. If not, well, he did not.
That said, there are a lot of parts of it that are interesting -- rehearsals, preparing costumes, discussions on planning future programs, dealing with large donors, etc. Those parts help you appreciate how much work, by a large number of people, goes into a production. However, unfortunately, those parts are outweighed by the excessive length and boring parts, so that the overall impression is unpleasant. And that's too bad, because it could have been a wonderful film. Bottom line -- I was looking forward to this film, but after seeing it, I would have to say "skip that."
Thank you.
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