03 · 03 · 26

Frederick Wiseman and the poetics of patience

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

Back in the 1940s, movie scenes seemed endless: characters would talk in the same room about the same things for up to ten minutes, and yet the films would still manage to pack a lot of events into under two hours. My favorite example is Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not (1944), where Lauren Bacall takes about seven minutes to kiss Humphrey Bogart from the moment she enters his room to seduce him. They talk leisurely before the kiss, and also after their lips meet. They even talk during the kisses, and they talk (or make faces) when their audience is the only company. Once Bacall leaves the room, the camera lingers on Bogart, who whistles, satisfied and dazzled; the scene has been going on for nearly nine minutes before it fades to black.

Today, scenes like these are considered radical. The pace of mainstream cinema is so intense that a conversation lasting more than three minutes, a shot longer than ten seconds, are already considered extravagant by some. The rhythm of our images is much faster than that of classic cinema because our culture also moves faster. The death of the great American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, then, is not only the end of a life or an individual way of making films, but perhaps the end of a generational idea that allowed audiences to contemplate what they didn't usually look at closely in real life.

I called Wiseman a "filmmaker" and not a "documentarian" (although his work is almost exclusively documentary) because he disliked the distinction. Although his work often relied on images captured with off-screen planning but without control over what was happening on screen, Wiseman had a remarkable talent for making them resemble John Cassavetes-esque fictions: people argue or shout at each other in language that is almost ethnographic, yet conveys much between the lines. Wiseman represented the kind of cinematic chronicler who doesn't need to offer opinions through voice-over narration (or opinions gathered from interviews) to clearly express his thoughts. Understanding his choices of what to show, and how to show it, is enough to grasp his attitude toward subjects and objects.

During his early career, Frederick Wiseman made indelible films about the American institutional world. He continued to do so later in his career, in colossal feature films such as In Jackson Heights (2015), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), and City Hall (2020). In fact, examining their runtimes reveals why Wiseman's work is so unique: they last 190 minutes, 143 minutes, and 272 minutes, respectively. Near Death (1989), the longest in his entire filmography, reaches 358 minutes; practically six hours. Wiseman's cinema, it becomes clear, is one where patience takes on significant meaning, not only because of what it demands of its viewers, but also because of what it represents in terms of its scope, themes, and, of course, form.

Among Wiseman's early works, Welfare (1975) stands out in my opinion, although one might well prefer Titicut Follies (1967) or Hospital (1970). However, the length makes a significant difference: while these latter two films (his first two) contain long scenes of bureaucratic failure, they don't even reach ninety minutes; Welfare, on the other hand, lasts almost three hours, is primarily about patience, and has two scenes of more than twenty minutes that demonstrate Wiseman's commitment to documenting what mainstream American cinema doesn't usually show about its society: exhaustion. Welfare depicts the ordinary anguish of living on the margins and finding that the system has collapsed; that the workers in a social services facility are exhausted, just as much as the worn-out individuals who ask them for help.

The two scenes, each exceeding twenty minutes, encapsulate Wiseman's radical approach and his exploration of the concept of patience to a philosophical degree: more than a dialectic (the opposition between thesis and antithesis to arrive at the truth), both are constructed from antinomy. That is, Wiseman perceives that the shared struggles of social workers and their clients are simultaneously valid, since all are subjected to a dysfunctional system that forces them to be mutually patient, although it is also true that they do not occupy the same positions of risk and authority.

In the first of these scenes, Wiseman focuses on a woman named Valerie Johnson who suffers from a confusion of records. For approximately 22 minutes, the camera concentrates on her and the social worker handling her case, refusing to let go because it seems to be capturing the cumbersome communication between inhabitants of different worlds.

It's not that the social worker refuses to help her; The problem is that the various offices where she's registered have a tangled web of poorly entered documents that leave him powerless. Later, it's suggested that Valerie suffers from mental illness, like many of the people who go to the office. By focusing on her and other individuals with disabilities and addictions, Wiseman suggests that people don't ask for financial assistance out of laziness, but because their abilities don't allow them to hold down a job.

Wiseman also had the insight and patience to detect a moment that is both dramatic and symbolic: the scene is even moving thanks to Valerie's innocence, expressed in her high-pitched voice and her fearful gaze, because who knows if she'll eat again tomorrow.

The director's tiny crew used a single camera to film without obstructions; he edited the footage himself and recorded the sound on location, so it was undoubtedly he who introduced the shots of these other characters:

This collage, which runs through Valerie's scene, not only avoids remaining in the same shot for the entire 22 minutes, but also gives us a sense of the space and the overwhelming despair within it. The anguish of Valerie and the powerless social worker is shared by all the characters around them.

At the end of Welfare, a man monologues about how the situation in this office resembles Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, where two characters wait for another, who never arrives, and in the meantime even toy with the idea of ​​suicide. Franz Kafka's bureaucratic nightmares also seem to nourish Welfare, especially in the other scene of about twenty minutes, in which a supervisor loses her composure while two cases unfold simultaneously.

The images alone speak volumes: she is white; the people seeking help are not.

But cinema is not just about the image. The rhythm of the scene, which escalates as the two cases against the supervisor converge, possesses suspense and violence, along with a compassion and institutional critique reminiscent of Sidney Lumet's films. But Wiseman's working material consists of events he patiently observed, transforming them into images and combining them to create a film. The best thing we can do, then—and especially in these days of mourning—is offer him our time and our gaze.

The reward of watching this lengthy film and its extended scenes is the image of a world we normally ignore; the awareness of others' suffering as if we had witnessed it ourselves. Perhaps this won't happen to all viewers, but Wiseman offers us the opportunity to change our minds, to become passionate about transforming things because no one described them to us: they showed them to us as irrefutable evidence.