Frederick Wiseman

Biografi från Wikipedia

Documentarian Frederick Wiseman has been noted for his ability to

capture the nuances of life in American institutions such as prisons,

hospitals, welfare offices, and high schools. He started out in 1963 by

producing a fictional feature film, The Cool World, an examination of

the lives of Harlem teenagers. In the beginning, Wiseman was a staunch

social reformist, and his films were calls for change. Titicut Follies,

his first documentary, is an exposé of life in a prison for the

criminally insane in Bridgewater, MA. It was controversial and left

Wiseman with the reputation of being a muckraker. His four subsequent

documentaries were all exposés of other tax-supported institutions

designed to show the ineffectiveness of the bureaucracy that not only

threatens to destroy them, but also dehumanizes the people they were

meant to serve. Wiseman toned down his message and began focusing more

on American culture to point out the symbolism of daily activities in

his film Primate (1974). In the â??80s, he began examining institutions as

they relate to ideology. Unlike other documentaries, Wiseman's work

does not progress chronologically; rather, the segments are arranged

thematically, like an essay, and are linked via rhetorical devices such

as comparison and contrast to create a patterned structure. His films

are never narrated, thereby forcing viewers to make connections between

the sequences themselves. Wiseman has occasionally returned to fictional

films, albeit in a non-fiction performance style, as with Seraphita's

Diary (1982) and La Derniere Lettre (2002).