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.
Titicut Follies (1967), Wiseman’s first film, is the hardest to watch. Wiseman was teaching law classes at Boston University when he set out to make a film about the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts — one that would confront the public with its horrors. Whatever acts brought men to this place could not justify the intense dehumanization and physical violence inflicted on them by the staff. Wiseman’s camera (operated by a more experienced ethnographic filmmaker, John Marshall) presents the forced feedings, shavings, bathings, nudity, isolation, and other violations of patients’ autonomy in close-up. There is no dignity for anyone in the constricted spaces of Bridgewater’s cells and courtyard, corridors and conference room. Wiseman’s subjects often look directly at the camera. Scenes begin and end without ceremony or obvious logic — much like, one imagines, the patients’ days. There is no moral daylight between guards, nurses, and inmates, who all come together for the titular and bookending Titicut Follies, an annual pageant and illustration of the greater folly of this institution that claims to promote and protect the general welfare.
This kind of carnivalesque performance — a variety show put on by inmates and administrators together, with song and dance and an act where the nurses unaccountably bare their bottoms — is one of the dependable dimensions of life in the “total institution,” as the sociologist Erving Goffman had recently attempted to define and describe it in his 1961 book Asylums. Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness appeared the same year, and all pointed to the psychiatric hospital as a representative locus of the violence of Enlightenment rationality. Beyond antipsychiatry, the mid-century advent of social constructionism would propel a widespread interrogation of the foundations of contemporary order and understanding. Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of institutional relations in Asylums provides something of a how-to for Wiseman’s emerging project, and his compendium of the performative markers of institutional relations could serve as a shot list for any of the director’s films: physical boundaries, special ceremonies, planning meetings, and one-on-one intake or service provision interviews in which people show us who they are and what they do.
We no longer know what a state looks like, what it should look like, what it will look like.
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Wiseman himself offered “no precise definition of ‘institution’ other than a place that has existed for a while and that has fairly circumscribed geographical boundaries and where the staff is thought to be trying to do a good job,” as he put it in a 2010 essay. To this, one might add that an institution is a place with long corridors, and people specifically charged with cleaning them. For his second film, Wiseman turned to a Philadelphia-area High School (1968) whose students, while fairly privileged, were still forced to submit to the arbitrary power of teachers and administrators tasked with policing sexual activity and stamping out nonconformity. The school is a youth factory that produces fodder for NASA and Vietnam. But, as Goffman writes, “every total institution can be seen as a kind of dead sea in which little islands of vivid, encapturing activity appear.” In classrooms, the gymnasium, and the auditorium, Wiseman mines cinematic gold as the class of 1968 contends with a system of authority whose express goal is to put them in their place. An early scene with the buzz-cut, short-sleeved dean of discipline famously captures him and a student who has been unfairly assigned detention in an absurdist debate about what it means to be a man: Do you stand up for your principles unconditionally, or stoically follow rules and accept punishment even when unwarranted? Elsewhere, a student apologizes after being chastised for wishing to wear a short prom dress: “I didn’t mean to be individualistic.”
There are no talking head interviews in Wiseman’s films, and there is no need for them. Through their performances, people reveal what we are witnessing and what it means. The approach is evident in Titicut Follies, established in High School, and elaborated in the subsequent films. Someone will deliver a speech extolling an institution’s mission and values, and later on in another scene someone will call bullshit. In a self-reflexive classroom discussion, a young man, white, in sunglasses and a necklace, cuts through the logic of the school to put everything in context: “In its attitude towards education and in its relations with the world today, this school is miserable.” A Black student, more conservatively dressed in a tweed jacket, adds: “Scientifically and technologically, Northeast is an advanced school. . . . Morally, socially, this school is a garbage can.” The teacher tries to resolve the conversation by suggesting that this fact is common to all schools.
Culture wars meet body horror at New York City’s public Metropolitan Hospital (1969), in East Harlem. The film’s protagonists — a notably multicultural, post-1965 array of doctors and nurses — are attempting to provide universal health services, but their efforts falter against the immense needs of the social body, as patients bring a million particular problems born of poverty and oppression. There are diabetics, people addicted to alcohol and to heroin, and, for comic relief, a kid from Minnesota on a bad trip. Cops and doctors tolerate his freak-out: One person’s life-altering experience is just more vomit to mop up here, all in a day’s work. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, empathetic and calm where Bridgewater’s is aggressive and manipulative, shows real care for another wayward youth, a young, queer Latino patient who’s been tossed out by his family and diagnosed as schizophrenic. Each scene is a piece of a profound personal drama; together they conjure an entire world. Outside this world of rehabilitation and healing is another one, uncaring and off-screen, that seems to be connected to the hospital only by telephone. Doctors plead over the phone with people at other institutions who are content for the hospital to fill the role of last resort: Private hospitals dump agonized patients at the doctors’ doorstep; welfare caseworkers just won’t help. Hospital’s final shot shows us the hospital building with FDR Drive in the foreground, enclosing it like a moat: Cars roll past, oblivious to the tragedies and triumphs playing out inside.
A few years later, Wiseman turned his attention to the New York City welfare office on the other end of the line. Prison, hospital, and mental institution all feed into the halls of the Human Resources Administration: Welfare (1975) contains multitudes. The mid-block Lower Manhattan facade briefly depicted at the beginning belies the enormity of its fluorescent-lit floor plates and innumerable levels to which clients are referred up and down in pursuit of welfare checks and some measure of justice. Inside, queues, rows of chairs, and close-up views of anonymous clients underscore the sheer number of people served. In extended interview scenes, clients and caseworkers invoke an unbroken chain of absentee husbands, bad landlords, bad choices, and few choices, as personal histories are reduced to notarized letters. Each “life event,” in contemporary bureaucratese, is subject to scrutiny and sign-off. Frontline staff are the audience and evaluators of elaborate stories that suggest some ease with working the system, or what others with a less poetic sensibility might call welfare fraud. They are also deputized to interpret the extradiegetic acts of their colleagues at nearby offices and in the Social Security Administration, who eternally defer responsibility: ID cards and address changes and budget adjustments are beyond their ken. Extreme material want confronts a regime of never-ending paperwork. Repeated references to scheduled hearings and a foray to a subterranean supercomputer seem entirely at odds with the question, oft repeated, of where, in the endless waiting between appointments and approvals, a person is supposed to eat and sleep that night.
As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see.
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Comparisons to Beckett and purgatory are easy and on one occasion direct, but from a contemporary vantage point the enterprise impresses more than it alienates. The welfare office is not a very perfect place, but it’s no Bridgewater. Welfare depicts the front lines of social reproduction, as well as the realities of service delivery, power, and powerlessness at the height of the welfare state and on the literal eve of New York City’s fiscal crisis. The experience of the runaround, the futile venting of frustration on an agent who is a representative of an absurd system — this is familiar to all of us who have sought clemency or at least attention from any “customer service” system, public or private. Less familiar, and incredible in retrospect, is the sense of entitlement all around. I mean this in the sense of public entitlements, of what kind of living a state owes its citizens, especially in the wake of the civil rights struggle to expand social benefits. The welfare system’s failure or function is a measure of the country’s commitment to equality.
Welfare is less a film about welfare clients than it is about the caseworkers in the building charged with representing the state and recognizing clients’ humanity at the same time, street-level bureaucrats rarely designated the protagonists of our social dramas. As the human links between the formulation of policy and its implementation, these workers are constantly arbitrating “impossible situations,” as the political scientist Bernardo Zacka puts it. Impossible situations abound in Welfare, and across Wiseman’s films in general. There is the young Hospital nurse who wants to take home the baby whose drunk grandmother refuses to feed or fetch him, but is discouraged by a coworker from getting involved. There is the Welfare caseworker, a supervisor Wiseman has already shown us in sympathetic situations, trying to expedite the case of an older woman accompanied by a translator and advocate from a community center. The latter’s advocacy verges on a shakedown: Who is going to give the suffering woman money for food while her case wends its way through the system? “Do you eat? You eat, right?” he asks the bureaucrat. The wizened welfare worker replies, “Do you eat? Do you eat? OK, I eat also.” Their predicaments reveal the tensions between our values and aspirations, between individual and collective responsibility. “Studying street-level bureaucracy,” Zacka writes, “is tantamount to holding a mirror to ourselves as a polity.” Wiseman’s mirror keeps viewers’ attention for 167 minutes, replicating the experience of surrender required by the welfare office.
In 1991, Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and five years later he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Meanwhile, his secretary of housing and urban development, Henry Cisneros, was ready to end public housing as we’d known it, too. Cisneros’s HOPE VI program financed the demolition and redevelopment of the Ida B. Wells Homes in Chicago, where Wiseman filmed Public Housing (1997) in the summer of 1995. (The site’s ninety-four acres are now home to an apartment complex called Oakwood Shores.)
The state, in the form of the Chicago Housing Authority and associated entities, governed every aspect of life in the Wells Homes. Though the CHA had recently been taken over by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, at the time of filming it was still landlord and policeman, coach and confessor, contractor and exterminator. Ministering to the most minute needs of residents (some 1,500 households, down from an original capacity of 3,200), the CHA also left these needs radically undermet. In place of a welfare state, Wiseman surveys, in muted color, a vast, punitive apparatus. Wells is a city within a city with its own police force and a grocery store where customers must request food from behind a bulletproof barrier. Cops enforce rules against “criminal trespass on state-supported land” in the indeterminate open spaces of its row-house-and-tower-in-the-park planning and argue in the street with two men over whether the refrigerator they have stolen is or is not state property. The handshake logo painted on their squad car perfectly echoes one set of hands cuffing another.
By the mid-’90s, public housing was the preeminent symbol of the profound errors, tragedy, and hypocrisy of the US democratic project, drawing no shortage of social scientists and policymakers to document the hypersegregation, violence, and acute suffering found at Wells and places like it. In Wiseman’s Public Housing, the boarded-up windows across Wells telegraph dereliction of duty. Meanwhile, the development is the site of a powerful ideological project of personal empowerment. Indirect agents of the state order residents to take responsibility for the lives and situations they’ve had no means to control. Members of a “Men of Wells” group discuss their efforts to show up and man up; a social worker in pearls leading a women’s group tries to prepare its members for workfare with a bit of tough love that unspools into threat. An unsatisfactory check-in around the table on the women’s plans for the future proceeds briskly to some frank talk: When the cuts come, “I’m not working at Ida B. Wells. It’s gonna be like a war zone.” Improbably, Ron Carter, a 1978 second-round draft pick by the Lakers, appears in the role of CHA’s director of economic development, making a personal pitch for the new business opportunities available to entrepreneurial residents. It’s their chance to get a cut of the changes coming to Wells. Later, he brings his rags-to-riches story to a larger group assembled at a community college. The motivational speech is followed by the tinny song of an ice cream truck, one small-scale entrepreneur servicing the many children we have seen around the development among the drug dealers and car washers.
Carter’s bootstraps narrative falls flat in the face of the absolute abjection Wiseman obliges us to witness: an absurdist play of cops and dealers made tolerable by the filmmaker’s dry sense of humor (some call it black, or perhaps ironic, but it’s too sympathetically attuned to the rhyme and unreason of a world of contradictions to qualify), and by the integrity with which all the actors play the roles to which they have been condemned. In one of Public Housing’s central scenes, Wiseman presents us with an assessment interview for a treatment diversion program, in which a man rehearses a grim lifetime of addiction to a sympathetic counselor, only to learn after fifteen minutes that he is ineligible for the program.
In 1994, two boys, 10 and 11 years old, brought a 5-year-old to a vacant fourteenth-floor apartment in the Wells Homes and dropped him out of a window. The State of Illinois changed the law in response to the incident, so that the juvenile “superpredators” could be sentenced as adults. Cisneros cited the sensational killing in the HUD takeover (and subsequent dismantling) of the Chicago Housing Authority. Not long afterward, the radio journalist Dave Isay teamed up with two teenage residents of Wells, who interviewed their neighbors about the story for a documentary that was broadcast on NPR. The collaboration spawned a book and a feature film and is part of the origin story of the definitive 21st-century US documentary institution, StoryCorps. Isay’s experience handing over the recorder helped inspire StoryCorps’ enduringly popular setup, in which ordinary people share their own stories by interviewing one another. Launched after September 11, the nonprofit offered a kind of transcendence from personal tragedy, answering the problem of bodies falling from the sky for extraordinarily complex reasons with a format to narrate and document “what’s really important in life: love, loss, family, friendship.”
Love, family, and friends can all fail you, and if they do, you will need cops, courts, and welfare offices. Lurking unrecognized behind StoryCorps’ trove of personal tales about abandonment and addiction are the schools, social service providers, and hospitals where individuals find help and form lifelong bonds. StoryCorps is not unique in its solipsism; it is emblematic of the dominant pattern of contemporary documentary film, in which sympathetic characters move through a satisfying narrative arc to generate empathy and/or mobilize some sort of social awareness. For filmmakers with greater cinematic and social commitments (and for those of us who want to watch their films), this tyranny of story is a source of great frustration. Wholly given over to the agency of the individual, mainstream contemporary documentary is structurally blind to social structure. As the filmmaker-authors of a manifesto titled “Beyond Story” wrote in 2018, “This dominant mode of cinematic storytelling — developed to serve commercial interests — privileges individuals over collectivities, people over their environments, human will over systemic forces, and in terms of spectatorship, feelings over analysis and passivity over action.” Or, as the filmmaker Brett Story put it, contemporary documentary shares a worldview with Margaret Thatcher: There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and families.1
You could say that the inverse is true in Wiseman’s films. As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see. There are always “characters,” but their significance lies in the way they intersect with and illuminate social structure. They never motivate action — what they do instead is perform (and sometimes declaim) the logics under which they operate. There are no personal journeys. Wiseman rarely follows anyone anywhere, making an exception for the children at the Alabama School for the Blind, where learning to move from point A to B is precisely the object of their education.
The French love American institutions, universalism, and Frederick Wiseman.
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Wiseman’s own rejection of the term documentary for his films might reflect low public expectations of a genre that too often presents facts merely as fodder for feelings, rather than one that, at its best, serves as the very highest and most social form of art. Like sculpture, documentary at its most consequential works from the material world to delineate and transcend its limits. Rather than seeking to replicate or re-create or narrate it, the filmmaker is expressing the truth of the material from the material itself. “What the films do,” Wiseman said in a 1974 interview, “is give people some information. Hopefully on the basis of this and other information, people will be able to make more informed decisions about what, if any, change they would like to have take place.” In other words, we are the historical actors. In seeing and knowing what we now know, having seen what Wiseman has shown, we are responsible. The work is not a “call to action,” in contemporary parlance, so much as a statement of collective implication. How we take care of one another is not someone else’s story, and it’s not someone else’s problem. It’s ours.
For decades, Wiseman’s films were funded and distributed by public television. Wiseman produced a documentary every year between 1971 and 1979 thanks to two back-to-back contracts with the New York station WNET, and many subsequent films credit the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nearly all of Wiseman’s films, from High School to City Hall (2020), appeared on PBS, whose national distribution network was broader and vastly more “public” than the international festival circuit. The CPB, which was established in 1968, dissolved at the beginning of 2026 after losing congressional funding, going the way of the Wells Homes and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Today, the broadest possible access to Wiseman’s films comes through Kanopy, a streaming service available via public libraries. The New York and Brooklyn systems unsubscribed in 2019, announcing that “the cost of Kanopy makes it unsustainable for the library.” But they still lend out the DVDs.
The turn-of-the-millennium diptych Domestic Violence (2001) and Domestic Violence 2 (2002) is ur-Wiseman, exploring an extremely unappealing subject over the course of six hours. Screened together to conclude the retrospective, the films’ focus on the societal impacts of the male exercise of ruthless power and control felt particularly timely in our era of revanchism for rapists, wife beaters, misogynists, and abusers. But the two films also provided a perfect punctuation mark (even a little bit of a question mark) to Wiseman’s oeuvre as a whole. Domestic Violence is as much about objectivity, discretion, and the place personal story occupies in social structure as it is about patriarchy or violence.
After an introductory tour of drunken threats, broken tables, and a woman holding her face together with a tissue, the first film unfolds principally at The Spring, an exemplary family shelter where victims of domestic violence find safe harbor and a path to a new life. Like Public Housing, Domestic Violence chronicles an epistemic turning point, and empowerment is part of that story. The women who come to The Spring and the children they bring with them have an opportunity to tell their own stories, often for the first time in their lives. One woman, 72 years old and married fifty years to a man who just tried to burn down their house with her in it, “never got a chance . . . to, you know, say what I wanted to him.” Residents express and interpret life experiences distorted by years of gaslighting and their own compensatory dissimulation. In their downtime, women swap war stories about the bruises and broken bones they once attributed to impossible accidents. But reality is still hard to discern. The staff discuss one problematic resident with “a truth problem.” A caseworker struggles to make sense of a newly arrived 5-year-old’s story about what happened when the “policement” came. One thing is clear: When her dad dies, “I’m not gonna cry.” To counteract helplessness both learned and violently imposed, The Spring operates a program of personal accountability. On arrival, residents sign an agreement to progress with their caseworker through a series of increasingly self-sufficient GOALS, a commitment reinforced by the lettering on a motivational poster hanging in the brightly lit cinder-block hallway.
Domestic Violence 2, by contrast, begins in the dark, as police intervene in an unclear situation in an unclear place where a couple claims that no violence has occurred. Part one has primed us to question the truth of any first-person accounts. The law, however, is clear. “Maybe you don’t see it” as domestic violence, says the arresting officer, “but the state does.” “No guesswork in it anymore.”
Wiseman went to Florida after the adoption of new legal statutes that took away a great deal of discretion in the policing and adjudication of cases of domestic violence. The 1994 federal Violence Against Women Act sought to treat domestic violence not as a private matter but as an affair of state; to compensate for incidents where the police left couples in conflict only to have to return to a stabbing hours later, cops dispatched to domestic disputes were obligated to jail the alleged offenders and hold them until a bond hearing before a judge. Judges now mete out sentences in accordance with a rubric of mandatory minimums. Accordingly, Domestic Violence 2 has a more legible three-act structure, passing through the same sequence of courts of Florida’s Thirteenth Judicial Circuit as those arrested on domestic violence charges.
First we see the arraignment judge, stern and avenging, as he enumerates prior offenses and parole status to calculate bond for a roomful of men (and some women) in orange jumpsuits who have been automatically sent to jail, from where they appear on a Sony Trinitron monitor. A video court is a structure for the verification of stories that the judge directs remotely. Blocking the scene from the bench, he has the accused stand and position themselves in the remote courtroom and instructs, in the case of a couple with cross-complaints, “Get a close-up on them.” Repeatedly, he warns plaintiffs and witnesses of the consequences of changing their testimony. Contradiction is the burden of the second, sentencing judge. Like an exasperated mother, she must evaluate what is true, and what is to be done, about couples in all manner of incomprehensible domestic arrangements whose accounts strain credulity and her patience (though never ours).
As we hear one person’s story about what happened on New Year’s Eve, or to the windshield, and then the other’s, and what they stated to the police and what they are saying in court and what additional information witnesses introduce, we are faced with the fact that everyone is being very convincing and that some of what is before us cannot be true. The sentencing judge’s process of truth seeking is a form of editing: superimposing and reconciling an endless supply of not-uplifting stories and out-of-sync timelines to produce forward movement, to reach conclusions. The judge, who has power but also faces legal restrictions on her operations and on the presentation of stories in her court, serves as a proxy for the documentary filmmaker. She is making interpretations on the basis of what people put before her.
Finally, in the third act, a judgy-judge, one who fits the image we’ve absorbed from courtroom dramas, presides over hearings on the continuation and nullification of injunctions. As one couple spars over a particularly florid backstory, he interrupts, “What am I, a potted plant?” The judge is not a neutral observer, a mute witness to manipulation, but the designated meaning maker in this affair. Complicated situations must be distilled and resolved according to what’s presented in the courtroom, to the camera. As the door closes softly behind each case, the obscured view out to the hallway reminds us that we cannot know what will happen after the protagonists go off-screen. In a final act of circularity, the judge sends many of the men back to the offender treatment program at The Spring.
On its face, Domestic Violence is all story: Stories are evaluated by police to determine which course of action to pursue; stories are transformed into intake forms at the shelter; stories are the material that women share in their group sessions; and stories are presented to the judges at each stage in the highly prescribed process of sentencing and ruling. But these are not coherent StoryCorps stories about “what’s really important in life.” They are imperfect, evidentiary fragments. Domestic Violence portrays the set of institutions tasked with arbitrating narrative to bring a measure of clarity and justice to the world. As individual stories twist and fall apart, something has to hold them together, and that’s the court, the law, the film.
So, trust stories? Or trust structures? And what of trust more generally, so central to the demands we make on documentary and on institutions? At the end of one screening, a viewer new to Wiseman marveled at how long it must have taken for the director to “build trust,” like a participant observer. The answer to that question was satisfying and pointed: “No time!” Wiseman’s method — said Wiseman — was that he just showed up and started filming.
It is hard to imagine any public institution today offering itself up to such scrutiny, the problem of trust going both ways. Wiseman argued that no special dispensation was needed from an institution to document its acting in the public interest, leaning on well-established interpretations of the First Amendment. In this practice of public-access filmmaking, Wiseman said he asked for “complete access to everything that is going on in the institution” with no right of review. “Getting permission has been easy,” he said — but easy permission rests on public institutions, personal connections, and a willingness to move on when it’s not granted or is taken away. Law and Order (1969) was filmed in Kansas City after the (one imagines) more media-savvy LAPD cut off access midway through filming.
Public workers today are justified in their wariness toward documentarians seeking access. The rise of the gotcha school of bad-faith filmmaking, beginning with James O’Keefe’s attempts to take down Planned Parenthood and NPR, among others, means that institutions in the far right’s crosshairs are ever on guard against surreptitious recording, entrapment, and out-of-context edits. Those institutions that maintain a harder grasp on power set the terms of their representation. Hence the garish forms of access that, in the intervening decades, have become familiar to modern viewers: television judges, patrol-car ride alongs, and tightly controlled documentaries on streaming platforms.
Outside of these opportunities, institutional access comes to us via the so-called accountability devices of the body camera and various other surveillance technologies. Despite the promise of total coverage, the “transparency” of data dumps and body-cam footage offers the potential for endless obfuscation. (Bill Morrison’s Incident [2023] suggests one direction for institutional cinema in the post-Wiseman digital age, using FOIAed footage to interrogate how the Chicago Police Department constructs its story around a fatal shooting.) Meanwhile, the private institutions whose public impact is tremendous, who benefit hugely from public subsidy and wield total control over the images anyone can create of them, go virtually undocumented. The Amazon warehouse at the center of Brett Story’s Union (2024), for example, is a black box. All we ever see of the country’s second-largest private employer comes through cell phone images smuggled out by workers.
Wiseman therefore tells only half the story. As the political scientist Jacob Hacker has observed, the US has always had an exceptionally divided welfare state, with social spending and service institutions located in the private sector, where they are less visible and accountable to the public. Wiseman clocked High School, but not Lockheed Martin; Hospital, not UnitedHealthcare; Neiman Marcus, yes, in The Store (1983), but certainly not First National City Bank.
The Garden, filmed three years after Public Housing and completed in 2005 but largely unseen outside of bootlegs that circulate on Russian video sites, is thus an important companion to Wiseman’s work on public institutions that shape and explicate the American experience. Madison Square Garden is a twenty-thousand-seat arena built atop the ruins of the old Pennsylvania Station and is that strange thing we call a civic center: a concert hall, convention center, and arena home to the Rangers and the Knicks, all in one. A true New York institution with room for all kinds of people and interests, the Garden hosts, over the course of the film, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, a WWF night, an Evander Holyfield fight, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, and the Puff Daddy and the Family tour. This last event is the cause of great agita for management, who fear that their “fans-first” philosophy will be pushed to the limit by an influx of unruly “guests.”
The Garden is a film about labor. Though we’re never oriented within the untenable geography of this modern-day agora, the film has an upstairs-downstairs sensibility. The Garden is above all a workplace, so Wiseman lingers at the job fairs held there, on the workers in the kitchens prepping popcorn and cotton candy or swordfish and filet mignon, on the pro athletes out on the court, and on the cleaning woman who wipes their photos, which hang outside the owners’ offices.
The Dolans, the Garden’s owners, have used their immense wealth and power to hold New York City by the balls. They held Wiseman by the balls, too. It appears that Wiseman gave management the right of review, and the Dolans’ lawyers objected to certain scenes of boardroom preparations for upcoming negotiations with the unions. And so, after twenty-one years, The Garden remains unreleased, just as New York City remains unreleased from the Dolans’ grip on the future of the critical regional transit center under their arena.
From the 1980s onward, Wiseman allows us to watch in real time how the private sector saturates and dominates beloved civic institutions like Central Park, the Miami-Dade Zoo (1993), and, in Ex Libris (2017), the New York Public Library. Films that portray democracy at work are in many ways about fundraising from the private sector to maintain baseline access to public goods. Betsy Barlow Rogers, a cofounder of the Central Park Conservancy, oversees a turbocharged capital campaign pitching Fifth Avenue residents to pay up to maintain their front yard. Parks staff kick out unlicensed activist-vendors of T-shirts and bumper stickers at a peace festival, but also make way for teams of runners from Morgan Stanley and Manufacturers Hanover who are greeted by a grinning Mayor Koch at the start of the 3.5-mile Corporate Challenge. At the Idaho State Capitol, elected officials intently, if not passionately, debate important causes like displaying the Ten Commandments, smoking in restaurants, and defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, but State Legislature (2006) is mostly a film about how the public sector works to support the market. Under the capitol’s coffered dome, the 2004 Idaho legislative session perseveres in its mission to represent, enact, and safeguard the interests of “the business community.” To further its mission of uplift and even emancipation through access to quality information, the NYPL’s president, Tony Marx, and his senior staff engage in a constant triangulation of pitches to city government and private donors, strategizing about the most generative applications of limited funding. A presenter at a staff training on community engagement explains: “We want to engage our community, because we want them to fund us.” Adds another speaker: “We always have to prove that we’re relevant.”
The never-ending nonprofit grind, on-screen and off, might be one reason why, beginning in the mid-1990s, Wiseman was drawn to work in France, filming a smaller, parallel survey of cultural institutions like La Comédie-Française (1996), the Paris Opera Ballet, the Crazy Horse (2011) cabaret, and a Michelin three-star restaurant. In the face of such deep moral compromise, if not rot, at home, who would not be drawn to a society so committed to the preservation of l’art du savoir faire? The French Ministry of Culture recently issued a €475,000 plan to support “le patrimoine du cabaret.” Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023), Wiseman’s final film, tenderly renders the extremely anachronistic and profoundly touching commitment to the production of very special cheese. The regard is mutual. The French love American institutions, universalism, and Frederick Wiseman. The series of Parisian screenings that began in September 2024 was entitled Wiseman: Nos humanités, in recognition of the universality of navigating our existence in relation to powerful institutions. While Lincoln Center set aside five weeks, the Centre Pompidou hosted a two-part, seven-month, complete retrospective of all Wiseman’s films (except for The Garden, although the French press reports it’s the music rights that can’t be cleared), with guest lectures and special presentations, rushing to schedule the series before the cultural institution closed for major renovations.
The concrete edifice of Boston’s City Hall — screened at the Pompidou but not at Lincoln Center — looks like the Idaho Statehouse’s neoclassical cupola turned inside out, an effort to advertise public services on the municipal building’s surface. This welfare-state construction, brutalism incarnate, has somehow endured decades of general embarrassment, vehement hatred, and several attempts at demolition. Retrofitted with bicycle parking and metal detectors, it is the hub of Wiseman’s final institutional film, which chronicles city hall, the administrative building, and “city hall,” the people administering policies and services across the New England city in an attempt to close the racial wealth gap, promote economic development, and address a persistent housing crisis.
Cops, veterans, people with disabilities, beloved sports franchises, and public housing developments are all in the mix in this institution of institutions, but the real focus of the film is the administration of second-term mayor Martin J. Walsh. It is easy to see why the administration would grant access to Wiseman and his crew: City hall has a story to tell. Rebranded in Obama-campaign Gotham type, the City of Boston is doubling down on inclusivity and democracy during the first Trump Administration, hoping to leave behind its own legacy of blatant, unrepentant racism. Lest we forget that Boston sits at the origins of the national project of the U. S. of A., Wiseman reminds us with footage of a colonial cemetery, plus details of history paintings depicting the Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, the Tea Party, and so on. Scenes run longer and linger favorably on administrators at work. There is less dialogue between the public and frontline workers, and more exposition by city hall staffers and especially Marty Walsh, who governs through narrative. This film is more scripted, and that credit should go to the mayor’s speechwriter.
In City Hall, the logic of storytelling has become the logic of government. Walsh’s disclosures — speaking as an Irish Catholic, a child of immigrants, a pediatric cancer survivor, and a recovering alcoholic — embody a kind of trauma-informed leadership. A StoryCorps-style deference to personal experience affects not just presentation style, but policy objectives. The mayor encourages participants in a Veterans Day town hall event to vent their feelings and embrace therapeutic healing. In an extended discussion of a drop-in engagement center for opioid addicts, participants sparkle with excitement about the possibility of “storytelling” recovery through oral histories and some sort of collaboration with Swoon, of wheatpasted street portrait fame. The mayor exhorts developers on a climate resiliency task force to take their efforts to the editorial boards and win hearts and minds. A man at an audience for parking ticket forgiveness begins by announcing he is “here to tell my story” about parking in front of a hydrant overnight. It’s a pretty good one, and the nice bureaucrat uses his discretion to absolve the new dad. Wiseman, too, seems to have assimilated contemporary narrative expectations in his focus on the sympathetic character of Walsh and his earnest attempts to navigate an adverse environment with good cheer and determination. Perhaps he was influenced by the film’s combination of funders, old and new: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, yes, but also the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms and the Sundance Institute.
We all go easier on ourselves and others in old age, with a hard-earned, longer view of our well-intentioned if deeply flawed efforts. Still, Wiseman hasn’t lost his edge in City Hall. On the few occasions when residents talk back at community meetings to the minority entrepreneurs offering them “economic development” (these businesspeople, notably, are never the same race or ethnicity as the community), they make crystal clear the distance between the opportunity “to make your voice heard” and any sort of public obligation. The pursuit of a chance to “build equity” is not so different from the pursuit of a welfare check. A job at the cannabis dispensary, a space for community use at the new Dudley Square development: Goods are proffered, but people still have no real say-so. They remain charged with the navigation of inscrutable decisions that have already been made elsewhere.
Still, City Hall is so close to home, such an earnest bulwark against the very worst impulses of the Trump Administration, that the best we can do starts to look more like the ceiling than a floor. Look how nobody smokes anymore; instead, tables are littered with disposable coffee cups. Look how this city hall that has no corridors officiates gay marriages, collects trash, inspects buildings, vaccinates pets (?!), all while operating, as per a presentation by the city budget director, in a “constrained, fiscally tight structure.”
Mayor Michelle Wu declared Boston City Hall an official landmark in January 2025. The Lincoln Center retrospective began the same month, marking Wiseman’s retirement, and the preservation of his films for the foreseeable future. Capturing the continuities amid the larger chaos, Wiseman’s films may not have arcs, but they provide historical records of ends and beginnings. The neat alignment with the conclusion of the long American century is apposite. We no longer know what a state looks like, what it should look like, what it will look like. We don’t know right now how to look at one. The landmark designation puts to rest the question of Boston City Hall’s survival. The 4K restoration means the films will be with us for as long as the format survives. Both are evidence that we never had it so good. And also evidence that we will never have it so good again
Story, a living refutation of nominative determinism, has flirted with Wisemanian structure in her own institutional interrogations. The jail has long replaced the asylum as our dominant social metaphor: We’re not all crazy; we’re just wrongly incarcerated. Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) traces the contours of the US carceral apparatus, which has metastasized since the 1980s into a parallel state, in a survey that opts for expansiveness over full immersion. Locating the institution across a dozen satellite sites, everywhere but the prison itself, it’s less Erving Goffman, more Golden Gulag. ↩
