Reviews

Mariana Mogilevich

On Frederick Wiseman

It was good to spend February 2025 inside Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. Outside, the month passed with its usual frozen gloom, dramatically heightened, if gloom can be, by the frenetic chaos of a new Trump Administration. As heads rolled, chainsaws revved, and decades of bureaucratic organization and accumulated expertise were permanently disassembled, a retrospective of the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman offered welcome refuge.

Wiseman, who died earlier this year at 96, was the preeminent chronicler of our collective institutions, documenting their structures and agents in long, unnarrated films often described as observational. Occasioned by a major 4K restoration of decades of his work, Lincoln Center’s retrospective, Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution, curated by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson, presented forty-two of his forty-six films, their runtimes averaging 150 minutes. Double features provided an escape from reality from one to six on Tuesday afternoons, and New Yorkers played hooky by the hundreds to see Missile (1987), then Blind (1986). Evenings and weekends, viewers spent hours in the company of the American Ballet (1995) Theatre or luxuriating in Central Park (1990).

What solace in each immersion, deep in another place and time, every moment definitively past! Wiseman first came on the scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s with a series of bracing dissections of the US welfare state, which was then at an apogee that looked like a nadir. But seen in 2025, every unflinching depiction of once fraught institutional practices began to look like competency porn, in which schools and courts and boards of directors executed their vexed tasks with comforting aplomb. Lincoln Center’s official program thus seemed to frame a shadow retrospective: a this-is-your-life survey of the structures of American society as we once thought we knew it and have good reason to believe it has ceased to be.