Zooming In
Dear Editors,
As a Frederick Wiseman devotee, I took the news of his death pretty hard; it’s a testament to Wiseman’s artistic vitality that he could die at 96, leaving behind forty-six astounding films, and it could still seem like he was taken from us too young. I’m grateful to have an appreciation as substantial as Mariana Mogilevich’s “Looking Like a State” (Issue 53) to soften the blow. Her review is the type of comprehensive survey that offers the pleasures of a greatest-hits compilation, while never averting its critical gaze from Wiseman’s legacy as documentarian qua sociologist. Mogilevich’s insight into the pernicious influence of “story” and sentimentality on modern documentary filmmaking — an influence that Wiseman remained miraculously unswayed by — prevents us from missing the forest for the trees. A less deft author might have stayed zoomed in on Wiseman, never stepping back to observe the director outside of a vacuum.
At this point, I should mention that I also had the distinct privilege of fact-checking Mogilevich’s piece, which gave me an excuse to revisit some twenty-four hours’ worth of Wiseman’s cinema over a seriously condensed timeframe. The job of the fact-checker is to verify that every event, person, or bit of dialogue mentioned in the piece exists, and to provide a time stamp for it. This is a different mode of watching film; the eye and ear must remain in a constant state of hypervigilance to confirm whether one can spy a coffee cup in the back of a frame, or if someone says “gonna be” instead of “going to be.” Watching like this gave me the chance to, if I may borrow Mogilevich’s phrase, frame a shadow retrospective of her shadow retrospective. I had to completely forgo the sociologist’s bird’s-eye view for the minutiae of cinematic craft. This was Wiseman in a vacuum, and it offered just as many pleasures as Mogilevich’s sweeping, rigorous inquiry, especially in moments where an anomalous choice jolted me out of my fact-checking haze.
Watching Titicut Follies, filmed at a Massachusetts mental institution, I was struck by a scene in which a fledgling Wiseman intercuts a force-feeding procedure with the funereal preparation of a dead inmate. Usually, Wiseman’s work is defined by the lack of this sort of blunt didacticism — directly juxtaposing the treatment of a “patient” with the treatment of a corpse doesn’t leave the viewer much interpretive latitude. Similarly striking is Wiseman’s use of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” in the opening of his sophomore feature, High School, the only nondiegetic needle-drop across his documentary output. Later in his career, Wiseman came to favor a sort of weightlessness in his editing: He entered most scenes with a series of one- or two-second-long unmoving shots, teleporting to new locations like a curious ghost. Here, he films his journey to the school from the window of a moving car as Redding plays, lazily directing the camera toward the odd road sign or swaying piece of laundry. It’s jarringly uncharacteristic of him, but an apt opening for a movie largely about being taken for a ride: You’re firmly in the passenger seat — and you didn’t even get to pick the music!
When, in Public Housing, Wiseman visits the Ida B. Wells Homes in the wake of 5-year-old Eric Morse’s murder, there’s again an atypical heaviness to his transitional vignettes. Instead of trying to palliate or tug at the heartstrings, à la the earliest iteration of StoryCorps, he lets the loss cast a quiet pall over the film. Occasionally, the interstices will be static shots of Black children. You’ll watch them run, bike, or slowly trudge out of sight, and Wiseman’s camera will hold on what’s left in their wake: a brick wall, a barred window, an empty chair. He’ll often precede or follow these haunting absences with shots of the Chicago Housing Authority Police Department: patrol cars slowly rolling to a stop in an unpopulated frame or cops rushing in from off camera to join an illegal search in progress. The borders of the frame seem to thrum. There’s an immediate, kinetic force to the edit: the sense of a chase, or a collision, or a replacement.
Mogilevich notes that TiticutFollies could function as a checklist for the hallmarks of Erving Goffman’s institutions, and she’s right. I can personally assure you that the film contains “physical boundaries, special ceremonies, planning meetings, and one-on-one intake or service provision interviews” (at time stamps 17:11, 00:05, 1:00:29, and 04:25, respectively). Yet, when an interviewer once suggested to Wiseman that he could be compared to Goffman, Wiseman described an inauspicious meeting with the sociologist:
As it happened, he was a visiting professor at the university where I taught, and one of my colleagues “brought him” to me while I was editing Titicut Follies. I showed him the sequence in which the guard, who is also a mortician, performs the ritual washing of the deceased inmate. He told me, “Look at this scene; it’s characteristic of the indifference of prison guards toward incarcerated patients, of their degree of dehumanization. The proof: He doesn’t speak to the prisoner.” He hadn’t even noticed that the man was dead! . . . It’s an anecdote, but it sums up my approach: The human experience is complicated, and I try to reflect this complexity in my editing. I abhor didacticism, the scourge of documentaries.
Yes, he abhors it; but I’ll remind you that here he’s discussing a sequence where he cuts between an inhumane medical procedure and an embalming! Wiseman’s enduring appeal lies partly in this slipperiness, his contradiction. Every label that could be affixed to him has been: sociologist and documentarian, but also ethnographer, transcendentalist, pointillist, poet, and Great American Novelist. This last one may have been the only appellation that pleased Wiseman — when pressed to name influences, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Hawthorne, and James often made the cut. He attributed his editorial skills to the “reading I was taught in college and the novels and poems I have since tried to read with care.” (One is reminded of Godard cheekily informing Dick Cavett that Jerry Lewis is “more a painter, maybe, than a director.” Well, sure, Jean-Luc, but you must concede he’s made more movies than paintings.)
Regardless of which school he preferred to associate with, this proliferation of identifiers points to the fundamental multiplicity in his work. Wiseman shot his films with a certain epic nonchalance such that Mogilevich rightly claims there are “no individuals,” only figures as they “intersect with and illuminate social structure,” yet he was also downright Melvillian in the way he addressed his subjects. He suffused all of them — fishermen, friars, nurses, judges, soldiers, students, miners, skiers, cleaners, cabbage peelers, cops, and confidence men — with an essential dignity.
The penultimate scene of Belfast, Maine, his four-plus-hour magnum opus, sees Wiseman pay a visit to the studio of a local artist. He finds the aged man in the process of enlarging a small reference painting, which depicts a verdant and rugged forest landscape. Over the ensuing two minutes, we watch the artist painstakingly transfer the details of the original image to the enormous blank canvas. Each cut brings us closer to the painting until, for all intents and purposes, it vanishes; only the brushstroke remains.
“This is what the world would look like from outer space,” another man explains in an earlier scene, as he reads from a Dorling Kindersley–type book to a group of men with cognitive disabilities. This could serve as one logline for the Wiseman project — an extraterrestrial’s anthropological study of the scurrying movements and structures of an unknown race. Yet as the man says this, the camera holds tightly on his hand as it traces the contours of the earth for his audience. Wiseman’s gift was that he could obey dual impulses. He could hold in focus both the weight of the world and the touch of the hand; the painting and the brushstroke; the forest and the trees.
— Caleb Stern
Lindentown, USA
Dear Editors,
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of that desktop game GeoGuessr, where you’re dropped into an unmarked location on Google Maps and have to guess where in the world you are. Actually, what I’ve become hooked on is a local variation called NYCGuessr, which is extra satisfying if you’ve lived in New York for long enough to be somewhat familiar with the styles of brick favored in certain boroughs, the skyscrapers visible from different waterfronts, that particular quality of light East Williamsburg has, and so on. Sometimes the game will place you right in front of, say, an apartment building you used to live in, and you’ll have this satisfying feeling of: Jeez, wow, what are the odds of encountering such a familiar place in such a chance way?
I was delighted to have a similar experience recently with a piece of fiction. Gillian Linden’s “Beckley Furnace Road” (Issue 53) begins on an early summer morning, someplace idyllic and maybe a little agrarian: “The air had a chill in it and felt clean, and there was a thin condensation between the bricks and over the grass. Three or four deer were under the apple tree.” There are woods nearby; an outdoor party has just happened; not far away, we learn, some nuns are selling blueberries.
I read this story in the late-spring sun, in my in-laws’ backyard, in a village in western Connecticut. This backyard is a special place, where I’ve incidentally spent many happy afternoons over the years reading n+1, along with all the other magazines that pile up on the mail table until one has a nice vacationy long weekend to get into them. Anyway, there I was, reading Issue 53, the Housatonic River burbling in the background, and I looked around and had the psychedelic thought: Linden’s story could have taken place right here. The further I read, the truer this impression felt. The backyard she described seemed like it could be this backyard; the apple tree in the story might have been the apple tree in the meadow across the driveway; the clean air and fern-soaking rain and “sky turning lavender” clearly referred to movements in the very atmosphere under which I sat. By the time I got to the narrator announcing her plans to drive to the “transfer station” — that’s what New Englanders call the zone at the municipal dump where people leave books and functioning appliances for their neighbors to take for free — I was sure I was right in the vicinity of Lindentown, geographically speaking.
Later I googled “Beckley Furnace Road,” the “old-fashioned” place name in the story’s title. There appears to be no such road anywhere in America — that’s OK, artistic license and all — but there is a “Beckley Iron Furnace State Park” in East Canaan, Connecticut. It’s a twelve-minute drive from my in-laws’ house! People drive faster than they should in western Connecticut, but that’s still awfully close. In fact, I realized, I’ve been to Beckley Iron Furnace State Park before. We picnicked there sometime during the pandemic.
Linden’s story is remarkable for several reasons. In just a few thousand words, she builds a subtly escalating sense of terror, even though the only thing that really happens is that a kid falls down. Linden is intelligent and self-aware about the bourgeois mannerisms of western Connecticut’s WASPy pied-à-terre class, without denying that class its considerable charms. (I laughed out loud at the line “My son had developed an interest in the fiber arts.”) Above all she is so observant and exacting, her descriptive abilities so fine-tuned, that you can read a two-line description of a sky and a tree and know exactly where you are. I’ve always appreciated realist fiction that attempts something like location-sharing — Nathanael West’s evocatively sinister descriptions of Southern California, Naipaul’s postcard-style missives from the English countryside, Welty’s recognizably overgrown landscapes of the American South — but this took things to a new level. This was literature as dropping a pin.
I was so taken with Linden’s abilities that I went ahead and read her 2024 novel, Negative Space. The book is less withholding about its setting — we know right away that we’re in a fancy part of Brooklyn, probably on a block that’s been featured on NYCGuessr — but even so, its precision of movement and space was startling. I’m grateful to n+1 for putting this writer on my map.
—Tommy Tower